Lights, Camera, Render | C4D + Redshift Training Masterclass

1. Lights, Camera, Render | Cinema 4D + Redshift Training: Hey, I'm Derek Kirk of affect Tron and I'm super excited to announce that I'm finally able to bring light camera render into a skill share. It's over 7 hours of content. You may have heard some of this or seen as before from CG Shortcuts.com the ultimate red shift master class. This is the second half of that class, which is my favorite part of the class and really the part where I got to teach it the way that I really like to teach it. And so I just wanted to be able, I'm excited to be able to share that, the skill share community now and all the members. So basically it's 7 hours of training where we're going to learn all kinds of stuff. With Red Shift, it's all Red Shift 3.5 and up. So it's still all very applicable and relevant and you'll easily be able to navigate and find your way around, which is super cool. So we're going to talk about optimizing your machine based on your graphics card, how to actually figure that out and get your renders going the best for you, rather than just a point and click guide of like saying this is the best if you have the best high end graphics card. Because not everybody does and I am very aware of that. I don't even have the best high end graphics card. So whether you're a beginner C 40 and red shift user or an experienced C 40 and red shift user, there should be something here that I think you can learn that's definitely designed, that beginners and first time users can definitely dive in and get a good understanding of red shift. So by the end of this you should be able to understand like if you want to start a project in red shift, you'll be able to finish the project in red shift. So throughout this course, you'll basically, we're going to go through very practical, real examples of using lighting, how to set it up, why it is the way it is, and how to use it. Rather than just saying this is what you do. You really want to understand why things are the way they are, That way you understand how to troubleshoot because that's a big part of it. And we've talked about AOB's redshift object tag, all kinds of things. You can see this over 7 hours of content. And on top of all of that, I've also included a free project lesson from Minded Motion Workshop. My latest project where we create a render ready, realistic product render at the end of it using ironically a blender. You'll get that joke if you do Three D, right? I hope blender. Anyway, so we're going to create this really cool thing and I'll show you how to create your own realistic and photo ready like product render. Basically setting up lighting render settings, importing assets, all that stuff, getting it all working from the very beginning of the project up that way, you know, following step by step, you'll be able to create your own cool scene. And everything you'll learn is sort of this, you'll be applicable to beyond just this scene. Basically, you're creating a scene that is going to be able to be used for any product you want to throw in there, which is great. Beyond that 33 minute long lesson, there's 7 hours of other content to go through. And I'm just really excited that I'm finally able to bring this to skill share and have everybody get to experience it. Because it's a lot of really cool training and good tips that I think will really help help you out and help you get comfortable with red shift because that's the real goal. Okay, let's get into it. 2. Render Setting basics: In this lesson and we're going to talk about Render Settings, and we're going to go over just an overview of all of the renter settings and then we're going to go into each of these in more detail and other lessons. So basically I just want you to understand how to get to your renter settings and what are going to be the main things you're going to want to control. So when it comes to renter settings, you can hit control B, and that will get you to your renter settings, or you can click this little icon here. So clapboard with the gear on it that opens up your renter settings. Now by default, this is going to be set to standard and you're not going to have access to anything Red shift at all. You need to change this to red shift and that will bring all your redshift material, access everything. It'll actually change your entire layout as well. You only have red shift things. Instead of here we have a couple options. We've got output, save, post effects, which may or may not be visible to you from the start. And we have a red shift and magic Looks a G. If you have the max on one subscription and you include magic A looks, this will be available to you. I don't have it, but that's okay. Bridge magic Looks is its own thing. Let's go ahead and take a look at what we have here. Under output, output is going to be basically your export settings. This is going to be your resolution for your scene. This is going to be everything that you see here in your hut is going to be based on this output. Right now, we have a set to 192-01-1080, You can have different presets for different screen sizes. Squares mobile, we have print, we have things like that, we have sizes instead of pixels, you can change between pixels to actual inches. And things for things like print, you can uncheck lock ratio or leave it on. If you want your ratio to stay the same, leave this connected. If I change this down to 12 80, that's going to take this down to 724. We keep that same 16 by nine ratio. Uncheck that, and we can create squares or different shapes or whatever you want. And you can see once I changed that to a square, our viewport here changed. You can see that again. We've got a data rate which is on by default. I have never turned it off. I have looked this up in the red shift manual. It does not exist. I don't know what this does. It adapts the data rate, I'm not sure. I assume this is like the red shift equivalent of a variable bit rate. If it was doing something like video or something versus a constant bit rate on. I've never had issues with it being on, so I haven't turned it off. But there you go. That's on. By default, you have a resolution. We'll look this up. Resolution is pixels, or pixels branch, or pixels by CM. So if you're doing something for print, you're probably going to want to increase that to like 300 or something. If it's going to be blown up really big or on a building or something like that. We have render region, which is basically going to be a crop setting. If there's something in your scene and you're doing an animation or something like that and you want to just focus on this one small section of your scene. You could render region that and adjust the borders by cutting it in and stuff. Just like if you've ever used OBS or anything where you crop your settings in on your video or anything like that. You slide this up to cut off more of the left. Slide this up to cut off more of the top. Same with the right in the bottom. So basically you can end up having a little area that you just want to render out so you can render out your entire animation. Just the little area so you don't have to render out your entire scene in case there are some areas that are giving you troubles or you just want to test and make sure that that part looks good, that's when you would use that. Next you have film aspect. This is 16 by 9114 by three widescreen. This thing you have pixel aspect ratio. Which square is probably going to be what you want. Maybe if you're making something for broadcast, you might need to make it Pal widescreen if you're in Europe. Or possibly TSC widescreen for America or Animal Freak for a movie, something like that. You're going to know what you need to do for that if you're working in that industry, but this is where you changed your pixel aspect ratio. Next you have your frame rate. This one is really important because 24 is where you want to be most likely. This is the normal film frame rate. But if you're editing something or doing and compositing, you're definitely going to want to make sure anything with real footage, you want to make sure you have the exact same frame rate as that footage. And also the frame rate here is not locked into the frame rate of your project. So you want to make sure that these match. And to do that, we go around here to our scene, we control D. We make sure that our time stamp here, our time section, our FPS, or frames per second, is set to 24. So that's the same as the frame rate here. So you could have this offset. And then what's going to happen is you're going to have 24 frames per second to render out. And then you're going to render out it out at 30 frames per second. And stuff is just going to not line up and you're not going to have all the information you need to have. You want to really make sure that those line up the same. Next you have the option of what you want to output. You can do current frame, which is on by default, which is going to export out whatever frame you have selected in the timeline down here. The next option you have is manual, where you could say, I want to render out from frame 35 to frame 70, and that's what I want. Then you have all frames, which is going to render out your entire frame timeline, basically from whatever the number in this box is to the number in this box. Now the next option is the preview range. And that is going to ignore these boxes and only do what's inside this gray bar here. By default, this is stretched out to be your full range. But let's say you just want to go, I want to start from right here, 29, Now I want to go to 51. Now our preview range is 29 to 51 and that's what's going to render. This is exactly the same as going into manual and typing that in. But maybe you've just slid this in and would rather do it this way. It's just a multiple ways to do the same thing. Frame step, you want to leave it one field, so you want to leave off unless you're doing something maybe for broadcast, you might need to do even first or odd first if you're doing interlaced footage or something like that. But normally you're going to be able to leave that off. Okay, so that's the output setting. The next settings we're going to cover are the save settings. Inside of here we've got regular image and we've got multipass image. Basically, you want to make sure you have checkbox saved on this if you're not using multipass image, which should be off by default. Basically what we have here is we have the option to choose where we want to save our file by clicking this folder here. And then we can name it when naming your files, especially if you're doing an animation. Don't end them with a number because what it's going to do when it does an animation is it's going to pend numbers onto that. And we'll cover that here in a second. But basically just want to end it with something. If it has to be a number, put an underscore after it. Just so when you go into your create an image sequence and bring that into a third party program, it's going to be able to know the order of that correctly and that number is not going to have an issue. Okay, next thing is our format, this is where we could choose bitmap, body paint, DDS. We can do a Jpeg and open EXR, a PNG, a Targa Tiff. These are going to be your most common things. I use PNG's a lot. You also have the option to do movie files like an MP four or an ABI or V. I highly recommend against using any of these for the sole reason of it does not save the file or the file will not work correctly unless it gets 100% complete. Basically, if you have 300 frames, you're rendering out for a ten second video or something like that. Set render and you get 250 frames through it and then your computer crashes or the power goes out or something like that. You have to start over. You do not have a usable file, but if you use an image sequence, you have all the way up to frame 250 already saved and rendered out. So then when you can come back in and do a manual export and just go from frame 251 to the end so you don't have to start all over again. So that's the main reason. Also, when you're rendering out P four for some reason, they always come out a little bit darker. Also, sometimes Jpegs can appear slightly darker, that's why I often use PNG's. Also, PNG's give you access to alpha channels which Jpegs don't. Pngs and targets are probably going to be your best bet if you're doing a regular image format. If you're using a multipass image format, that's when you're going to want to get into your open EXRs. But open XRs allow you to have a higher bit rate and have more dynamic range. If you're doing a lot of post effects, open XR is probably going to be where you should go, but they're way bigger file sizes X, we have the depth, which is going to be dependent on the format. Like I said, PNG's go up to 16 bit. These are going to help with things like banding in issues like that. Or if we go into EXR, we have the option to do 32 bit, which is going to be the most accurate and give you the most control. Okay, so that's one benefit of using those. Secondly, we have the way it's named, you can say I wanted to name it out and add the whatever at the end of it, which I highly recommend you have the option of four numbers or just three numbers, whatever. But this is fine. So basically what it's going to do is when it renders out frame zero, it's going to say they've saved it as, and then add 0000 for the frame zero. Then the next file will be whatever you named it as, 0001 and so on throughout it. Then when you bring something in as a sequence, you'll have it ordered correctly. That's why I was saying don't name it with a number at the end because then there would be the number and then a number and then these four numbers, it might get confused. Just be mindful of that image color profile on. By default, it normally just like reads your monitor and figures out from your computer what you want it to be at. This is normally fine, but if you have a specific color profile that you want, you can load that in or something like that if you need to, but normally you won't need to mess with this. Second, we have alpha channel. If you want your PNG to have an alpha channel, you need to have that enabled so it has transparency. When that is enabled, you have the option of doing a straight alpha, which as you can, if you want to or you can do a separate alpha. And the way separate alpha works is it will render out two image files for you. One image file will be the image with the final render, and then the other file will be just the alpha channel. It'll just be black and white. Normally you don't need to separate that, but you totally can if you want to, if you're going to do any compositing and stuff with that pit. Dithering is one by default, that's fine. That just helps smooth things out. Now the next setting, the multipass image setting. This is going to be where you want to use open EX R's. If you're going to use this, you don't need to use this, but you can do both. You can save out a P and G and also a multipass image if you want to. That's nice. The way that these work is basically with an EXR and a multi pass image. What it does is it allows you to have all of your beauty passes and all of your AOVs saved out into one file that contains all that information rather than having 15 different PNGs. It's like this is the depth of field pass, this is the render passes, it is the beauty passes is the lighting pass, this is the color mat pass, whatever. You just have one file that contains all of that information in multiple layer format inside of itself. If you're going to do anything for after effects or new, any kind of compositing or post effects or Photoshop, afterwards, you're going to want to use an opening X R 32 bit multi layer file, basically. That's just going to allow you to have all that information into one thing and we'll cover that later. And we cover that already in the materials master class as well. Next we have the compositing project file. Now this is going to be, if you're going to use something specifically, you have a target application that you want everything to be sent to, like after effect Nuke motion or Fusion. This is going to be really important for a lot of compositors and things that are blending things with real footage. Basically, you just want to save this out, you'll have the option of this and you can save your project file and send everything together. Basically, if you're saying, I'm going to send this off to somebody that's going to do it for me, so I'm not going to have to deal with it. Make sure you have that enabled and you're going to know if you're in that pipeline that needs that option. And this is where that control is. It's underneath the save file here. We're going to skip over post effects now, and we'll cover that in its own lesson quick. We're going to go over the red shift settings here and we're very quickly going to cover what all is available here. And we're going to go way more in depth in the next lesson. Basically, inside the red Shift option, this is where we have our basic tab. In our advanced tab, these don't do anything for these options here, it just works for the red Shift option. Underneath the Basic tab, you can see we have Render engine, we have production, and we have Real time. Basically, there are two types of render engines. If you're going to create something that's going to be a final product or a final render, you're going to want to use production. It has access to everything. Red Shift. Real time is relatively new and still under development, and they're still adding features and it's a lot more stable now than it used to be. Basically, real time is more like a game engine than a production engine. So basically it is going to allow for almost instant feedback of everything and it's going to be real quick to get to that final render. But there are things like environmental bog and stuff like that that it just doesn't render. It just doesn't do it. It doesn't know how to yet, but they're working on it basically. Your production engine is where you're going to use for rendering out basically. And your RT or your real time rendering is going to be very helpful for look to have and conceptual stuff and figuring things out but probably not what you're going to want to use if you're going to export any kind of digital content. Now the next thing you see you have bucket quality and progressive passes, and we'll cover this more in depth. Bucket quality works in combination with, if you go over here to the advanced tab, automatic sampling, which is on by default. And I was very against, at first I thought there's no way that the machine can do it better than me. I learned and I worked so hard to figure out all of these samples that I don't want it to be better. But. I've come to love the automatic sampling. It's amazing when we're using automatic sampling is we have a render quality control with a slider. Now if you're new to three D, this doesn't sound like that impressive, but basically this slider right here controls the amount of noise in your scene and the clarity of your image. The lower this is, the higher up it is, and the more clear or clean your image is going to be, the less noise there is going to be. As we bring this up, we get into more noise, but faster render times. As we bring this down, we get into less noise but longer render times. Everything is a balancing act. But the main thing is when you have this option where you can control your entire render settings with one slider, it just allows you to focus on your actual scene so much more it used to always and you can still do this and we'll cover it. But for me personally, you would focus really hard on your scene and then you get time to render. And then it's just like another layer of problem solving and trial and error and figuring out what samples you need to put here, how to optimize your scene, even after you finished your scene, you weren't finished. But now with the automatic sampling and just the slider, you can kind just streamline that step to become like, okay, I'm working on this and now all I need to do is just go lower the slider or set the slider to high and I'm done, but we'll cover that more in depth. Basically, this is awesome. Then we have progressive passes and we can leave it on 1024 because when you're using a final render, you're going to be using the bucket render settings and not this progressive pass and we'll cover that as well. Denoising, which is super awesome, is off by default and you can turn that on and that is going to be huge. We will cover that in a video on its own. Basically, it is a post time smoother. If you do have a noisy image with a higher threshold, this can smoothen out and make it look smoother without adding a lot of render time. You have motion blur which will cover as well. Global illumination, which is light bouncing off of surfaces. Basically, you're going to want to always have this on. With this off, nothing looks natural. It's basically is like, hey, you want this to look like 1996 CG. Go for it. Yeah, turn that off. But if you want to look like any kind of realism at all, you're going to want to have global illumination. Because the way light works in real life is light doesn't just stop when it hits the surface. It bounces off that surface and bounces back and forth. And so you get color information from like this pink cube, it's going to hit this purple cube. This purple cube is going to hit this blue cube. And this big light blue area is going to hit up here. What we could do is we can look at this really quick IPR and you can see our scene is pretty bright. We just have a big overhead light, but everything is pretty bright. And that's because it's hitting our floor and bouncing back up. Now if I turn off global illumination, you'll see all these hard shadows. And that's because we're only getting light from our light source and not off of anything else. There's no bounces at all, and instantly it looks a lot more G. Now stylistically, you may want to use this because maybe what you're creating is that old school CG look, who knows. But you're probably going to want to have G on most of the time. And you can see how that brings all of that bounce back up into our scene here. You have combined depth, which most of the time you're probably going to want to leave at six. But if you think that there's not enough bounces and things going on, you can increase this number. That way it create more lies. If you had a certain scenario where you think you needed more light bounces or refraction count in depth, this is where you can control that. But most of the time you're probably not going to want to touch that. Same with transparency, depth as well. Lastly, you have this hardware ray tracing, if available, make sure that is on if you have an RTX card. If you don't have an RTX card, it is not going to work for you. Which is a bummer because I've done tests and it really does speed it up quite a bit. It very much makes it worth it. If you can get your hands on an RTX card, I highly recommend it because it really does speed up your workflow. Basically from personal experience, I had a 1070 when I first started using red Shift and I thought things were pretty fast. Let's say I had a scene that took a minute to render. Okay, that's pretty good. Then I got a 30, 70 TI and replaced my 1070 and I enabled hardware ray tracing. That scene took like 9 seconds. I thought the coup de corp count was just four times faster. I thought, oh, it's just going to be four times faster. No, it's a lot faster. It really makes a big difference. Definitely, if you're serious about being a Redshift render artist or any kind of GP render artist, you definitely want an RTX card if you're on a Mac. They're working on making metal really good. Those are the basic settings. And we have advanced settings here. And we're going to go into all of this here in the next future lessons. But just to iterate what the differences between progressive pass and bucket quality and what these two render engines are, we'll take a look at this. Here's our scene. And what we can do is we can either do our viewport here and use our IPR here instead of our viewport if you want, which is neat, it's a little slower because you actually still have access to control all of your stuff in your viewport. You can move things around and stuff in here and move your camera around while you're rendering, which is pretty cool, which is relatively new and pretty neat. Alternatively, you can go to window and go down to Redshift Render view. If you have your red shift tab up here, it's right there as well. So we can open this up and what we have here are a couple options. We've got Render, which is going to do a bucket render quality image. And it's not going to matter if we move our camera around or anything. It's not going to be affected by that. It's going to just going to render out wherever this camera was when you pushed render. Okay, now this plate button is the IPR and what that means is this is going to be a progressive pass of live feedback of your scene. As I rotate around, you'll see that updates very quickly and rotates around with me with the IPR. You also have the option of turning this into bucket rendering mode. The way IPR works is it does a whole lot of progressive passes. And you're really only going to want to use this when you're just doing some looked. If you don't ever really want to use this for your final render, because it's going to be way slower than actual bucket rendering. But it does do the whole scene and give you a nice preview of everything very quickly. Alternatively, you can hit the bucket render, which are these cubes here, and that will allow this to bucket render for you. So you can see it's going to come in here and start bucket rendering these out. The difference between this and the render mode is if I rotate my camera around, these are going to re, update automatically and it's going to start working. That is how that works. And there's some other settings here that will cover in a later video. But the other thing I want to cover is just the difference between the production render, which is what we just covered, and the real time render versus this RT button. I highly recommend saving before you hit that RT button. It's a whole lot more stable now than it used to be. I'm ready to 3.5 and it really works a whole lot better. You're going to hit this RT and then you hit Play. It's Chris going to give you a way faster feedback and it looks really clean and crisp. And I can move this around and it's very quick to get that really cool almost instant feedback of a final render. That's really impressive for look Dev, this makes it feel a lot more like Unreal Engine or something like that. You can control your lighting and your scene and get a whole lot better feedback inside of here. But there are issues with this as well. Cool thing is, is that Oka does work with this, but we lose the ability to do a couple controls that we have with the other options you can see really gets at depth of field, working really fast. It's really impressive. Very neat. So like I said, I really never used this much before because it was very unstable but now it's actually a viable option, expressly for Lk Dev really, really cool how fast that is. There are a few things it doesn't support like environmental lighting and stuff like that, fog and stuff it does not do but really need to. You can see when we turn off that real time, we have all of these other tools up here and we'll cover those in another lesson. Those are the basic things that you need to control to get started rendering. Just go in here. You've got low, medium, high, and very high for your bucket quality. All these do is adjust threshold value as all these do. At high, it's a lower threshold, then it is low, it's a lower threshold. What we can do is just turn that up and it can be a lower quality than low if you want. Just for quick look V or super fast renders. The higher up the bucket quality is, the lower the threshold is. Thus, the longer the render time is, but the cleaner the image is. Think of it like bucket quality is picture quality. Threshold is room for noise, or tolerance for noise. A lower threshold means that we have less tolerance for noise. So it's going to be a cleaner image, but a very high quality picture. Okay, That's basically what renter settings are going to control. A lot of people think renter settings are the key to a good looking image or a good looking render. The majority of all renter settings do is just control the amount of noise in your scene, the overall composition, the lighting, the materials. That's what makes the scene look good. The render settings really just do the noise. Keep that in mind. That's why I think automatic sampling is a really good thing because it can just eliminate one layer of stress. When you already have a huge learning curve with three D software, I highly recommend that you start with the automatic sampling. So that you can just take one thing off your plate and if you ever want to, you can get into specific sampling on your own later on down the line. In the next video, let's talk about de noising because that's a really cool one. 3. CPU vs GPU : In this lesson, we're going to talk about the CPU versus the GPU versus the hyrid rendering of Red Shift. Since Red Shift 3.5 and Cinema 40 S 26, they've offered Red Shift for free to anybody who has a Cinema four D subscription. The only limitation is that they only have access to the CPU rendering version of Red Shift, which will take a look at the speeds and compare that. And honestly I'm going to tell you upfront, the CPU is far slower as of summer 2022. The good news and the silver lining of this is that they clearly want to make red shift available to all sinema forwarded users. So it's not going to hurt you to learn red shift at all. It basically allows people to have access to a red shift. So basically you can use all the benefits of red shift, all the materials, all the lighting and all that stuff, and just go ahead and hit Render and let it go overnight probably. And you'll be fine. But the good thing is, is you can actually learn the software before, you know, upgrading to that subscription fee just a little bit more to get that GPU speed. So when you make that leap, your speeds are just going to explode. They're going to be so much faster, it's going to be insane. So who knows what the future holds? Maybe they'll make the CPU almost as fast, if not faster, than the GPU. They may end up saying that the CPU is so much worse that we should just scrap it and give people GPU for free with red shift, who knows? But they probably won't take red shift away once they've given it to you. So it's only going to get better from here. And that's the good news. So let's go ahead and take a look at the CPU, at how to enable the CPU and disable the CPU, and what our options are for rendering. So the first thing is you want to make sure you're in our Redshift render settings. And we're going to go over here to Edit. And we're going to go to Preferences inside the Preferences window. We're going to scroll down here under Renderer, and here we see the option of Red Shift. We have a few things here. We've got our compute devices, which is going to be a list of all things that Redshift can use to render your scene. If you have multiple GPUs, you'll be able to select each of those buses. Or if you have your CPU or multiple CPUs or whatever, you have the option for that here as well. If you notice I have my CPU and my hybrid rendering off as well, but we're going to go ahead and do that as the baseline. And then compare the CPU to the GPU, and then the CPU and GPU together versus just the GPU for speeds. So let's go ahead and do the baseline test. And we're going to just go into settings and everything is set to the preset of low with de noising on for optics. What I'm going to do is I'm going to open up the render view here and I'm going to hit Render. I'm going to stop my recording, hit Render, and then come back when it's done because I don't want the OBS capture to affect the render times. Okay, so the GPU by itself took 7.8 seconds. Here we've got a very clean render, so we've got noise and everything on. It's a very simple scene that it does have a lot of lights and stuff in it. But yes, it's a really nice clean, fast render. So we'll go ahead and hit the snapshot button to store it in our Snapshot selection there so we can look at that. And that's going to keep that information in time with us for comparison. Next thing we're going to do is we're actually going, before we test the CPU, we're just going to test our graphics card without multi threading because it does make a difference. And I have an RTX card and I highly recommend if you're going to use Red Shift to get a Multi X card, but maybe you have a Mac and you're using M one. It might be worth it just to do these tests to enable it with and without the multi threading to figure out what's best for you. So let's go ahead and test it without multi threading, okay? Without multi threading, we were at a renter time of 7.83 with multi threading, we were at a renter time of 7.82 Very similar. No difference really, but if your renter time start getting longer, this difference is going to start growing and that gap is going to become bigger and bigger because it's such a small render, you're not seeing that gap that much. But if it was a minute and this would be a couple seconds, you're going to want to go with the multi threading option if you can. But definitely do that test just to make sure with your graphics card to make sure that that is faster for you. Okay, now what we want to do is we want to go ahead and uncheck our graphics card and check our CPU. Okay, and we're going to leave multi thirting off for this one, so we're going to hit Render and see that speed right off the bat. We're going to get an error because we cannot use nos with CPU on. When you use a hybrid you are allowed to use optics, but when you're using CPU on, optics has not worked. Let's go ahead and go into our settings and let's try Al single. Okay, we're going to hit Render. That took 3 minutes and 46 seconds and it's a really nice, clean image. Now I know that's not an apples to apples comparison because I used Alts. So let's go ahead and just turn off denoising. That way we can just have the pure CPU render and see what that time is for that, this plus down here. And we'll go ahead and go to our render settings and we'll turn off denoising and render this out. There you go. It was 332 without Altus and 346 with Altus. It definitely slowed it down, which it does, and Optic says too, a little bit, but not as bad as Altus, which we cover in the de noising video. But basically we have 332 versus 7.8 seconds. 3 minutes in 30 seconds versus 7 seconds. There's definitely a huge gap there. What we need to compare now is whether hybrid rendering is even worth it. Because if it takes it that long to render out with just the CPU, when you combine these two, is it really going to be faster or is it just going to be better to just let your CPU do it? Obviously, these options are dependent on what type of card you have and stuff. But most likely if you're looking into red shift, you have an Invidia RTX card or maybe a metal one and you should definitely run these tests yourself. It'll take long and they'll definitely give you a lot of insight into what is the best render setting for you. So let's go ahead enable both of those. Check hybrid rendering have multirting on give ourselves all the advantages and we're going to go ahead and just turn off denoising for this first one and see how it goes. Okay, with those combined, we're at 30.94 seconds, again without the CPU, 8 seconds. With the CPU 30 seconds, definitely not faster. Just for a double check comparison, we're going to go ahead and just turn off these one more time and run one more test with just the GPU and no denoising on. There we go, 8.97 seconds without noise on with just our CPU and multi threading on why these numbers are varying can definitely be because partly I am like getting on Chrome in between these. These might affect a few things just because I didn't want to just not touch my computer because I can't not be doing anything. So basically, if you see those slight variations, that's what that's from. But getting on your browser Chrome, anything that's going to use your GPU at all is definitely going to affect your render speed. Which is partly why I suggest using the render E for these and setting them up overnight so you have nothing else running on your computer so you can have full GPU power. But basically the main thing is it is definitely way faster to not use your CPU with an RTX card. Now with your card, you should probably, if you have a different card, definitely do a test. It doesn't take long as you can see and you'll just know what's best for you. But there we go. That's the difference between CPU, how to enable it and disable it. So if you are a rested veteran and you've just started using the new 3.5 and S 26 and you think your render times are slower, go in here and make sure that your CPU isn't slowing you down. The next lesson we're just going to go over some optimizations and things that you need to have on if you're rendering with Ched. 4. Optimization: In this lesson, we're going to go over just some optimizations that can help speed up your Redshift render workflow. As well as just a checklist of things that you need to make sure you have on and that you've tested to make sure that you're not losing some power or not really optimizing your render engine as best you could. So let's go ahead and take a look at this inside of our render settings, instead of our render settings, We've got this window here and we're going to be using the production render engine for what we're going to be talking about. We're going to be using the production rendering engine for this. So the first thing we want to do for this test is I cannot tell you what preset to leave these on because it's going to be different for every scene. What I can tell you is that if you want to use something for production quality, rest shift recommends a threshold of 0.003 This is definitely what you want to be. At least I would go below this and you can go a little bit above it, but if you're not super on a super tight deadline for time or anything and you can let this go, this will probably surrender overnight for most of the things you're going to create, who knows? But you want to be at least here or beneath that. Okay. So 0.003 is where they recommend. Now if you're using denoising, I highly recommend optics because it is so fast. But Altas dual does a really good job of keeping details when you have a bunch of small details. It has a good idea of not blurring those out so it knows the difference between noise and design a little bit better than optics does. But a lot of times, especially if you're doing a matt scene like this, optics 100% of the way. And if you are using optics, go into the advanced tab. Go down underneath the optics bucket, Noise overhead, and make sure that is set to zero. That's going to shave off a little bit of time on your render time, okay? And if you're doing an animation, make sure you have noise pattern off and recover all this in the noise video in a second. Next thing we want to do is we want to go into our optimizations here. If we're not using subsurface scattering, we don't want to use that. If you are using subsurface scattering, what we can do is we can use trace, which will basically override the mode. You can select the mode in your subsurface scattering options of your material, but we can override that with this. So everything is just the same. In case you have multiple materials, tracing is going to be more accurate but slower actually. And point based is going to be much faster and still gets you a really good result. And you can set that up to rebuild, load, or rebuild a free pass or don't save. If you have a lot of sub service stuff going on, you can definitely just say load where it builds it once and then you can save out where that is and it will save that out so it doesn't have to rebuild it every single time. But that's a whole other thing on its own. This isn't really about sub service scattering, this is going to be about optimizations here for a majority of renders. But keep that in mind. If you are using sub scattering, you can adjust the quality of that here and this will help speed up the time a little bit. I would recommend doing the rebuild pre pass only. All right, then we have a triple quality which we can adjust. That swell obviously higher is a higher quality but it's going to affect render time. Next we have cutoff thresholds and most of these are super low, which is exactly what we want. But if you think you need to decrease the cutoff thresholds, basically what this is doing, the higher the values here, the more is just going to start killing those bounces and those rays off faster. So you're not going to get as realistic of a result. If you want, you can bring down direct lighting, You do not have to. These are settings are fine. Russian roulette sounds like a ridiculous one, but basically it just works in a way that says all if it's a reflection or a refraction. I'm going to say I'm going to do a Russian roulette gamble. On which one I want to bounce off of this point on the surface. You want to leave that how it is. Because basically it doesn't really know how to choose the difference between reflection and refraction, or GI. When it's bouncing lights off the surface, what it does is it randomly chooses them in a whole bunch of tiny little areas and creates a fall off. It makes a very nice blend of all of them together, but if you feel like changing that, you can, but you do not need to. Again, before we talk about this trace acceleration, redshift advises you not to touch these two issues, these two options, unless you know exactly what you're doing. Because wrong values here can easily create long render times and very noisy images. Be sure to know exactly what you're doing with these, but a majority of the time you're not going to want to use the cut off thresholds and stuff like that if you want to know more into detail about those. Let me know in the comments below and thank, but just the majority of the general public probably don't need to get into that. So let's go ahead and just skip over that for right now. Now, the trace acceleration is something that's only available for trace cards obviously. But basically this is used for scenes that have a lot of tracing going on and then something like hair or subsurface scattering, they're using trace base based retrace based subsurface scattering. On these options, this is going to affect that the most. Now what we can say is complete the construction before rendering. This is very important with like hair and stuff like that. Then for the max leaf primitives, default of eight is going to be your best bet. Higher values really are going to create a little bit longer of a render time, but they might create a little cleaner of an image, but they're going to use up a lot more of your V Ram. Now if you have a scene like this that doesn't have a whole lot of ray tracing going on, you actually can lower that down to four and speed up your image pretty well. But when this was set to eight, it took 7.86 seconds. And when it was set to four, it took 7.61 seconds, slightly faster, but if you're using anything that has ray tracing, you can go ahead and set that up to eight. And if not you can get away with four. It's going to use less Ram up fast. Preprocessing is set to IPR only. None or all you can definitely do, all this is just going to help, just preprocess as it goes to the IPR view. Preprocessing allows you to have more of a faster response time when using IPR previews. Basically, it's going to try to optimize it as much as possible to get that feedback back to you faster. You definitely want to have that on as well, especially during look dev. Now, a lot of the optimizations are actually going to come from the system menu here. The first thing we're going to do is you can set up your logs and feedback and stuff here. If you have a bunch of errors and you're not sure how to fix them or whatever, you can create your logs and then send them off to the Maxon support team and they'll get back to you. But let's go ahead and skip over that and go into bucket rendering. And this is going to be one of the biggest spots where you can maybe see a little bit of increase in your time. And it's going to be very dependent on the amount of V Ram that your graphics card has. Now if it's something like a Mac in one metal kind of card, it has a lot and you can actually probably get away with a 512. Now I'm using RTX 30 70, which probably has a little higher capacity than the default which is set to 128. So basically what this is going to do is this bucket size literally determines the size of these buckets. You see, if I say 64, these buckets are going to be smaller. I say 256, they're going to be bigger. If I say 512, they're going to be bigger. So you might think, well, why don't I just set it to 512? Because fewer buckets mean faster renders. Right? It only creates faster render times when you have the V Ram to back it up. So you should definitely do a test with your card. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to do a test with my 30, 70 TI and we're going to see the difference. 604128-2 56.5 12. Okay, well I learn something about my computer basically. Here's what happens. At 64 a size, the bucket renders, it took 11.3 seconds, at 01:28 it took 7.82 seconds. With my bucket rendering size set up to 256, it took 7.04 seconds. That's 0.8 seconds faster. Now at 05:12 I was actually able to get it all the way down to 6.88 Just by changing the bucket size, we have a five second difference in a very small render that's almost twice as fast because our bucket size is at 05:12 rather than 64. I'm going to be living mine on 512. Now from now on, go ahead and do those tests on your scene really quickly and make sure you use the one that's the fastest for you. Now. The RTX 30, 70 I has a lot of V Ram, so it has the option to do the 512, but yours if you're using a GTX card or something, you might be limited to the 256 or the 128, or maybe the 64 is going to be the best one for you because it's going to be optimized for your card the best. So definitely do a test on that. So the bucket order doesn't affect render time that much. It does a tiny bit. I've found that horizontal is the fastest, just slightly. I'm talking point second 0.04 seconds faster. That one is 0.2 seconds faster. Yeah, I think horizontal is the best. Basically, that's going to make it work like an old loading screen is going to come in from the top and work its way across and down spiral is going to spiral out from the middle. And Hilbert does its own thing. But basically the benefit of using the spiral is you get to start from the middle, which normally you're going to have something you want to look at in the middle. And you don't have to wait for it to load down, but Horizontal is coming out faster. Maybe you should definitely do a test with those with your scene as well. Horizontal is steadily coming out a little bit faster, so I'm going to leave that on there as well. Inside the legacy controls, there are some things you can turn on and off that may be useful for your scenes, such as enabling cutoff rules or instance optimizations. You can turn that off or turn off reducing samples of other effects, that kind of thing. But basically, normally you're not going to need to have any of these on as far as creating a nice optimized system for you. Now there is the memory system which you definitely want to have on and it needs to be checked by default. And here's where you can allocate your GPU memory. If all you're doing on your computer is rendering this, you can increase the GPU memory usage all the way up to 100% but I would probably go up to about 99. And you can definitely leave these NV links set to automatic. If you're using irradiance point cloud, you can adjust the memory of that and the cache of that as well as well as textures. If you have huge textures, you may need to increase your texture cache for this, but this is where these options are. But basically, I haven't had that many issues with it being set to 90% And most of the time, yes, I'll set my computer to render, but I have two monitors running, and I normally have something else open as well, and I don't want my computer to lock out or burn out my GPU, so I leave it at 90% but you can definitely increase that if you want to. But those settings, as well as just making sure you have hardware array tracing enabled and a threshold of 0.003 if you're doing production quality, are going to be your best bets for creating something repeatedly at good quality and at the fastest quality that you can do it with your graphics card. Optimize your graphics card set and your settings to match your graphics card. Once you have all of these settings set up how you want, definitely come down here and just say your preferred settings wherever you want. Derrick's settings, just like that. Perfect. Yeah. So, now you have these saved, and so you can create a copy of this if you want to copy and then paste. And you can come in here and make this one in one that's set to 0.03 This is going to be the render time, all caps, I don't know why, but render time, but there you go. That's how the basic checklist you should definitely do when you're first getting in a red shift to make sure you've got it all set up. And then once you have that set up and everything, you should be able to create those presets and save them that way you have them. And you'll know that you're using your card efficiently and you'll be able to create repeatable, good speed results for your system. All right, that was quite a bit and I know it's a little techy and hardware based, and I wish I could just tell you, just set these as your options. But the problem is everybody's hardware is different and everybody's different hardware acts differently. Just knowing how to test it, to figure it out yourself is going to be more helpful than me just saying just do this and it'll probably work best for you. Just definitely do some tests and hopefully that was helpful. We'll go ahead and move on to, we're going to move on into taking a look at unified sampling, Automatic sampling versus manually sampling. And how to control that and how that affects your render quality in the next lesson. 5. Sampling Automatic vs Manual: In this lesson, we're going to talk about sampling and sample rates. Basically, there are two trains of thought to this. And basically you can either do automatic sampling or you can do manual sampling. Whether to find out what's right for you Really comes down to the issue of personal preference. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that one is better than the other, they both are very similar. It's possible to get the manual settings to be a little bit faster than the automatic, but not without a lot of trial and error and knowledge and experience and tweaking. So if you're the type of person like me where when you want to focus on your scene, you want to create your materials, create your lighting, create your scene. And then when it comes time to render time, you want to be able to streamline that as much as possible because you just want to not have another layer of troubleshooting and another process to get your scene optimized after you've already done everything else in your scene. To me it's like a no brighter to use the automatic sampling because it makes it incredibly easy and incredibly fast to get a good result. That being said, there are still times and people that might love the process of troubleshooting and optimizing your scene. Figuring out what samples are going, where, how to tweak that and get the exact speed, that perfect balance between samples and speed, noise and clarity. Render time and quality. Right? That's what all rendering, pretty much the entire purpose of render settings is to control the amount of noise in your scene. So why? There's definitely a place for manual and there's definitely a place for automatic. Perhaps you're going to send something off to a render farm or something and you think you can shave off a couple seconds by using your manual sampling versus the automatic sampling, that's going to actually save you money. So there is a time where maybe that's possible, but there also might be times where you're kind of in a crunch, in a deadline, and you don't have time to test out a whole of these renter settings. And you can just say automatic sampling with a low threshold. And that's going to save you money because you're going to reach your deadline and get paid. So there are times to use both, and it's 100% personal preference, okay? One is not better than the other, let's get that clear. One may be better for you than the other, but that doesn't mean it's better. All right, so first thing we want to do is we're inside our Redshift render settings and we're here in the basic default load out of Red Shift. First thing we want to do is we want to hit our IPR button. And then we want to hit bucket rendering, because all of these sample settings, everything are only going to affect the bucket quality, which is for the render production. Okay, so first thing I want to do is we're going to turn on tracing. Hardware tracing because we have an RTX card and it's going to speed stuff up. So you can see as my render goes by, default irradiance point cloud is on and that's what this white image is and that's calculating our GI. And the way that works is it calculates that and then it starts rendering. The benefit of that is that if you have a full scene and an animation, you can actually save that. And then it doesn't have to rebuild it every time. So it can be pretty fast, but honestly, I find that brute force is one of my favorite. But we'll get into those when we get into the GI video. But for right now, what we're going to do is we're going to go to the Redhiftath, we're going to go to Advanced and we're going to change our global elimination from Iranians point cloud to brute force. Mainly for the sole purpose of that. I don't want to see it to calculate this out, I just wanted to go straight into rendering and that's what brute force does. So samples, what we have here is we have automatic sampling, which I will show you after manual sampling, which I've talked about a little bit. And I'll show you after manual sampling again, just so you can understand the value of it, the pros and cons of it, et cetera. To enable manual sampling, you need to uncheck automatic sampling, which is on by default. And you can see that opens up this array of new options We have. Threshold is still there. We have samples, samples show samples. We've got overrides here, which you control down. And you have an override of reflection, refraction, et cetera. So the way that these values work, because just looking at this, it makes no sense as a new user. But the way these values work is in order to reach this threshold, which redshift recommends, if you're going to do production quality work to set to 0.003 at least. Okay? It goes all the way, it goes lower, but that's what they recommend at the least to do for production quality work. Now what this is going to do is it's going to apply the minimum amount of samples in areas that may not need as MN samples. And then it's going to apply the maximum amount of samples in areas that are noisier in order to reach this threshold of 0.003 Which is this literally just controls like how much noise allowance you're having in your scene. The good thing is that doesn't make a lot of sense. But visually, it makes a lot more sense. And there is a way to visualize this. You can click Show Samples here in this check box. Or you can go up here to your interview and twirl down this circle here and say samples. What that's going to do is that's going to turn this image into this weird gray image. The reason it looks like this is because this color represents our maximum samples anywhere. That's black represents our minimum samples because our sample rate is so low and our threshold is also relatively low. Basically this means it's throwing the max value of samples at everything in the scene. If you look at the render quality of this, it's not too good. What we could do to make this better is first increase the maximum samples. Red shift recommends to do 256 for the max as a minimum and samples for the minimum to do eight. So we're going to set that to 8.2 56. And this is in conjunction with this 0.003 And you can see already that this is a much cleaner image now. It's still noisy, especially when we zoom in, but it's much, much cleaner. Let's take a look at these samples for this, you can see once again, it's just throwing everything at it. So we need to raise this up even more. So we're going to raise it up to 512. Now, it's important to note that these numbers that I'm raising this up by our purpose, you don't have to stick to this rule. But it's very helpful and it works the best to jump up in the bit style. So you've got eight bit, 16 bit, 32 bit, 64 bit, so on 2506512, whatever. And you can see now we've increased this. We're still getting solid gray, so we're going to keep jumping up. If you don't want to do the math, you can just say times two, each step of the way. Now you see now we're starting to get a difference. Now what it's saying is, okay, I don't have to apply 1024 samples right here in this area to achieve this threshold. I'm throwing somewhere in between the minimum and the max right here. We don't have to throw the max at everything in order to reach that threshold. This is pretty good, but we really want it to be a little more dramatic of a difference. Once again, we're going to increase this times two. Now we have a little more contrast, which means we're getting some of these areas on the surfaces of our cubes and stuff that are getting a little gray rather than white. Which means we're getting enough samples in our scene to reach that threshold. So everywhere this very white color is getting this max. And everywhere that's not is getting somewhere in between the min and the max because we can see it. This means that all of these areas, even though they're getting less value, less samples, are still inside of this threshold of noise allowance. If we lowered this, we might see a difference. If we go all the way down to what is the very high setting, we might start to see it turn more white again. That's saying, okay, well if you want that lower threshold, well, I'm going to have to throw all of these samples at it. Once again, we can say times to just by viewing this and understanding what this is doing, you can understand how automatic sampling works. What automatic sampling does is it creates this for you. It sets the minimum and the max for you in order to reach this threshold with a good allowance, so you don't have areas that aren't reaching that threshold and it's not going to just throw just the max at it. A is taking longer to render, but we're getting a nice variance between RC and here. So that explains that. So let's go back to 0.03 just so we can get back to that threshold that they recommend. And take a look at this Minimum of eight and maximum of 4,096 We're going to take a look at what this actually looks like in the render view. If we take a look at this and we zoom in, we're getting a very clean image. Very clean. The shadow of this cone looks much nicer than it did when we had a lower maximum sample value. Our reflections are very clean. Our glass is clean. This is looking really good now. Is it as clean as it possibly could be? No, because our threshold has room to get lower, but there's always a balance between quality. You look at this like this, it's like, yeah, there's a little noise there, but when you look at it like this at 100 sizes, you can't really see that there's noise there. And then shrink that down to your phone that you're displaying this sign. You definitely can't see there's noise there. But if you're going to blow this up on a billboard or something or like a big screen, then that might show up. Everything has to be taken into account as far as like where this is going, how this is going to be displayed, where people are going to look at it, on how close are they going to look at it, is just going to be like, oh that's neat. And then swipe then maybe you don't need to clean this up anymore. But there's also ways to clean this up without adding more samples. But this brings us to the point of how some of it is very clean and some of it is not as clean. Well, there are things that take more samples than other things. For example, a lot of these overrides require a lot of specific things. There are a few factors that really cause noise and are almost always going to be the things that you can troubleshoot, erst, before trying to troubleshoot your entire scene. First, GI adding a lot more, adding a lot more GI bounces might clear up a lot of noise that's going to come from a scene with not a lot of light sources. Where you have a lot of light bouncing off of objects and reflecting on others. Like right here, how this is pink, that's the bouncing off of this onto this. Secondly, another big one is reflection. Things that reflect require a lot more samples than things that are Matt. Then lighting and shadows are always a big thing that you almost always get a lot of noise in as well. What this is saying, this is saying to throw the minimum max at everything in your scene. Now you can control these directly with these overrides instead of throwing everything at the whole scene. Let's cause the render, we're just going to hit a plus sign to get a copy of that. We're going to do, we turn our samples all the way down to one. If you look at this right now, it's going to look really bad. So you can see that's really, really noisy because there's not enough samples. Now we know our scene doesn't have any ambient occlusion, so we're going to say override that turn to zero. We know it doesn't have any volumes. Override that turn to zero, subs scattering override that turn to zero, Li scattering turn to zero. Now the only things in our scene that are affecting our reflection, refraction and light, what we'll do is we'll set our samples to 2048, 2,048.2048 here. This hopefully will be a very similar result to when we had our samples all the way up to 4,096 Just because I don't think we really need that many samples. We can always increase this later. It's better to start small and work your way up, then go over the top and work your way back down, mainly because of timing. Okay, so that finished rendering and it took 3 minutes and 54 seconds, but it's really clean, super clean, very nice. And what we could do is we could go in and try to lower those settings even lower and still get a clean image, but we're probably not going to get that result. What we can do is we can try, but what we're doing right now is we're rendering out the same scene with the same threshold, but with the automatic sampling. And we're going to pause the OBS so it's kind of a fair comparison. And we're going to see about the speed different. Okay. So it wasn't a purely clean speed test because I did have OBS going for both of those for part of it. But what we can see here is the automatic renderer with the threshold 0.03 took 4 minutes and 40 seconds, but it is a very clean image. Super clean. There's a tiny bit of noise back here maybe, but not much. Those areas where lighting is hitting here, even over here on this cube, that's just what the material looks like. We're actually getting a really nice clean image. We were able to go back to our one we did at 2048, and it took 3 minutes and 54 seconds. If you go back and forth between these two, it's hard to see a difference. It almost looks like the automatic sampling. It's a little noisier back here in the background. But when he looks at your image like this, it makes sense that noisier because you can't tell the difference at all. Let's look up here at some of these tender shots. Those look the same, very similar results. The automatic sampling definitely did a better job with the refraction. We might need to up our refraction samples to match the quality of the automatic sampling. But for the most part, we did a pretty good job beating the machine. Now we did a good job beating the machine. And we shaved off 40 seconds because we went in there, we did some testing, we figured things out, and we probably spent a good 20 minutes or so just figuring that out and rendering that out. Those 20 minutes, were they worth saving 40 seconds over? Maybe it's really up to you, because the real, ultimate reality and the truth of all of this is, is that we can get pretty much this exact same result even faster using denoising. What we're going to do is we're going to do a speed test between using automatic sampling with denoising and we're going to do a speed test, manual sampling and denoising. And we're just going to figure this out before we get into this direct speed test, I just want to recap because maybe at this point you're not interested in what's really faster or whatever. You're just trying to figure out what's best for you. And even if I don't know what's best for me, how do I even figure out how to start troubleshooting noise. First thing is going to be this threshold. You're going to want to be below 0.03 if you're getting a lot of noise in your scene. That's the very first thing. The second thing I would check is make sure you have plenty of GI rays. And if you're not using brut force rays and you're using your radiance point cloud, make sure you have enough samples per pixel there and you're going to want a pretty high value here. Now the cool thing with automatic sampling is that it controls these rays and it controls all of these as well. You may not know what's reflection, what's refraction. You may not be able to visually tell the difference between when you need to use light or versus GI versus reflection that comes with experience and knowing your materials and material properties and things like that. Like, I know that this cube has reflection as this cube, but this cone has no reflection. Any noise on this cone is not coming from reflection samples, it's coming from lighting samples. A lot of that just comes from experience and understanding of what your materials are actually made up of and how those are reacting with the light. It's a combination of all of those things. And if you don't understand these, you can still use the Minmax thresholds here, the minmax samples here. But controlling these versus controlling these, you might have a longer render time. Let's go ahead and just do a speed test real quick of just the settings 8-2048 here without any overrides on at all. This should be similar speed to what we had before. We'll see, I don't know, just using the sample in a one in the sample max of 2048. With the same threshold, it took 3 minutes and 31 seconds, which is faster than our 3 minutes, 54 seconds, which means that there were things in here that we were throwing samples at that we didn't need to throw that many samples at. That is where the value of these works is. You don't have to do the troubleshooting of figuring out what you need to throw samples at and what you don't. But also this is a good way to start off before. Now going down into here, we can say, okay, well let's throw less at this or that. But you can see the difference very clearly is the transmission, the refraction value is getting a lot cleaner when we use the automatic sampling. Basically, this means we could come in here and maybe it could partly be because I had my OBS on for less time during this one. But I believe it's because here we were forcing it to throw this many samples at everything. This basically is saying, I don't need to throw it at everything, I'm going to throw it at what I think needs it. And then to get that threshold and not throw it at what it doesn't. This is normally going to be your best bet to get your fastest render versus doing these overrides unless there's one particular thing and you're seeing that you know is causing issues and that's where you can come in here to your overrides. And we can say maybe we can get away with just 1,000 or just like 512 here. But we know we have a lot of reflection and light. So we can say, well, we have a lot of reflection issues. So let's go ahead and just bring up those reflection values. But I bet it's our light that's giving us more issues than anything else. So let's just try to do a lower sample value, but keep our lighting up high, can take a look at that. What we can see here is that we've got our renter time down to 225. We also have the right here. This is looking really nice and clean. This is looking really clean because our lighting is still good. But what we have here is we have a pretty noisy issue here when it comes to both our reflection and our refraction a little bit. That's the issue we run into is you have to do a little trial and error. And you can use the renter region to clean that up a bit. You can see if just reflection fixes that. As you can have guessed, refraction is going to help clean that up a lot more. That does, refraction cleans that up quite a bit. What we can do is we can try to lower these values even lower. And just keep doing this. We'll go right here where we have some nice reflections and some nice GI going on. And we'll just take a look at how this is being set up. We can still probably get away with a lower value here. So we'll go down to 512. You can start to see a little bit of noise there. We'll split the difference and go 800. I know it's breaking my rule of the eight bit, but we're going to see how it works. It didn't really change it that much. We'll do 512 times two. That should clean it up. I don't even know if you can really see the quality of this because if we can press the videos a lot to fit them on the website, but that definitely clean that up quite a bit. We're going to look at our reflection here. We're just going to override that with say, 1,024 as well, just to get a little more than that minimum there. Than that maximum. And that's definitely cleaner than this right here. We can move that here and just see that difference. Now we can let that render across our whole scene. What we should have is a really nice balance between our higher sampling. We're able to lower the minimum and the max samples lower, but keep our overrides at these values where we can just pump more into what we need to do that nice balance between clarity and time. So you can see this is a lot of work and a lot of trial and error. And for some people this may be extremely fun problem solving. For other people, it may seem extremely tedious and frustrating to figure out, and that is why you can do it manually, or you can use automatic sampling. If we talk about the automatic sampling, yes, it might have taken a tiny bit longer. But that little bit of extra time might be worth your mental well being if you're one of those people that this seems extremely tedious and frustrating to because this is all automatic sampling is doing. It's coming in here, it's setting up your min and your Max. It's setting up your Override samples for each of these values itself, and also your GI. So it's just doing that exact same thing we're doing, but it's just doing it automatically to reach this threshold. So we were able to get our inner time down to 254, which is a lot faster than the 440 of the automatic sampling. But if you look at the quality difference, it still is slightly less clear in the refraction. So I think that automatic sampling is pumping a little more than 2048 into that refraction. But for the rest of it, if you look, most of it is pretty good. There's not really a difference that much, but you can definitely see if you really zoom in there, aromatic sampling versus normal. Honestly, you could totally get away with this as a nice clean render. You might want to pump some more into refraction if this bothers you, but it's a cloudy material to begin with. It doesn't look weird that it's noisy. Because it is noisy. Even when it's clean, there's that. But you can definitely see the difference a tiny bit. But that shaved off a good minute and a half of render time, maybe that's worth looking into, doing it manually versus doing it automatically. Now the whole truth is that we can use something called denoising, which we did the video on. And we can basically combine either doing it manually or doing it automatically, and then also combining the nos on top of that. Be sure to check out the denoising lesson because what we can do is we can come in here and use even lower values. Let's go to 512, let's go to 64 here, 512512. What we're going to do is we're going to have a way faster render. Okay, With denoising and our samples all the way down to 64.5 12, we're able to get maybe the best looking image we've gotten yet. It's a little frustrating because you can do a whole lot of work. And then especially if you have a nice clean surfaces like this, you can get incredibly fast clear results With denoising, we can have this really nice clean image, really. And again, what we can do is just sample test this against the automatic sampling with noise. So let's go ahead and do that. Okay, so here's the thing with the automatic sampling is because our threshold is still low, it wasn't any faster. We just have a very clean image here which is really nice because you have the de noising, it's not really blurring any details or anything. It's just created an incredibly clean image for us. But it took almost 5 minutes. Now if you want your automatic sampling to be on par with your lower samples that you've typed in manually, all you need to do is change the threshold here. A couple of options as you go to Basic and you go to Low, and you can see that that changes your threshold to 0.1 And that's going to give us that lower settings, which we're dealing with with those minimum and maximum samples where we just had 8.64 it's going to be comparable to that. So let's go ahead and take a look at how that looks. Now you see we have a pretty nice image. It's got no noise here. And these reflections, our GI is looking good. Our reflection is looking good over here. Even our ice cube over here is looking really good. And we were able to do this in 30 seconds. Let's take a snapshot of that. We'll take a look at the difference between our low settings manually, which I think are a little bit better. If you look at them, you see we have a little bit of noise here. From that noise, I think that there is a little bit more quality in the manual that we did. But if we take a look at the difference between our high settings and our noise settings, it's marginally different. For 3.5 minutes faster, there's a balance, obviously a balance. And with animation, the more denoise you use, the riskier it is. Because you might get more of some weird wobblies in between where it's blurring different things. Maybe somewhere in the middle for both settings is going to be where the best bet is. But probably, I mean, if you're like me, you hate samples now I hate them. Yes. Automatic sampling, you just control the threshold. And shift suggests a threshold 0.03 It's using automatic sampling or not. It does recommend that if you want to use non automatic sampling to do these values here with a 1.1 and then control it here. Now I will say that when using Unified Sampling and automatic sampling, sometimes it's better to throw this up there than do these overrides. I find it a little better sometimes. Secondly, the only thing that will affect depth of field noise and motion blur noise are these unified sampling, minimum and maximum. Anything in the override is not going to affect it and you're not going to be able to clean that up any other way besides your samples here. Depth of field and motion blur. You're going to need these samples here. Again, it's a combination of your threshold value. How much noise do you want to allow in your scene? How many samples do you want to allow it to throw at it? Most of the time you're men, you can keep pretty low. But if you're realizing you have a little more noise than you want in some areas that may not be getting a lot of attention, increase your minimum as well, but allowing there to be a gap between the men and the max is what's going to let you optimize your scene for you. I know that was a whole lot and hopefully that made sense. If it doesn't, please comment below and what didn't make sense. And what you'd like more clarity on because that is how samples work and how samples affect winter time and how samples affect noise. And how you can manually control them. And how do to control the automatic sampling as well. So hopefully that made sense to you. Let me know if it didn't and I will try to, I'll provide something that will help explain that. Okay. So now we have covered the B of the basics. The in depth bits of the render settings will cover GI when in the lighting section and Cassis as well. And we'll also cover motion blur in the camera section. In the next lesson, we're going to take a look at the RS render view window, as well as doing the Viewport render and take a look at what each of those have to offer. 6. RS Renderview vs Viewport Render: In this lesson, we're going to talk about the Redshift render view. This window just is really useful and to activate this, you can actually set up a short key for this. I use Alt one for this to bring that up because I almost always have it up. But there's also a couple of different ways you can render. If you don't want to use the redshift render view, you can actually use the viewpoint view here with this red shift option. And you have a majority of the same controls here that you have in there as well. But not all of them. But you can use your IPR here, you're going to get a little slower result. But the difference is, is that inside of here, you can still move this around, you can still move your camera around and get that almost real time feedback and actually control and move things around, which is really cool when using real time. Now we've got that depth of field going on, which might be too much. We're going to turn that off just for the sake of this speed. Now we can move this around, but not only can we move this around and get that real time feedback, we can actually move our objects around and get that real time feedback as well. Pretty neat. This is good. It's not always going to be as good as the re review. A lot of times I'll use the interview. And also just so I don't accidentally click on something, I can just focus on what it looks like to find the interview. Go to window, go down to interview. Or if you have your red shift menu up here, it's right there as well. I suggest setting up a keyboard shortcut for this. When we have a real time on, we see we only have a few options here. What we have here is the option for a pass. So we can choose which AOV pass we want. Which we only have the beauty pass right now, which is fine. But if you have other passes in here, this is where you'll be able to access all of those. We'll talk about setting up AOVs in another lesson. We also have R GB. We can click this and that will change it to the alpha. Now we also have the option of just seeing what's red, what's green, and what's blue. We have just different ways we can look at this. If we had an alpha channel, it's very useful to go into the alpha and make sure that that alpha channel is correct. It will be black and white. Next thing we have is views here. We can normally set it to auto or render. Basically the way this works is if you're in another viewport, you set to auto, it's probably going to go into that viewport to render it out. Real time is just struggling right now. Just toggle it off. Toggle it back on, and it should work. It still has some issues, but if you ever realize that something's not working right or whatever, you can hit the refreshed button, which is right here. Normally you won't have to. It normally does a pretty good job. We also have the snowflake here that freezes geometry. This is going to freeze rich post time geometry stuff. So like if you're rendering a spline as geometry or something like that, we'll cover that in a later lesson. Then lastly we have the snapshots here which is where if you add a take snapshot, you can have these snapshots down here to view. Which saves information about them as well as the option to save them out. Still, if you want to, it's an image. And to do that, you would go up here to file. You can save out as an EXR or save as an image and save those out. Lastly, we have the PV, which is the snapshot to picture viewer. Which means it's just going to throw that snapshot out into the picture viewer, which is just C 40 native render viewer. If you get out of real time, here we see we have a couple more options. We have the bucket render in which we talked about false got freeze tessellation which is also discussed in the Redshift materials master class. We also have the option to do regular, we have the option to do a clay render. This is really good for look div and stuff to make sure your lighting looks nice. It's always important if you're seen looks good in all white. It probably is going to look good when you color it and add materials and stuff too as well. This just basically over rid the material Override mode, which is still available in the legacy format, but now we can just use this clay option. And then we can click this again and choose Samples. Samples are what you're going to want to use if you want to manually control how your scene is getting those samples and where it's being applied. With our settings set to high crashed on me, I had to load it back in with our settings set to high, which very rarely happens. It's mainly because of my OBS is running in the background which is freaking you out. But basically with high you can see how all of these things are now showing up. And that's because everywhere that's gray here is getting a lot more samples than what it is. So these are getting a higher sample rates because that's going to provide a cleaner image. So you can see visually how the automatic sampling is being applied to your scene. And you can think, okay, that actually is working pretty well, so that's pretty cool. Next we have this here which is for depth of field, which we'll focus on later. Select Object allows you to click this and then click in your render view to select that object. That's going to select that cloner for us, because that's what I clicked on. If I click the Cyc wall back here, it's going to click that subdivision surface, which is what our Cyc wall is in. If there's something you want to see in your scene and you don't want to go into the viewport, you can just click in your render to figure out what that is with this selected. Same with material. We say what material is this glass material. I like that one. Click that, it's going to select that for you. I actually want to look at this pink one. You can just click that to bring up that pink material for you quickly. Just click and drag in there to get what you want to get to. Then lastly, we have the snapshots, which provides a list of all your snapshots together for you. Which you can click this little button right here to take a snapshot, just like we mentioned earlier. And we can do that. Let's go ahead and do one. That's like no light. Just so we have a different look here. We just have one light lighting up the back of our site. We'll hit a snapshot of that inside of the snapshot tool. What we can do is we have the option to set a and set, we're going to grab this first one. We're going to set that to a by clicking set A. This one we're going to say set B. Now what we have is this option to do a slider to go between the two. If you change something and you can't decide whether you like it better or not or you want to see what you like, This will allow you to do a slide at which you can rotate as well or fade in the other half on top of it, or grab this and rotate it around. You can make some pretty neat looking results here. But basically this is just so you can compare easily. And then all you need to do is remove A and remove B to get rid of that. A nice little thing you can do to compare. Again, send a picture view and copy frame buffer is available here as well. Lastly, we have the original size. If you click hold and drag to move around inside of here and scroll wheel in and out to zoom in and out. I forget for new people this may not be common knowledge. But if you ever get lost in here and you can't find it, just hit that's going to frame everything up for you. Adjust the size here. What we're looking at here, even though our output is set to 1080, this isn't a 1080 image. This is 66% If you want to look like the 1080 image, you're going to want to set 100% Now this is going to be our image of what it's actually going to look like. We actually need to open it up all the way so we can see this whole image. Now we can do fit window, we can do fill window. I'm not sure why you would ever do that. Fixed scaling is an option, but I would just stick with the original size and scroll wheel in and out of that what you want. Now lastly there's this little gear here which is the settings inside of this. This is all up your post effect settings. Once you get into here, that's going to turn on the post effects inside of here. Once you apply one of these, let's say you want to add a photographic exposure and we're going to cover all of this later in a video to now. We can control the post effects live while we're rendering. It doesn't even have to be a final image. We can apply these effects during render time that's applied to red ship post to fix here in our inter settings. This little option is here to go ahead and start controlling things like Bloom and stuff like that really neat. A lot of cool tools inside of here as well. There's also the show output before denoising. If you do have a denoise Er on like I'm using, you can have a beauty pass, it's noisy and a beauty pass that's not if you don't like the result of the noise, you still have that option to see what it looks like without the noise at all. Keep that in mind as well. I skipped over this one. Yeah, I also skipped over this region, which is actually very helpful. This is toggled by hitting R, R is render region. Basically, the way this works is to bring up a little box that allows you to select what you want to render. If I don't want to render anything out here, I just want to render in here because I'm working on the way the lighting is hitting this area or something or a certain material. I don't want to wait for it to spiral out to get to this point, just moving your box over, that can really help speed that up, so you can just focus on one area. You can also bucket render inside of that box as well. A really cool way to just have a specific area you want to look at while you make some tweaks and stuff and only it is going to be affected in this render region. Once you get those tweaks how you want it, now you can turn that off and go back into full screen rendering. It's just nice to be able to isolate a certain view without having to wait, especially near the edges of the screen. And I have to wait for that to spiral out to get to it. Pretty cool. All right. A lot of really cool tools inside of here. Be sure to know that As well as saving your image out from here, you can choose different file formats, all this stuff, the compression inside there, you have the view, snapshot, settings region is zero frame, all here, reload, refresh, zoom, rotation, all these things you have available inside the view, which also is available here. Then Preferences, you can set up shortcuts for this. Then you have click to focus and stuff like that. Which basically is just saying, do you want these to be there? Yes, you do. Okay, pretty cool. The only downside to the render view is that you cannot do animations through it. So if you want to do animations, you're still going to need to send that to the picture viewer, which you can do by clicking this button right here that covers the render view region. Really neat tool that you don't have all of these controls instead of the IPR view, but you do have a lot. You can do bucket mode inside of this window here, and also clay mode as well, so you can get a cool view of your scene instead of here. But again, not quite as good a feedback, but also there's the chance there's the cool feature that you can move things around and test and develop while rendering all in one space. Especially if you only have one screen that you're working on. That's huge. But if you have a side monitor or anything, it's nice just to have that side monitor up and just be able to move around freely and have a big viewport, then look at the renter view for your renter. But there's also the issue of accidentally clicking and moving something when inside your IPR viewport, do whatever works best for you. All right. 7. Denoiser: In this listen, we're going to go over the de noising. The reason you get noise in a scene like this here is because your sample rate is too low, meaning you're not throwing enough samples at it to get a clean image. Now a higher sample, you can go in and lower your threshold value, so you can throw more samples at it. That will be a nice clean image, but it will take longer to render. But alternatively, you could also just use denoising. Sometimes the way denoising works is it is a post effect smoothing. So it's going to try to blend this noise together to make it appear smooth. The way denoising works, if we troll this down, we have a checkbox here, we can turn that on. Then we have three options. We have optics, Alta single and Altas dual optics is what I use the most and it is what I think is the fastest one. Alta single I wouldn't bother using because Altas dual is just literally twice as good as Alta single. If you're going to use Alta, if you're going to use Alt, I would use Alt. Now, you don't have to, you can definitely use Alta single as well. But altasdual is basically just two passes of it. So it's twice as good. It does take longer though, that's the thing. Alt is definitely slower than optics. Now with optics, optics works really well with things like depth of field and reflections and things like that. And volumes and noises and stuff, and volumes and shadows works incredibly well. But when you have things that have like super small details and a bump map or a texture, it doesn't do as good of a job of discerning when something is noise from a lack of samples and or just noise from a detail. That's where Alts actually does a really a better job of being able to not smooth out the wrong things. Normally I use optics, but if you have a scene with a whole lot of details, Altus might be the way to go even though it takes longer. We're going to go ahead and hit Render here. You're going to see it comes in noisy. Then it's going to start to try to smooth that out, and then eventually it's going to be really smooth. And we've only done 1% render as it looks so smooth. That's the denoising working. You can see how even though it was super noisy before, it doesn't look super noisy. Now this also works with bucket rendering as well. You can see as it's rendering, it's noisy. The thing is here, we have a low setting. The exact same settings you just saw that were super noisy are now not noisy, and they look pretty good. Now, if you come in here and actually set these settings up to very high, and look at that comparatively, you will be able to see a slight difference. What I want to do is I want to show you how to speed up denoising actually. So it's even faster if you go into advanced tab by swirl down here underneath the denoising and then go down underneath the optics. And by default the bucket noise overhead is set to ten. Basically that means it's going to try to put 10% of the effort into denoising it while it's rendering, What I want to do is I want to take that down to zero because I want it to render completely with all of its noise and then smooth it out. And what that's going to do is that's actually going to provide a faster render time. I did a test without BS on because when I'm screen recording all my renter times are longer because it's uses my GPU to encode the video, so I'm using up some of my GPU power. But basically this is the 41.83 is denoising with the bucket Noise overhead at ten, and then with the bucket overhead set to zero, we got it down to 40.6 It's not a huge jump, but it's faster. And if you have a long animation, a few seconds, Billy makes a big difference. The only thing is, basically if you're using the noise with a set all the way up to ten, is when you first hit Render, you're going to instantly see that feedback from that denoising so you can get an idea of what it's going to look like before having to wait for the entire image to load. So, it's really up to you whether you want to lower that down or not. The Alta dual, we can go ahead and take a look at that as well. Here we have the Alt dual. You see it took a minute and 37 almost twice as long, but it does a really good job of cleaning up that noise. If you look at some of the others, you see it's not quite as smooth as the Alt. But that's just some tips on denoising. Alternatively with denoising, there are some issues you may run into besides just blurring out things that aren't supposed to be blurred, that is very apparent when you're doing an animation. You're doing an animation. It's very important that you come in here and you turn off random noise pattern. This is underneath the advanced tab. By default this is on, you need to turn that off. What that's going to do is basically when it's on, it creates every frame has its own noise pattern, which is more natural to noise. It's just more organic is the way it looks on video and stuff like that, it moves around. But when it comes to blurring things and smoothing things, the denoisers don't know the difference between noise from the random noise pattern. Basically, the way this works is if it's doing a different noise each scene and you're trying to smooth between frame one and frame two and so on, your noise changes. It's not going to smooth it exactly the same, because it's smoothing it based on the pixels around it. And if those pixels are changing, then it's not going to have the same look. You might end up with this weird moving smudge look. When you do denoising with an animation, you want to make sure you turn that off. Also, if you're doing an animation with denoise, even if on a still image, it looks really good at a certain threshold. I highly recommend just lowering that threshold a little bit for animation. Just because it really helps out the noser. Sometimes you'll get some weird flickering even with the noise pattern off. It's just because that a noiser is not perfect and it just needs a little bit more information to smooth that out when doing an animation. So keep that in mind. Still image, you can probably get away with a higher threshold animation. Make sure noise pattern is off and you might want to lower your threshold down just a bit, especially when you look at it. You're getting this weird, wobbly looking smooth where it's not smoothing it out from frame to frame exactly the same way. That's it on de noising is really cool, super helpful thing like taking render times down like we could go threshold all the way up to one. This is really low. We'll use optics on this and we'll hit render on this. And we have a scene that has a lot of depth of field. It's got glass. It's got refraction. It's got GI. And we were able to render it out in under 15 seconds. And it looks really good. Does it look as good as when we did at the higher threshold? Not exactly, but it's pretty close. And so that's the thing is you can get away with a lot of stuff with noisers, definitely play around that, get comfortable with when it works, when it doesn't. But it's one of those tools in your arsenal that really can help speed up your renders, but it's not something you want to rely on every single time, but it is very, very useful. 8. Progressive vs Bucket: Listen, we're going to talk about, just real quickly, we're going to go over the difference between progressive and bucket rendering just so you understand that there are limitations to progressive and there are things that aren't as good about bucket rendering. So in general, what we have here is when you hit this IPR button, you are using progressive rendering. And you can see it down here, it says progressive rendering and has the percentage going. The good thing is, is basically with the noise are on and stuff, we can get extremely fast previews of what is roughly what our final render is going to look like when using the IPR which is progressive. So we're not using the bucket rendering. The way we can control the settings for this is basically instead of using this, we're going to use this slider here. Progressive passes and we can increase that or decrease that however we want, but you're not really ever going to want to use that for production quality. This is really solely for look dev, We can turn this really far down and we're just going to get these really fast quick renders that way we just have a little faster real time feedback which is pretty nice, really good for look dev and stuff like that. And this works really well inside of the IPR viewport here. So we can go to our viewport, it PR, and see how we get a really nice quick result with that denoising on little noise there really quickly. But then it smooths out really quickly after that to give us a nice look. Pretty cool that we can actually move our objects around and control our camera and stuff and get that almost real time feedback. That's almost as good as the RT, but there are things that Progressive can do that RT cannot do. There are things like environmental lighting and things like that that Progressive actually can do that RT can't. Now there are things that progressive cannot do that bucket rendering can do. For example, one thing that progressive rendering cannot do is progressive rendering cannot do motion blur, It cannot do chromatic aberration very well. I will say that those are two things for sure that you definitely don't want to be using. You need to be mindful of that. If you're creating something and you're looking at it and you've got motion blur on in your scene and you're looking at it only using your IPR and you're only using that progressive pass, it's going to look different than your final render. It's always a good idea to change it to bucket mode just so we can see what that's actually going to look like. Yes, it's a little slower, but that's why it gives you a more final result. That's the whole point is progressive is great for previews. Bucket rendering gives you more accurate final results. There's nothing that bucket rendering will not render, There's no settings, no effects, nothing that bucket rendering won't do. That's the beauty of bucket rendering. It's the final production level, because it supports everything. Whether you're doing RT, we're going to just cover RT really quickly. So there you go. Basically you want to use progressive and you can adjust that slider if you want to speed that up. And you're really just going to use that for lock dev pass down to about eight and still get really fast feedback. It's going to be rough but it's going to be pretty nice, especially with denoising. Without denoising, you see it's just really, really noisy. But that denoiser works so fast that you actually get a pretty decent result. That's good enough to view previews. Now if you go below eight, you start getting into some things where just lights and stuff just aren't working properly at all. And it's not really a good even rough result of what you're actually going to look at. So I wouldn't go below eight. And honestly you can really just go with 1024, the default setting, and you should be able to get those clean fast results that are really good for previews. Progressive is really good with depth of field and stuff while you're setting that up. And it's just good to adjust things so that you don't have to wait for the bucket render to finish because the bucket render is slower even though it's cleaner. Progressive preview looked while you're creating it in the process bucket rendering before you do your final render, just to sure. Then again as your final render so that you can make sure that it is production quality. The next lesson we're going to talk about the RT render view. We're going to talk about RT really quick and just another way that that might be even better for you, that might be good enough for production for some instances, and it's even faster than progressive. Let's go ahead and take a look at that and the next lesson. 9. Real Time Render: We've talked about RT in an earlier lesson. I'm just going to cover it real quickly just to kind of show off just how fast it works and how well it actually works. And then also talk about the limitations of it real quick just to remind you on that. So it's really, really good and powerful for look dev and stuff like that. So what we can do right now we have progressive and it's really nice for instant view feedback. So when we move this around, you see if we get this really noisy image and then it smoothes out, right, this is progressive. What we're going to do is we're going to enable RT. We're going to go ahead and do that. And you can see that that was instantly smooth. Now you also noticed that our cube here, which is using the new standard material and it was using the new transmission scatter to create that purple color. It doesn't support that. There are limitations are that, that is just hindering. Let's go ahead and just say let's take this color and put it there. It should support that. Refresh it. It'll kick in. Yeah, there we go. It supports transmission color, just not scatter control and depth. We can just keep that in mind that there are some limitations there. But there is subsurface scattering that it supports now that it didn't use to support. And when you make changes, you might have to refresh it, which defeats the purpose. You can see here as I adjust the subsurface here, it actually is working and responding to that. Sometimes you have to refresh it, but it is working. But again, there are limitations. Normally, if you're just doing things that have base simple materials or you have a couple of texture maps driving things, RT is going to be your best friend, especially for deciding where you want to put your camera. You can get a real quick look at some like options here. It's like, oh, okay, I can see how this texture is going to be shiny. This one's Matt, and this one's whatever. So basically what we can do now is we can go ahead and say, Redshift camera really quickly. Go to this, we could go inside of our Boca tab here real quick and add some Boca. What we can see is we see that feedback instantly, which is really, really nice of RT. What we want to do is we want to adjust the focus distance of this. What we can do to do that is go back into our camera and choose that picker. And just pick in our viewport what we want to focus on and we get that preview really quickly. It's that same video game depth of field that you see from Unreal Engine and stuff like that. And then we can adjust the power of this, but you can see how that's beneficial. So now it's going to lock in. And as we get closer, it'll pull it into focus or whatever. And you have a set you want, which is pretty cool. So we're getting this really nice, quick clean feedback. You can go ahead to see how that's better and faster than progressive. But really it's one of those things. I think they're developing a lot, but I don't think it's fast enough to really work in this workflow. I wouldn't sit here and design something in real time. It might help be nice to have this option, but I don't think it's really fast if there's still that little, tiny bit of lag, but not much. But if you enjoy just working with what you're seeing as what you're actually singing here, I can understand why RT is a little nice. So you can bring this over, bring this down, especially if you're coming from more of a gaming background, from a game engine background, this might be more familiar to you and feel better, even if it does feel a little sluggish comparatively. It's cool just to get those feedbacks really quick. You can see how the fillets to affect the edges and how we're going to get those highlights, stuff like that. Pretty cool. We see those live reflections really neat, how well it is working, really up to you, if you want to work around in that, just know there are limitations like fog and stuff like that. But if you're doing a lot of simple scenes, RT might be a really good way just to start building and seeing while you're building how your lighting is affecting stuff. See if you're learning, it's a really good way to see like, okay, this is how my light is working and I can see how that's working very fast in real time. And I don't have to worry about like setting my light up, hitting render, and watching these buckets go around to see that it's going to be dark over here and right over here, You know what I mean, You can really see how your lighting and stuff is going to be working. We can go ahead and come in here, We can lower the spread of this, and you can see how that creates more of a focused light here. We can rotate cubes, we have this slide and rotate that around. It creates shadows really quickly. So you can see how adjusting your lights and stuff is going to affect your scene, as well as the spread and sharpness is going to affect your shadows in a much faster, more real time feedback. I can scale this new cube up and encompass some of these other cubes. Then I can go in here and make a glass material up quick. I'll say white for the transmission and turn that weight all the way up. We'll just throw that R cube. We'll see how the RT affects that. And you can see there's a little lag there, but then it kicks in and we get this nice glass feedback, which is pretty cool, pretty neat how you can move that around, but you can see how that's affecting that as well as our light dome lights are going to be probably your best friend when using RT. Just because the more light there is, the better and the less GI has to use the calculator around. Here we go. Limitations of this is basically when we go into the render settings, we go to red shift and we have our RT. We just a couple of settings and there's not really that much more to it, there's not really any way to speed it up much or slow it down. We're just set up to whatever we have really going to be based on the speed of your graphics card. Really cool way to get your renders going. There you go. T is probably still in development a little bit. I can see the truth about RT is that it's not where like Unreal Engine is. I wish it was, I wish I could. I don't understand why I get into Unreal Engine five and I can see these real time, insanely beautiful feedbacks. But I get inside of software design to create three D things and I can't. But the thing is RT is useful and it's in development. Basically what we're going to do is you'll use it for setting things up, then you're going to still use bucket rendering at the end. There you go. But basically, if you want to play around with it, feel free to do so just often. In the next lesson we're going to talk about Render Time geometry. 10. Render Time geometry Magic: In this lesson, we're going to talk about render time geometry. What I'm talking about here is Red Shift has the ability to create geometry at render time, so you don't have to have it in your Viewport normally. For example, we have a helix here which is a spline object. If we hit Render right now, we have not because there's no geometry, there's nothing we can see. Normally what you would do is you take a sweep in the null here. You take another spline, and then you take a sweep, you toss it all in there, then you have your geometry. Now, if you had render, obviously you're going to see it because you have that geometry there. Now the issue with this is, is let's say we had like a whole bunch of these. Well, your scene starts slowing down quite a bit, especially with rope and things like that. We want to be able to create this without having a ton of geometry slowing our scene down. We're going to take our sweep away. And all we need to do is right click this helix, go to render tags red shift object instead of here we see we have this option called curve that's only available when you put the red shift object tag on splines and things like that. And hair, we've got the curves here and what we can do is choose the mode, and here we can choose hair strands for hair boxes, cylinders, capsules, cones, and strips. And this is going to say how you want to basically sweep your helix. Let's say if you say boxes, we're not going to see anything happen here at all. What we can do is turn on our IPR. You'll see we have a visible spline. What we could do is control the thickness of this. Now we have this nice cube spline and it's almost instant feedback. So we can have a whole bunch of these without slowing it down. It's going to create that geometry at render time. So the benefit of this is that you can create a whole bunch of things much faster and keep your viewport running very smoothly. The only downside is if you're trying to like line something up like a cube, this without the IPR on. If you want to set on the edge of this, you can try to do it there, but see it pushes that out, then you have to do it in the live view and it can just be difficult to line things up exactly right. So keep that in mind, you're going to want to use this when you want to do like a whole bunch of grass or a whole bunch of hair, or just a whole bunch of particle streams or something. A nice shortcut to create this look very fast. And then we have the option to change it to say hair strands. We'll see how that creates interesting hair look. And then we can say cylinders, and that's going to have a hard cap and be a cylinder around here. And then we can say capsules, which is going to basically be cylinders with the capsule on the end. And you can see that this doesn't look that smooth and this low poly. So all we need to do is we actually can choose our interpolation of the actual spline itself is one thing. We can resample it to create more steps if we want. Or what we can do instead of that is we can go into our Mess subdivision and we can change that to fixed. And we can go ahead and just increase that subdivision there. And that's going to add smoothness here. We might need to refresh this or adaptive here. If you do adaptive, you're going to get those really nice, smooth results very quickly. You can see how we've smoothed that out. We have a really nice cool curve here. Now the cool thing is we actually can control the scale along the length of our splines. If we bring the scale down to zero at the beginning, it's going to be very small, and as it gets going, it's going to be longer. If you had this moving or whatever, or a tracer object, you can have this really nice fall off where you have a thicker object, then it becomes smaller as it goes, or vice versa. Or you can create something that's a little different. You have this option to control these aspects of your blind. Really cool way to create that geometry really quickly. Quickly, we built an emitter emitting out and then tracers are going to trace that path of those emitter. And we have a turbulence field here just to create this. All we're doing is we have this effect where these particles are just flying out and going all over the place. The cool thing is, is right now if we hit Render on this, obviously we don't have anything rendering. But again, if we just right click our tracer, go to Render Tags, Red shift object, we have that curve option. We can go ahead and choose capsules. We could choose this adaptive mesh subdivision. We have these paths generated really instantly for us. And we could put a material on this. Or we could, we could create a material that's omissive if we wanted to throw that on there and we'll get these glowy lines. The cool thing is, really quickly, we get that really fast feedback from a whole bunch of lines play. And it's just going to draw these out and obviously we're not going to see it as fast here. You can see how we're going to be able to get those really fast results really quickly. Which if we tried to put all of this in a bunch of sweeps, we're going to start slowing down our scene a lot because there's so many lines going on. There you go, but that's how you can create some really cool, interesting looks incredibly fast. Then have just a whole bunch of sweeps and things that you could not possibly create. And have your viewport work properly, but your viewport handles splines way better than it handles. Look at this then. It handles geometry. Let's go ahead and just add a dome light just so we have a light over top of all of this. We'll go ahead and hit Render View. You'll see just how fast this works quickly, create some really cool looking renders just with a tag, really cool way to do render times geometry a little bit extra. But I really think it's a really neat tool that we can create some really cool stuff. Get creepy. Here we go. Reads Creepy. We'll change this to like, I don't know why it's pretty cool looking though, but you could add some bump and stuff materials even work on this if you wanted to add bump or anything on here that you totally could and some shininess, definitely going to take longer to render. But we go, we could come in here and make this all glass. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about rendering hair. It's very similar to this but actually even easier. 11. Hair: In this lesson, we're going to talk about rendering hair and red shift and just troubleshooting some common problems and making sure we get the most out of our render engine as we can. Now, I've troubleshot this for hours because there are so many factors that come into play with this. And we're just going to go over a lot of those common ones and just set you up for success so that you'll get somewhere between, you can get the best render settings for you and figure that out. Basically, to start off, this is just a scene from the asset browser. It's called Hairstyle Woman's hair or something like that. And just brought that in. The cool thing about redshift is, is when it has hair built into it, by default this was underneath the woman's head subdivision and underneath this mesh. And for whatever reason, redshift wasn't recognizing the hair. But as soon as I brought those hair objects out of underneath that subdivision surface and made them just out here in their own, it worked fine. So keep that in mind that that might be an issue that you might need to look forward to. Just make sure your hair is not within a subdivision surface. That seemed to mess it up. So secondly, what I've done is I've created a red shift hair material now. Not the red shift materials hair material per se. There's actually, I mean, I talked about this a lot more in the materials master class, but we can create this, this creates a 40 hair attributes to plug it into hair, which sounds good, but it's actually not as good as what red shift has to offer. And so the best thing we want to do is we want to use principled hair. And it's just kind of hidden hair material for whatever reason. But we go over it a lot more in detail in the red shift master class. It's super cool. It allows you to create variation and stuff in your hair. And everything that you do within this is only going to affect your hair color. You still are able to use the C 40 hair material tags to control the thickness, the frizz, the kink, the density, all of those things, the things such as specular and roughness are not going to be affected. Those are going to be affected by the red shift material which will control the roughness and the hair. But the hair attributes, as far as just the things we have like clump, displaced, curl, wave, all of these things are still going to be controlled. So the cool thing is, is basically that allows us to just throw in something that lets us control the hair. And we can use the hair the way we're used to, or you can still just use all these settings which are really nice and easy to use. Secondly, when you add hair into your scene, if you open up the render settings, it should automatically add hair render to your scene. If for whatever reason this is not here or this is unchecked, you need to go down to effect and add hair render. Otherwise, red shipped isn't going to render your hair. Instead of here you have the option of sampling per pixel or per vertex. There's not really any difference in speed here, so it's up to you. Now, the setting, these settings here are going to really be based on the hair settings here instead, just ignore that stuff there. Now that we have our hair set up and we have our hair material on here, what we need to do is talk about creating consistent results from what I've discovered. Instead of the red shift tab underneath the basics tab. For whatever reason with this scene and just rendering out this hair, having the hardware ray tracing off has sped up my render. Normally, this on speeds up your render, but for whatever reason with this hair it is slowing it down. Underneath the advanced tab, we need to go underneath optimizations and use the ray tracing acceleration here. We don't need to complete construction before rendering, but we do want to set our max leaf primitives to four and our fast pre processing to all. What this is going to do in red shift advises using this when you're using something like hair and stuff like that. With red shift you want it defaults to eight, but you want to set it to a lower value to speed up hair renders. And the fast preprocessing is really going to help you with your IPR feedback. It's just going to help speed that up so you can render your hair faster for preview. It's not really going to affect overall render time, but it's going to affect your IPR. This will affect your render time. And four seems to be a really good sweet spot, at least for this scene. Try eight and below if you want to speed up your render here. Lastly, we want to make sure we go into our systems tab and hair is using up a lot of V Ram, even though when I go into my red shift feedback display, it's telling me I have five gigs free when I'm rendering this out. But for whatever reason, this is actually peaking and clipping and getting into my other apps that are open and the background processes and it's actually slowing me down. What I've found is if I go down to just 80% I'm actually getting a faster result and more consistent result than 90% So this is something you might need to play with, and this is very much going to be based on your GPU. If you've got a 30, 90, you can probably get away with 90% Or if you've got something under 30, 70 I, you might need to go down as well. So make sure to try that because sometimes this can look like it's working perfectly, but really you need to lower it and you'll get better results. And the really only way you're going to figure that out is by testing it. So many variables that will determine render time. It's crazy, but hopefully with these basic settings, make sure this is off inside of your optimizations. Set this to four and all, and then inside your system, lower that down a little bit and you should get better results. So what we're going to do now is just click Render, and we're going to take a look at how this hair renders. There we go. There's our nice clean render. We've got this nice depth of field, we've got our hair, and it looks fantastic. So it was really good. 237, which is exactly what I was expecting. That's perfect. So now just for example, we're going to go into the render settings and we're going to turn on the inside the basic tab, we're going to turn on the hardware ray tracing. And in theory this should make it faster, but we're going to see, so let's go ahead and just hit render. There we go. As expected, it was actually 10 seconds slower with that hardware acceleration on, so be sure to turn that off for hair renders. Some scenes it will speed it up. Some scenes that are very like hair heavy, it won't speed it up even though it seems like it. So it doesn't definitely keep that in mind when creating your hair renders. Hopefully this is helpful in troubleshooting some render time issues with your hair. Definitely check out your system memory usage and it may show to check off the hardware acceleration. But inside the advanced tab, go into that hardware acceleration setting here underneath the optimizations, and set that down to four. Okay, hopefully that will help. In the next video, we're going to talk about rendering particles. 12. Particles: In this lesson we're going to talk about rendering out particles. So what we have here is just have a little emitter that's just pre little turbulence, it's just shooting out little particles, right? If you hit render on this right now, obviously we're not going to see anything. Nothing because we don't, we don't have any materials on anything. Here's what we can do with the emitter. There is a red shift material, particle material, and you do not have to use this, but you can with the particle material, we can throw that on there. And where you're going to notice is that we still have nothing showing up because that's not what's going to make it render. In order to render out particles, it's much like rendering out render time geometry. We need a right click emitter, go to render tags and add a red shift object tag. Now red shift knows when it's on an emitter that it can use particles. So it gives us this particle tag here. And all we need to do is we have several choices. We can do points, which will give us no geometry but just strata points for color information. We have sphere instances, quad instances, which would be great for something like that. You're using cut out alpha images on like something like dust or something like that, if you're trying to fake that kind of look. Custom objects allows us to use our own objects. I'll show you that in a minute. And optimized spheres is probably what you're going to want if you just want dots floating around. This is going to be your best, most controllable option. It's better than sphere instances because it's optimized right now would be it. Because we have this render tag on it. You are going to see our dots and you can see them there. We have this nice like Starfield look kind of thing. But we can come down here and just increase the scale of this. And so we can start scaling these up. We have this really nice ability to have geometry here without having to use it in the viewport. So we can have really high numbers of things without it slowing down our viewport. Much like winter time geometry, with using splines and stuff like that like we used for the tracers, it can come into our emitter, change it to 500 particles, really shoot at a whole bunch of those red shift interview, It's going to handle that, no problem. The thing with the RS particle, if you take a look inside of this, all it does is it plugs in a particle color user data node into our RS particle material which doesn't have that many options. It has some back lighting which is nice. It's basically just a red shift material. The only thing that's different is inside of the color user data. We have the option to choose where this information is being driven from. If we have a mograph item and we have some fields and stuff that are affecting the color of our. So if you wanted to like fade from one color to the other via a linear field or something like that, you could set up a mograph color to be the option to drive that color. That way that information will drive that. Alternatively, you could do the geometry color ID, Individual particles and stuff are different. If you had different geometry in here, then you also have just particle particle color, which is going to be more based on something like using thinking particles or XP particles or something like that. But you are not bound to using the particle material for particles at all. It just gives you the option to drive, which you also can drive these using just a color user data, which is exactly the same node. Basically, we have color user data, we could bring that in and hook that up. Instead you can see we have presets here. We could do mograph color objects and particle color exactly the same node, just without the word particle in front of it. Keep that in mind that you are not bound to the particle thing. Instead of this, we could come in here and use whatever node we wanted to. Let's say we want to use an incandescent node because they're pretty cool and most time we're going to use particles, we're probably going to want it to be like little lights floating around. There we go. We could do that, but we really don't need the color user data to drive this. We could just use our node here if you want, and use something like temperature and bring this temperature down. And we should get some nice warm firefly looks here with a little bloom. We could come in here and we could lower the size down to one and just have some nice sparkles like if we had a flame or something, or you just need something to look like stuff is floating around. You could definitely do that. Now I mentioned it using the custom geometry here. In order to do the custom objects, all we need to do, and some objects we could add text and say hello, hello in here. And then we'll do a little man as well. We'll go to our emitter, and we'll go to our red shoe tag. We'll go to custom objects. We'll grab our text, bring it in. Grab our figure, bring it in. And now you can see we should probably turn down the bloom. You can see how we can just have that geometry just shooting out. You can see how it's a way to create. You could bring in a very complex geometry like cars and stuff like that. It's a way to have a whole lot of geometry and things render very quickly because you're not having to do it in the viewport, you're just doing it at render time. Again, pretty cool. We can come in here with the rotation and stuff, change the variation up on that and you can see how that changes all of that. Hello and whatever. We can bring this back down to ten so we can see what's going on here. You start this back up, you'll see we'll just have this geometry just flowing out. We could easily just create whatever we want. You could have a whole bunch of words or text, or you can have fancy models or cars or missiles. Whatever you want to shoot out of an emitter, You can and render that out with this red shift tag very easily. You don't have to worry about it clogging up your scene in your viewport. This is going to run very quickly and very smoothly because we're not using that geometry until render time. Again, not bound to the materials here. But it does appear that because we are using custom geometry, we are not getting our material on our emitter. So we actually need to put our material on our object. And the good thing is because we're doing that, we can actually change and do multiple colors and multiple materials on different objects. Pretty cool our bloom back on. Yes. If you don't want to use custom geometry, you can put your material straight on the emitter and that will work. But if you are going to use a custom geometry, it's going to use the material from that geometry. Again, just a really cool way to make a whole bunch of stuff without breaking your scene. I don't know why you need that, but just in case you do, then you can easily change between custom objects and optimized spheres to go back to just nice particles maybe. Skill is up to two. And now we have this really nice just spray thing out of here. Pretty cool. Yeah, that's pretty much it for the particle node. You basically don't need to use it, you totally can. But the main thing is rendering out particles. It's going to take this redshift render tag and then you have your controls inside of your particles tab here. And this is going to be your best friend for that. Okay, that's it for particle rendering. Now let's take a look at AOVs in the next lesson. 13. AOVs: In this lesson, we're going to take a look at creating AOVs. This will give us information such as alpha passes as well as just sticker information, GI information, reflections, specular lighting, cryptomatting beauty passes, and then alpha channel. Of course, as I mentioned, basically what this is going to do is this is going to allow us to create an image that we're going to be able to take into any other software such as After Effects or Nuke. Anything we can use to do some post compositing and edit and control certain aspects that we want to control without having to come back into Cinema four D and re, render out the entire image. Thus making it a much faster workflow and a much more flexible workflow. Especially if you're working for clients or something that say they took a look at this can and they're like, actually we don't like that color. Can you make it a little darker or a little brighter? Or instead of white, can this be a little gray? So you're going to want to be able to, rather than come back into your image and re, export it all out and see if they like it. You should be able to just quickly make those changes in that other software and go ahead and hand it back. Now the main reason you do this is if you're part of either a team and you're going to have someone else do the compositing or you yourself are going to take it into something like Photoshop and combine it with something else like an image or an advertisement or something. And you need things to match a little bit better. Where your client wants you to change things. So you want to build it in a way that's going to be have the most flexibility after render time and thus in post production be the most editable that it can be. And so that's why you use AOVs and if you're not doing any of that stuff, you really don't need to use them. So you know, depending on your workflow, you might need these, you might need these, or you might not. So we're going to take a look at creating all of these and how we did this ourselves. Okay? So firstly, we have our scene here, and what we've done is we've got a psych wall here that we have added a red shift object tag, and we'll go over this in a later tutorial. And we've added a matt object tag and made sure that we have the reflections on here and we have our shadows off, so we just have a clean alpha of our objects without the background. But we still have that GI from the background for us. We can turn that off if we want, or vice versa. We could make this white, blah, blah, blah. But I mainly just did that just to showcase how to use the alpha channel because that's a pretty common one. What we can do here is in order to turn on AOVs, we need to go into our edit settings here. Firstly, you want to go into your Save option and you want to make sure you have a multi pass image on. And you're going to choose the format of open EXR, and you're going to choose between 16 bit and 32 bit. 32 bit is going to be a bigger file size, but you're going to have more dynamic range and have a lot more options in post work for this. Multi layer file is a must. Then we can obviously have the layer name and stuff and we'll talk about that in just a second. The way this works is with a multipass image and a multi layer file, it allows you to store all of these AOVs individually. So you've got your GI, you've got your cryptomat, you've got your depth pass whatever AOV you have instead of having about, let's say you have 20 AOVs, and instead of having 20 AOV files, individual like Jpegs or EXR's, whatever PNG's in your file explorer, you're only going to have one open EXR file. And inside of that EXR file, you're going to have the information for all of these passes that you're going to be able to use in after effects or Nuke or Photoshop, whatever. It's just a lot tightier way to create a whole bunch of AOVs. And that way you can just find your one file to have all that information inside of it rather than having a bunch of individual files. So it's just a lot tightier. What we want to do is we want to go to the Red Shift tab, and then underneath the Advanced tab we have the AOV tab. Lots of tabs, but we want to make sure we have it enabled. And then the base file name is going to be dollar sign project underscore AOV, which means it's going to say whatever the project file is underscore AOV. Then we want to make sure we have multipart E, X are selected. Then we want to choose our depth, whether it be 16 bit or 32 bit, then our compression. Most of the time you can leave this a default, but if you want, you can choose zip RL, Z, whatever. Da and DWA B are going to use the DWA compression here, the rest of those settings are not. 45 is the default. And the reason is 45 is because it says that's what's going to give you a nearly flawless render with the optimal low file size. If you go higher means you're going to compress it more. But your image might not be as clean, but you're going to have a smaller file size and if you go lower for the compression, you're going to have a cleaner image, but ain't even bigger file size. So it recommends this, but that again, AA and DAB. If you want to look into each of these yourself to figure out what's best for you, I use Default. When I do use EXR's, definitely want to have multipass compatibility enabled. I recommend using scan line over tiled, because Red Shift uses scan line by default, so you should probably just do that. So that is how to turn on AOVs. Now how do we actually create AOV's and manage them? Well, there's a couple of ways. One is inside the Show AOB Manager button right here. Now you don't have to go into the Render Settings tab over, tab over, and you can actually find it a lot easier in two other places. One is click and hold the Edit Render Settings, and now you just have our Red Shift AOB manager right here. So we can quickly get to our AOB manager. Also, we can go to our red shift tab, and it's right there as well, inside of the AOV manager, This will be blank Inside of our AOB manager. We have all of our available AOVs over here, which is really cool. We've got Beauty, which is going to be our final render. If we are using Noiser, you're going to want to make sure you click that Noise tab so you actually use that nos. All you need to do is drag and drop these so we can bring in our cryptomatt. We can bring in a puzzle mat. That way we have individual object colors for each object in our scene. We can bring in our GI. We could bring in emission if we had emission maps. We can bring in reflections. And let's go ahead and bring in a specular lighting as well. You have all kinds of options here to choose from, as well as the ability to create your own custom ones which will cover. Now if you're using denoiser, it's important to note, especially with things like lighting, you're going to want to enable denoising on things like GI and reflections when using denoising for your beauty pass as well. Just so all of those things match together. Now I highly recommend using multipass because it has the least number of limitations then the direct pass. But if you know you need to use direct, you can go ahead and use that, but most of the time you're going to want this multipass. So you have the option to do all of these things inside of a layer of EXR. Okay, so let's take a look at this real quick. Inside of our interview here, you can see we've got our cans here and our objects in our backgrounds and everything's going together. In our beauty pass, we actually can preview what our AOVs are going to look like individually, inside of here. We've got a beauty pass and we've got a beauty noise pass. The difference between these is this isn't going to be applied to denoiser. You're still going to have those und noise options available. But we could take a preview of what the GI is going to look like. What the puzzle mat is going to look like. It does not work in the interview, but it does work in the actual rendered picture viewer. But the reflections works here as well as the speculator lighting as well. You can take a look at these things also. One big one is the alpha channel, which you can view here, which we covered in an earlier lesson. But we have our alpha channel, so you can see that. So you can get exactly how you want it. Now, You can set up alpha reflection channels and stuff like that as well, and we can cover that in a later lesson. So we want to create an AOV for this sticker, or let's say this sticker right here. Because they say, well, we want actually to change this to the blue outline one. Can we change the color? They say we like this one and we just want to kind of mess with the color and see if we can adjust that a little bit. So we want to create just this sticker AOV to control that post. So let's go ahead and take a look at setting that up. You know, we now know how to add these individual ones from here. But let's go ahead and do something practical and create a custom one. And then take it into after effects and adjust it. So the first thing we'll go ahead and add the beauty pass, and we want to add that noise for that, but we're going to add a custom one here. And the way to do that is what we're going to do is we're going to go inside of our node here and we want to use the logo on this white can. What we can do is we can grab this logo here, this texture info. If you copy and paste your materials like I did, you're going to want to recreate another copy of this and rename it something and then hook it back up because it doesn't know the difference between the, if it's the exact same texture node that you used in this first one, the first material, it's going to grab this one instead. It doesn't know the difference between first can, second can, third can, if it's using the same texture node, copy and paste it, even if it's in a different material shader. I've found out that the way to fix that is just to simply copy and paste it inside the node, name it something different, and reconnect it, I don't know why, but that works. So what we can do now is instead of our node, we're going to hit and we're going to type in AOV. And here we have the option to store color to AOV. Store integer or store scalar. Integer is going to be numerical values, Scalar is going to be size values and stuff like that. And then color values are going to be exactly what we want. Now I wish you could just grab a material that you've created and plug it into an AOV so you could control everything that had like a steel material on it or anything like that. But it doesn't work that way. It only works a color data. So there's two things we want to do to create our sticker and have it be editable. The first thing we want to do is plug our material into the input beauty input. And then we're going to grab this AOV and plug it into the surface. Then we want to grab our texture here, Plug that into our AOV. And go to input AOV, input zero. We're going to grab our ramp that's driving our alpha channel. Plug that in, and go to AOV one V input one. Instead of this, we want to go ahead and rename these for input zero. This is the add new custom AOV and we're going to call that sticker color. Instead of the AOV two, we're going to add another custom AOV, and this is going to be sticker Alpha. Okay, now all we need to do is make sure in our AOV manager that these two options are here and we're going to make sure they're denoised as well. We've got this created and now we can just go in here and make sure when we save this out that we've got a multipass image and we've got it saved out with a multi layer. We're going to uncheck straight alpha and have this just like this. What we can do now is hit render real quick. Before we hit render, let's just go ahead and delete that beauty pass because we don't need it, we just need these two sticker colors. We want to double check real quick in our redshift render view that we and D do have that alpha channel, because we're going to need that. So let's go ahead and check that Alpha channel and we're looking good. That's perfect. That's the way we want. Now we can go ahead and hit render, say that out as the sticker replace EXR. And what we can do is let that render out quick. Okay, now we've got these passes and we see we have our sticker sticker color and we have our alpha overall, as well as just our image in general. So what we're going to do is we're going to go into after effects. Once we're inside of after effects, we want to make sure we right click in the project window. Here, go to import file. We want to choose sticker, replaced our EXR and we want to make sure we import this as a composition and not footage. Then this is going to pop up this import window to say composition or footage, which we've already told it. We want it to be a composition and we can precompose layers, which is fine if you don't do that. Your layers just aren't going to be in pre comps, which isn't a big deal. What we've got here, if you scroll this out, we see we have sticker replace a symbol and we also have our EXR right here. But what we're going to do is we're just going to double click the sticker, replace a symbol. And you can see we have all of our layers here in these pre comps, which is exactly what we want. Now there's a few that we don't want and that is the speculator which we did not tell it to make. It always pumps out a speculator, a reflection in a background. And these are not AOB's that we told it to make. None of these have any data. Let's say we want to adjust the color of our ticker here. We can use the alpha channel here to drive that. What we'll do is we'll go into our ticker color. We'll isolate this. Let's just say we go into here, we'll go to color correction. Just for the sake of example, we'll just go to hue and saturation and just change the colors to say blue orange. Now that we have our sticker color adjusted, what we can do is have our alpha layer right above our sticker color. And we're going to go ahead and instead of saying alpha mat, we're actually going to say Luma Matt. We're going to choose that Luma mat. And you can see that creates just the colors over our Effecttron label here. Then what we're going to do is we're just going to grab our RGBA, pull it down beneath so it's at the bottom of the hierarchy, and uncheck the solo and be sure to turn on that layer. You can see now we've got that color corrected logo on top and we didn't have to re, render anything out. And it looks perfect without it. It, there you go. So now we have the exact same look, but our colors are different. We've come in here and readjusted our colors here, which is exactly what we want. There's multiple ways to do that. That was just a quick example, but now you can see how beneficial and having an AOB with a different logo and an Alpha channel is going to be If your client's telling you they want this version of their logo rather than that version and you don't want to have to render it completely, you could just literally replace it over top of it. Pretty cool. All right, so that's AOB's 14. RS Object Tag: In this lesson, we're just going to talk a little bit about the red shift object tag and how that relates to camera and rendering and things like that. So let's go ahead and right click our sphere, Go to the render tag and go to red shift object tag. The main things we're going to want to deal with here is we're going to want to go over the visibility options as well as how to do these Matt object options underneath the visibility tab. We can override this by default just overwriting it, nothing's going to change. You can brootceG force, brote force GI if you want. So if you're using a radiance point cloud, you can make it also do broot force GI. You don't really need to do that unless you really want to. But the main thing that we would ever really need in here is the costics here. The main thing we'd ever really need are just to cast caustics. But what we can do here is we can actually adjust the way this works with primary rays and secondary shadows, self shadows, received shadows, and cast AO primary rays. Basically, if we uncheck that, what's going to happen is it makes it invisible. So it says, okay, it's not even going to get the initial light from our scene. And the way our eyes see things is they see the light bounce off the object and then it hits our eyeballs. So if C 40 is going to act the same way if our light isn't ever even reaching our object, it's not going to hit it. But the secondary rays are still there. So let's go ahead and take our floor and just make it reflective. Real quick, you're going to notice we have the actual reflection of our ball here as well in the floor. Even though the ball is not there, we're still getting the reflection of it because we're getting those secondary rays after it bounces off and hits the floor. We're seeing that bounce back to our eyeball. It doesn't make a lot of sense, but basically it can be a little confusing. But basically, primary rays means, hey, am I visible to the camera or not? If it's on, if it's off. Secondary rays are going to be things such as reflections. If we turn that off. Now we don't have any reflections here. And we're also not getting any GI, because all of our reflection and refraction options are now turned off, as well as global illumination. Because all of these things come from the secondary ray value. We get a very flat image. Yes, we can see it, but it doesn't look right. So this is what it would look like without GI, or reflections or anything like that. Reflections uncheck that, then it will go away. We'll still get our GI and everything that we like, but we don't have that reflection on the floor anymore. You can control what actually affects other things and stuff in here. You can do refractions. You can do cast reflections. Cast refractions. All of these things cast shadows. We can turn that off. Then we won't have a shadow from our object here. We're just going to get I, which can cause some interesting looks in a neat little style. But we can also tell things not to receive shadows if you're lighting something through a room or something. Basically, if you want to put something inside of an object like a box or something because you want to concentrate in that GI. You could say for that box not to cast shadows or do self shadows. If we had geometry here where it was bending over itself causing shadows and stuff, it could turn that off as well as O is automatically on, we don't really need to worry about that as well. A lot of these things are really just going to be for creating a very unique look and style. Sadly, what we can't do is we can't go into our area light with an object tag and say, okay, don't be visible in reflections. I wish we could, because then you could put a light and get that nice lighting effect, but it just doesn't work like that. We also can say, if you want an object to be visible to GI, receive GI, or visible to caustic photons, all of these things, probably you're just going to go ahead and leave on. But if you've got something that's affecting GI and you don't want it to, you can just disable GI. Or if you have an object you don't want to receive GI, obviously, you can turn that off there, just the ability to control things. Most of the time when you're going to use stuff like this, it's when you have things inside of each other or around things and you want to use them without being able to see them. Just hiding objects, you still want the attubues from them and stuff like that. I'll actually show you a really cool use of hiding the primary ray later on in a project lesson. It's really neat, interesting results. Let's go ahead and look at the Matt options in the next lesson. 15. Matte Shadows: This lesson, we're going to talk about the matt tab options inside of our red shift object tag. And we're just going to go ahead and override that to enable it. Then also you're going to want to enable it as well. Override really doesn't do anything. You have to enable it as well. Now what we have is we've overridden our Matt objects. Now we have what is just a black circle. We won't see any difference here until we turn on our alpha because there's an object behind us. We're not getting that look. We come in here and we turn this down, we actually can turn on our alpha, Now we have a reverse alpha. Basically we have a sphere here that's going to be cut out of our objects. We'll get this green background, but we won't get the sphere. So you could put an image behind this and actually see through it. Let's go ahead and just add in a dome light real quick just to show case this dome light, for the back plate of our dome light. Go ahead and use a back plate and we'll say, I don't know, this batmobile from our other course here, you can see it just creates a see through image. So we're just seeing through to the background. And as we rotate around stuff, we're getting just this really interesting Matt look. You could see how you could create some really cool little interesting instances with this with an emitter or something. But pretty cool basically. Most of the time you're going to want to do this is not this way but actually the opposite. Where we're, instead of putting it on our floor, I'm, instead of putting it on our sphere, we would put this on our floor. Our floor is Matt. When we come in here to the RGB, you'll see we have the option of creating just whatever background we want and we could put this sphere on that. It's still going to get the color information from our psych here, but it's going to be able to put in whatever we want. So we could put in an infinite floor or something like that very easily just by taking this green color and making it an image behind it. Now we're not getting the shadows and stuff as you can see in our alpha, unless we go down here to shadow and enable that. Then we want to make sure we say shadow affects alpha and enable that as well. For alpha, we're actually going to turn this back up all the way up to one. Now we have our object here as well as our shadow. If we came in here and we put an image behind this again, let's go ahead and take a look. And you would do this in a third party program, not inside the dome light, but I'm just doing it in the dome light because it's faster here. We've just put a space image in our background here. And you can see we actually have the shadows here of our ball hitting that. And if we move our light around, we're going to see that that's going to affect it as well. Our shadows are going to update and stuff like that. Shadows up. You can see now we just have a ball sitting on space. We're getting the shadows and our object, Matt, object. And we obviously wouldn't need to do a Cyc wall here. We could just do a floor because our Cyc wall is causing us some issues with the reflection here. But it's because we have our dome light on. Let's go and turn that light off. There we go. So now we have a perfectly clean image. Our dome light was sliding up our seam where I didn't need to. Now we have this nice image. We still have the color of our floor here reflecting it. If we wanted to match a little better, obviously we would need to go to like purple. Now we have just a ball sitting on a galaxy. So it's an interesting look, but an interesting look. We can create some really neat things. And obviously this is really important for products and stuff like that, where you want to put your product on a background or something or some font, or text, or magazine cover or whatever, but you want your shadow to be there so it's sitting on the floor. You can definitely do that. This is how you would do that. It's just the matt object on the floor. You would make sure you have show background of you don't have to do that. Use the alpha. That's just for planning. You can say apply to secondary rays. Now what you're going to do is that you're going to actually have those, turn this back on. It's going to try to apply the secondary rays to mat as well. So you're going to have all your reflections in GI and stuff are going to be weird, so you don't really want to do that. Let's go in here and make sure our floor is very shiny. And let's say we have a shiny floor that we want, and we want our object to look like it's on space, but we also wanted to have the reflection here. Let's sum out just a little bit here. In order to bring that reflection in, we can go ahead and see if we turn off our mat. Here we have our reflection. It's here on the surface. We definitely have it. Where's it going and why is it going away? Well, it's not because we need to apply a secondary rays. That's definitely not going to fix it because that's going to make our secondary rays Matt, which is something we want. What we do want is just our reflections on our floor. So all we need to do is go down to here to the reflection scale. And by default it's to zero to turn that up to one. And now we have our reflections in here as well. And that is going to come in. With the alpha. Let's just go ahead and test this out real quick. So we'll go to our settings. When you're using things with alpha, you want to make sure you're using an image that has an alpha channel like this. We want to render this out so we can use it properly. We're going to make sure we have a separate Alpha channel for this and we're going to go ahead and we're going to call this. Okay. And so now we're going to hit the interview here that render. All right, so now we have our objects here. If you go into our layers, when you look at the single pass here, we see we have our alpha as well as our regular image. So let's go ahead and go into Photoshop here. We've taken it into after fix here because I select a Photoshop, so I'm going to do it in after fix, but it's basically the exact same thing. Just more comfortable on after fix, you would bring it in here and we just click go to import file. Let me select both those files, the alpha one and the regular one that we did import, take those and G's. And all we need to do is let's go ahead and just start this from scratch. We'll take the two new comp with these two. We'll say single composition. Okay, We have these two together and we'll put the alpha one on the bottom. And you can see we don't really have anything going on, so we need to go ahead and just add a solid behind this. So this would be like your background. Whatever color or whatever you want. We could do something like purple. Sure, why not? And you see nothing happens. And that's because we're not using our alpha channel. For our alpha channel, we need to set that to lumet and now we have this nice alpha channel. But we've lost our shadows. We have our reflections. They're weak, but we've lost our shadows. So what we need to do firstly, is duplicate this alpha layer. And then we're going to do is we're going to go in here and we're going to add a curves to this, and we are going to invert this. Then we're going to take this and we're going to set this to soft light. So now we've brought our shadows back in. And then just because our reflections weak, what we're going to do is we're going to grab our used one. And we're going to duplicate that. Put this over top of everything, make sure this lumet is off. We're going to set this to screen. That's just going to brighten those reflections back up a bit. We have our shadow, we have the color, we have our reflections. So it's very important that you do your reflection scene on black. That way you can use screen and stuff like that. Whenever you're using alpha, obviously you need to do black anyway. But when you want to ring in that screen, it's going to be important to be on black as well. If there's a certain element that you want out of your full scene that you want to add in over top of something like a magazine or whatever, Just make sure that elements isolated with that reflection so you can do that. But now we could come in here and change our background color to whatever we wanted, and everything will adjust accordingly. Let's cool. So you can see that happening live. Pretty cool, obviously. You could also come in here and instead of using a solid layer, you could use a photo or something if you wanted to do that. But if you're going to do that, I would probably just do that within C 40 rather than doing it in post. But yeah, basically that's how you can get these settings and stuff exactly how you want. You might want to add some softness and transparency to your shadows. But that's pretty much how you can do that if you're going to use like actual environments. I would do camera mapping and stuff like that in sine 40. If you're going to do something for artwork or design, I would probably just do it the normal way. Okay, let's talk about camera tips in the next lesson. 16. Lighting Basics: In this lesson, we're going to go over just a quick overview of lighting with red shift and our lighting tools that we have available in just some basic settings so you can understand how to control them. And then I'm going to go in depth into each of them after this video. So be sure to, you know, following along. So firstly, the cameras are also down here on the bottom right now, so we've got area tags if you click and hold, we've got point light which is going to generate a point light basically and give you this nice icon. And like of course it's going to create a point light. What that means is, is that this light takes up no mass. It literally comes from a pixel, which is pretty neat but also not very realistic. Like if you want to create something that's going to be more realistic, you're probably not going to use a point light. But if you want to create something that's like little dots floating around that also affect volumetric fog and stuff like that, point lights a really good option rather than using particles and stuff like that. So let's just go ahead and take a look at rendering this out. We're going to use the render view here. You can see our point light is just hovering over our mass here. And it's not really having that big of an effect on this. We could come here and increase the intensity of this, and you're really going to have to start cranking that up to really start lighting up your scene. Now that we have this cranked up, you can see as we move this around, it's just evenly casting its shadow across everything really. Basically what it does is it, what it does is it emits light spherically all the way around it with no fall off. It's just this point that exists and creates shadows from there. You can see it's just a neat trick, but doesn't really give you a lot of control and stuff. You can't reduce the spread of this. You can't make it more focused. You're going to get just this fall off on it. You can turn off the fall off, so it becomes this 360 infinite light if you want, which can create some cool looks. Obviously the power of that is going to be need to be turned down. But now we've created just by changing the decay type, this is going to be your falloff. Okay, you've got intensity. Let me back up and just remember that you are just starting off to redshift and you may not know that you have your options here underneath your light, underneath your light. You have your object options inside of here. You can change the type of any light with these type drop down here. If I wanted to change this from point light to a dome light, I could. That's not going to change the name of it, it's just going to change the type of it. We're going to go with our point light right now, because that's what we're talking about. Now we've got a preview. We can say we want the wire frame or the illumination adjustments, that kind of thing, which we don't need to mess with ever. This is literally just for being able to grab our light for the point light inside of RT. Real time rendering. We don't have that option anyway. But in the viewport without RT on, you'll see our light right here, we have all these little lines coming out that is to show case that it is a point light. Because it's emitting everywhere from a very fine point. There's no shape to this. It's just emitting all around itself. If you turn these wireframes off that get sort that, I don't know why you would need that, but just in case you don't want to see that, you can turn that off here in the preview tab. Next we have the intensity, which is what we're going to use to adjust the brightness of our light. We'll go ahead and we'll swamp out of RT, The intensity of the light is going to be combined with the exposure as well as the decay. The decay works fall off, basically if we do linear decay, it's going to very much fall off with these and give us these nodes here, you'll see it pretty much changes our spotlight to this sphere that has a certain reach. And once it gets outside of this zone here, this ring, we lose all impact of it. If we put this here, where we're getting our light on our object here, go back to our IPR. We're going to see that the light effects, there we go. We're going to see that that light affects everything in that region and then falls off drastically. As soon as it gets outside of that, we can adjust the size of that and bring it back down. We're basically creating a ball of light that anything outside of the ball of light, it doesn't get lit. Everything inside the ball of light does get lit with a decay value from the center going out. So the further out it goes, the softer it gets. We can control the color and things here, as well as loading a texture map if you wanted to for specific colors. Now, quadratic is going to be more of a natural falloff. And what you're going to notice is when you're using quadratic with a point light, your intensity is going to need to be turned up a lot. Let's just start turning this up. We've seen we've had to turn it up from ten, up to about 7,000 to get our same feedback. What's neat is we're getting this nice falloff from our light here. We're still getting these hard shadows and stuff, but it's a little softer. But we're still getting hard shadows. If you wanted to, what we could do is come in here and turn up the exposure, and that's going to make it brighter. Rather than having to crank this up to 7,000 we could crank the exposure up to 5.10 even. That's going to brighten that up as well. The reason you use intensity over exposure is so basically you can make sure your lights are set up with the same power. And then use the exposure through the post effects and through the camera. It affects your full scene completely. But if you need to, for some reason, trick it and use the exposure instead of intensity for a certain light to make it a little bit brighter than others around it. This is the way to do it. You would increase the exposure or you could increase the intensity. But let's say it's like locked in to something else. You need to increase the exposure. Instead, intensity and exposure both control the brightness of your light. For point lights, it's very much just these wild numbers that don't make a lot of sense. Then you've got your decay, which is going to adjust how your light is being used. You can see the difference is drastic between all three of them. Honestly, you're not going to use point lights a whole lot, but they are pretty cool to use something like the post effects in there. So let's go ahead and open up our interview. Go to the post effects, and let's go ahead and add flares, because that's going to affect our light here. Now we're getting this nice cool lens flare from this point light, you can see it just depends on where the light is. It is reactive to this light. Pretty cool, little fun fact. With the point light, it can cause a nice flare. But again, there's no geometry here, so it's not going to be super accurate. And you're not going to use point lights that much at all. Okay? What you're going to use more than anything else is going to be the area light, which we'll get to in a minute. Next we have the spot light in the spotlight. We'll cover this a little more, but basically you can see you've still got intensity. We're going to raise this up, you've got exposure, you've got units decay exactly the same, but you also have the shape and the cone angle. What we'll notice here is if you go back out of our IPR, our shape is the same as the point light, except it has this cone extending out of it. We have this point which is going to be the point where our light is facing this. Just dragging this in and out is going to affect our intensity and not actually the shape of the cone angle. The cone angle is only going to be controlled down here with the shape of sliders. So we can say is we want a wider view or a sharper falloff. So we have the fall off, which is the inside, this is going to get 100% of our light. And then we can adjust the curve of that fall off. Just going to say how drastically do you want it to basically create a gradient from the edge of the fall off point to the edge of our spotlight here. With this spot light, what we can do is actually we need to rotate it to point it towards our object here. We're going to go over and we're going to pull up out of the way. We're going to hit our object from this angle here. We're going to take a look at this. You can see we're just hitting this piece of our object here pretty brightly. What we need to do is we need to come in here and we can adjust the intensity of this. It's just going to really intensify that. What we can do is increase the cone angle. Now you can start to see we get all the way to the edge. And if we get rid of this fall off angle, we're going to get this nice sharp image, which is going to be what we really want for a spot light. And we can adjust the falloff curve as well. But you'll notice with the cone angle, we're just literally controlling the edge of that cone and it's all being shot out from our light. If you want to soften this up, what we can do is just soften up the falloff. And you can see that it's going to make everything darker as it goes towards the middle. Then what we can do is bring that even more by crushing that falloff even more and creating even more of a gradient ramp there. If you don't want any fall off at all, you want to be like all sharp spot light. You want to make sure you have your fall off off completely. This is just going to give us this nice object here. Now the spot lights and stuff are a little trickier to control because they are directional. One tip you can do is create a null. Then right click your spot light. Go to Animation tags, Target, grab that null and put it in there. That's going to make that light always face that null. So now we can grab our light and just move it around and we're always going to have it facing that kill, so it's a lot easier to move it around our scene with the ease here. Spots are really nice with environmental fog, which we can add really quickly. And I'm just showing you a quick overview, work over all this stuff. I'm just showing you a lot of options and ways to use these things. There we go. If you come into our fall off here, our object, and we adjust the cone shape, and you can see how that sharp edge creates that nice spotlight look with that nice foggy beam. And we could come in here and increase the fall off a bit, soften up the edges of that to create a more traumatic look as well. Pretty cool use for the spotlight is to create that classic cone spotlight look, especially with environmental fog. Next on the list, we have the option of the infinite light. The infinite light is a little different. The infinite light spawns this light here, which looks a lot like the point light, except one of the lines is a lot longer and it's always along the Z axis. If you rotate this here, we'll see how that z axis shoots out further. Now we've created this infinite light that is just going to be a hard shadow. It's going to have infinite power and never fall off. This is going to be your best friend. If you're trying to create a long shadow, look, it does not matter where in the scene this is. It can be hidden underground. It's still going to light your scene exactly the same, because the only thing that matters is the direction of that line. Thus the name infinite, because it has infinite power and it doesn't matter where it comes from. All that matters is the angle. If we rotate this, you'll notice that, that light changes and we get that shadow going that way. Now again, the same controls, intensity, exposure and color. We can come in here and crank up the intensity a bit five. These numbers are really going to vary based on your scene, the scale of your scene, what type of light you're using, et cetera. We'll go into detail about each of these and how to add even more customization and options as well. But again, this one is going to be useful for creating that look. If you go underneath and rotate it up, you'll see we get nothing. But as we come down, we start getting light coming into our scene. You can create this nice long shadow very quickly and easily. Very easy to create that long shadow look very intensely. Now, each of these lights will go into detail about, but each of these lights has its own details panel, which we'll discuss later. But this is how you can really soften up those shadows and stuff. Even our infinite light is giving us super hard shadows. We can come in here and crank up the softness of that to soften that up, you can use an infinite light as a nice soft area light if you want. But most of the time, if you're going to use infinite light, you're probably going to want those harsh shadows. So you can do that a little bit, but you can also sit on them up just a bit by raising that up a little bit if you want to. Each light has these options, and we'll go into each of these later. Now, the next light that's available is the area light, which we're going to cover extensively, because this light is going to be the one you use most often as well as the HDRI. Go ahead and turn off blue or flayer here. The area light by default spawns in the middle of your scene facing backwards as a rectangle, which it's not really ever what you want. If you take a look at this area light, it looks like it's just a dot. But that's because our scene is very small right now, our area light is actually huge. You can hit and scale these. You also can grab the points and scale it up and down along each axis if you want. Basically, the way an area light works, again, the tag for the null and the target tag is very helpful with the area light. But the way the area light works is it actually gives mass and volume to the light. This is as if you had basically, if you had a big overhead silk with lights behind it, this is going to hit that silk and give you a nice diffusion. Let's go ahead and take a look at renewing this. You can see how that area light is just shining across this whole area very nicely and softly we could come in here. And the default intensity for the area light is 100, which is a little high for what we need. You can see how we have this area light being above our mountain and coming down. We have this nice soft fall off. Now if we bring this down and make this smaller, our brightness goes down as well. That's because we don't have as big of a light. And the bigger the light, the more the power, as long as you have normalized energy on which we can talk about when we go over the area light in its own video. But basically the area light is my favorite because it has a few options, other lights don't. One is just really nice soft shadows and it works most like a real light. Your lights actually have volume to them in shapes and whatever. You can have a rectangle, you can choose a disc, which will give you a nice light. To recreate a spotlight if you want. You can adjust the scale of the axes individually, in here as well. You also can adjust the spread if you come in here, let's take our light up to ten and adjust this spread down. As we lower the spread, we're going to get that super harsh light basically. It's going to create an instant beam to see this best. It's really easy to use the volume metric environment here. Zoom in here, right now with the volume here. Let's turn our light up to say, 50. There we go. We have this beam of light coming straight down. There's no fall off or anything, it's just coming perfectly straight down. And you can really see that in the volume. Now if we come in here and we start raising the spread of this up, it's going to act much like a spotlight. And start spreading out that cone based on the shape of this. The bigger the spread, the more the fall off is going to be and everything. It's going to have a much softer look and not be like a spotlight at that point. You might need to come in here and turn your intensity back down. Now if you lower that spread back down, you'll see that comes back into this beam of light here. The other cool thing you can do is sphere, which is exactly like a point light except with mass. You can see here in the render in the environment, there's actually like this sphere here that isn't as bright and that's because it's inside again, much like a point light. But a lot of times what you're going to do is you're going to put this sphere or something like this inside of a car head light or something like that. And it's going to emit in all directions. Basically it's going to emit out from itself all the way and not inside of itself. Alternatively, you can do a cylinder which is going to be pretty cool for creating wand light looks say 55.20 Yeah, we'll have this nice long cylinder which is basically as if we used a nice bar light to light on a wand light on top of our scene here. Which gives us a really nice look where it's lighting all the way around itself and not inside of itself. It's a really nice light and that's a really cool, practical one to use. That's very nice. We can see the versatility of the area light. And one of the cooler things that area light can do is it can take the shape of a mesh. Let's go ahead and add a Taurus here. Down scale it up, scale this down. There we go. We just have a Taurus here. What we can do with this area light is we can say, I want the shape of this area light to be a mesh. And then I want to grab that Taurus and put it in this mesh. Hit Render. Right now, you're not going to see it now. We have that light coming from this mesh. Let's go ahead and turn it down. The cool thing is, is we can actually click visible to make all of our lights visible even with the mesh. One that's pretty cool because it gives you the shape of whatever your mesh is. Now you have this really nice look here. So what we can do now is we go in here, adds bloom, and we have this really nice glowing ring. It's actually working as a light. When we add the environment back in, it's actually affecting our environment. This is something that incandescent materials do not do the Iga and materials affect the GI of volumes but not actually affect volumes. Aerial lights set to a mesh light do affect the environment. I know this is a lot and we're going to go into detail about each of them. I just wanted to quickly give you an overview of each one of these and try to give you a taste of what they can do. So let's go ahead and change the area light back. The last thing we'll talk about is we'll go back to the rectangle shape. Here's something here. If you go here and we take a look at this and you can see as we turn our light backwards to the back of our light is facing our camera. You can see our light here in our scene is just coming in as a void. This is always an issue. If you want to have your light in front of the camera, you need to make sure that you can fix this. We'll cover this, and it's very easy to fix. And basically, the fix for this right now is just to turn off visible. Now, you won't see that light being there at all, but why would you do visible? Well, here's one option. Let's say we want to light here in the middle of something, but we want it to be lit up on both sides. Like it's a neon sign or something, something that's or a logo hologram or something. And we want it to light up on both sides. What we can do is just say bidirectional and that's going to emit our light. You can see little arrow, things stick out on both sides now. So now we have light emitting to the left and light emitting to the right. So our front end back is being emitted. And we can make this visible now. And it should create a black shape. It should create a white flowing shape, so you can see our light all the time if we want. You notice that the difference is there's still a very thin line here because our shapes have mass. So if you want a light that is going to affect front and back and not have a middle at all, you definitely want to use a round shape and not a rectangle shape. The sphere is going to give you all directions but not that back. Interesting that you can do that and you can still adjust the spread of these. You can really create some interesting looks or lights in your scene area. Lights are extremely versatile and have a lot of control and variability. The last thing I'll talk about in all lights have this as well, and that's a normalized intensity. So the way red shift lights work is basically the size of the shape affects the brightness of the shape. Just like a real world light. If you had a bigger light, there was emitting light, then a small light, there was emitting light. You're going to have a brighter shape because you have more lights. Basically think of it as an LED panel. It has more as it gets bigger. The thing is, if you don't want that to be the object and you're just affecting the size of your lights for reflection and lighting purposes. Basically what you can do is you go to your area light, scroll down here and enable normalized intensity. What this is going to do is it's one going to make you need to use gigantic numbers like 50,000 But regardless of the size of my object here, it is not going to affect the brightness. It is only going to affect where that is hitting. If I do a literally beaty, tiny light with no spread, it should look exactly the same as a really big light with no spread. Obviously, this is clipping in, so we're lighting more of the scene, but you can tell there's no difference in the brightness and the falloff and stuff based on the size of the light. What this does, it allows you to have multiple lights that are different shapes and control them all but just intensity levels. It's just a little trickier because the slider here only goes up to 100 and you need, like I mentioned, about 50,000 to really get into that light somewhere up there in the thousands. It's ridiculous. Not the easiest to use, but definitely possible. Again, without normalized intensity on scale of your light, does determine the intensity of your light. Next light we want to talk about, we want to talk about the dome light, which will definitely cover more. Dome light creates a 360 sphere around your entire scene of light that is emitting inward towards itself, okay? So basically we've got everything is being lit right now, all over from 360 degrees with just white light. You can control the intensity of this as well as the exposure, just like before. But the main thing we're going to do for this is you're going to use HCRI maps. You can grab your ACRI maps and you'll see how that brings in that color information from that CRI map so we can just rotate our dome around. You'll see how that's going to give us that dome light. It's lighting set up for us exactly how we want it based on the dome light itself. You may need to come in here at just the brightness and or the gamma or your dome light. That's how you can do that. Now the other benefit of the dome light is, I mean, obviously dome lights are great for if you're not really trying to set up a lighting rig and you just want to throw something on something and have it look pretty well. Dome light is a great option. You can find all kinds of environment maps, CRI maps, we'll talk about this in the dome light section. But basically it's just kind of a quick and dirty way to get a very non editable version of a lighting set ups. You know, it'll give you a result quickly. A lot of people use them because they don't want to have to set up lights. And you can get away with really nice reflections and stuff just by using dome lights. So it's definitely a good tool to have in your arsenal next. Because it comes in and it is a spherical map, right? So you can do a hemispherical, you can do a mirror ball, and you can do angular. And you're going to know based on the CRI map that you get. Most of them are going to be spherical, But if you're doing something on a film set and they give you a mirror ball image, you can set that to mirror ball if you want to. Now the one thing we'll turn off our floor here. You can see our background here of our environment map. We've got like the curtains from the studio back here, we rotate around, you'll see we have like a chair and stuff. We're seeing the image of our HDRI map in our scene, which we don't want. What that is is that's down here in the environment. And we're just going to uncheck background now. We have a nice Alpha channel here that we can use and we still have that really nice lighting from that dome light. We can always replace the alpha and enable back plates which really, I don't feel like should belong in the dome light. I feel like it should be its own thing. But inside of the dome light, we have the back plate. We can use an image here to put into the background if it wanted to put like a city in the background. We can grab that city image and just load that in. And then we need to turn on our background again. And that's going to use that image as our background if you wanted to. That's how you can throw in a color or whatever you want. Just whatever background you want. It's going to be using the back plate. This is really important for motion tracking and things like that and compositing, but that is how you enable that and we'll cover that again, that's the Dom lights really quickly. Next we're going to go over the IS light, which is really a unique light that you're only going to use if you're doing a lot of architecture stuff and you know exactly what kind of light you want. So you can Google IS profiles, and then you literally just download those IES profiles, click the path here, bring them in, and that's going to give you that light. Basically, these are used for a lot of can lights and stuff like that for architecture. Let's go ahead and find one really quick. Here is the IES library. Basically, you have all these profiles of different lights and stuff that you can use. You can see how it creates some unique looks and lighting, things that you may not be able to recreate as easily. Let's use this one. This got like a multics going on. We'll click that. We'll download the IS, well we will click and drag that over here. That will load that into R scene here. Now we have our IS light. All we need to do is again bring it up and rotate that you can see this weird little shape it's given us here. We have this profile of the way that, that light is being spread out. And we're going to, again, see this best with environment on. You can see how that light is provided this strong beam in the middle, softer beam as it fades out. And then a softer beam on the outside. It's given itself layers based on the way to say the light would be built and the actual refraction of the light. Without having to build that, we can get that look pretty cool effect, especially an arc to do some nice lighting and stuff to make it more realistic like the actual lights that you're going to put in there. It's a very nice touch for arc, if you know what kind of lighting you're going to install to make that lighting accurate for you. Really cool effect. Yeah, that's the only reason you're going to use that is because you want to use a certain IES profile. Next light on the list is the portal light, which we're really only ever going to use inside to do interiors basically. Let's go ahead and build that real quick. So let's say we have our portal light here on top of our mountain. We're going to render this out. We're not going to have much light from this stall because our portal light is only going to be driven by exterior lights. It doesn't light things up on its own, but what it does instead, is it actually takes other lights in the scene and funnels it through itself. Basically what you would do, and we'll cover this again in a later lesson. But you would put this in a window or somewhere where you want light to come through. And you're using an HDRI map, you're using a dome light. Your whole dome light is coming over your scene. But your portal light, you really want to be focused. What it's going to do is if we turn up the intensity of our dome light, we can adjust the amount that that portal light is taking the dome light and injecting it in. If you had a house in here and you only had one window, it's going to have a hard time creating enough light inside of itself because the dome light is being blocked everywhere and it's just only going to get through here a little bit. And what the portal light is going to let that do is it's going to let it force more light inside your object, inside of your scene, so that you can get more accurate results. Again, if you come in here and we change the dome light to red, a portal light is going to focus that red light in there as well. It's going to be it just an amplification of the surrounding the light. Now we also can come in here and make the dome light different. The portal light different. The portal light is taking the light information from our dome, but then tinting it red and shooting it in. There's that as well. The portal light is really going to be useful for a lot of interior design. It only works if there's another light providing the light source for it to funnel. Lastly, we have the physical sun, which is neat and weird, but by itself it's literally the same as an infinite light. Except as it gets to certain degrees, it starts changing colors. So you get more evening as it gets lower, and then it's nighttime, then it's going to raise back up. It's oh, it's morning. And then it's going to be afternoon and now it's going to be more white because it's high noon. Then as it gets lower in the evening, again is going to turn more of that yellow Golan color. It's exactly the same as infinite light, except the angle of it affects the color of it as well. That works best with what's actually in the red shift objects here. And that is the sun and sky rig. What that does is that brings in that red shift sun, just like we saw. Which is an infinite light that adjusts the color based on the angle. And then it brings in a red shift sky, which is just a dome light that has some default colors to make it have a horizon and the sky with the lights here together, we can see, we can start slowing it down and we get this nice look where we have the evening fall in and we actually have this really nice dark blue shadow look. It's very natural to the way light falls off in our scene. Let's go ahead and bring our disc back here on the floor so you can see this. If you notice inside of a chi of sun, we can't control any of the settings here, but inside of a chi of sky, we have the option to control our sun and our sky. And here as well in our sun, we can increase the intensity. We can increase the scale of our sun, which is basically going to soften up our shadows. Then we have the sun and glow intensity, which is just going to give it the glow when we see it. Okay, Then we have the sky where we can increase the intensity of our sky here in the turbidity. And if you rotate down here, you can see the sky a little better. You can see how the color is based on the rotation of the sun here. If you bring this up, sky gets bluer. Now, it's noon, we bring it down, it gets slower. And then as we get to nighttime, black, As long as it's above the horizon, we're going to get that golden sunset look gradient for us. We can adjust this, we'll cover this in its own video as well. But you can adjust the way that it works, the ozone level, all that stuff, the horizon height. But basically you can control everything on your own. The color of the ground to be green if you want, and the night color to be like purple instead of blue, which should be a pretty cool results. Now when your light goes beneath the ground, it's not pure black, it's purple. So you can get some cool looks that way to shift the red blue to create more interesting looks. As well as just to adjust the saturation altogether in case you just want it to be a normal infant light. Are the types of lights that you have. And obviously you can tell that there are a lot of options in different uses for each of them. What we're going to do is we're going to go through each of them in their own lesson. Let's go ahead and F next one we're going to talk about the point light real quick and go over that and the next lesson. 17. Point Light: In this lesson, we're going to talk about the point light. So I've set up a little scene here which is just a couple of walls so we can see how the GI is affected, which we'll talk about GI later. But it's always on. And we want it on because it's going to allow light to work like light works. But we're going to talk about the point light here. So we have this simple scene and we have right now it is just a nice area light. We're going to turn that off and what we're going to do is we're going to add a point light so you can see without any light. So we've got this really super flat looking image. So we're going to click and hold here, go to point light. And that's going to bring that in right here into the ground here. Because it's in the ground, it cast shadows and everything. So let's go ahead and raise that up. But the problem is basically our intensity of our point light is so low even though when you're using an area light intensity of 100 is very high. It's based on the scale of the light. But the point light, there is no scale. It's just a point. That means we're going to need more intensity. So let's go ahead and just turn that up and you're going to see, oh, look at 47,000 We start to see a little bit here. We're just going to keep cranking that up again. We can use exposure instead, so it can actually have manageable numbers like that all the way up. What we can do is just come in here and increase the exposure up to three, or let's go ahead and crank it up to four. Now with the exposure and the intensity cranked up, we're finally seeing it. And we have the decay set to quadratic. And you can see we've got our point right here. And we have these really harsh, bizarre looking shadows, because they don't make a lot of sense, because it's just going to be weird. But you can see our little circle here that we have. If we scale this in, nothing happens. It doesn't change. It's not going to affect our point. It doesn't work like an area light. Okay. What we need to do to actually adjust our point light is adjust our decay. But with quadratic, it just falls off naturally on its own and there's no control over it. But we could change it to linear, which is where we get that option to say, okay, only emit light inside of our sphere, right? So we can go ahead and crank that up so it encompasses our scene here a little bit, and you're going to see that it's insanely bright. That's because when you're using linear, you're going to have to change your intensity. So you can see already that the point light is just a lot more work than it's worth because it doesn't even look that great. But now we can have an intensity that is normal compared to an area light. You can have an intensity of four exposure level of one. We have this interesting look where you can see wherever this sphere is overlapping with our walls, we're getting that nice circle. It's just a interesting look. It doesn't look good, it doesn't look natural. You're still getting harsh shadows, but you're getting soft shadows where it's intersecting. Um, so it's just kind of bizarre and if you pull that in, you're going to see it's just going to start killing off that light so it doesn't fall off normally. We could turn off fall off altogether and it's just going to be an extremely bright point light and we can lower that back down to one. And now we finally have just something that's interestingly bright. And if we move our point around, it's emitting in all directions. So our shadows are going to shoot up. Shadows are going to shoot super harsh against the wall and everywhere away from that point. It's just a bizarre look that you're not going to really want to use that much. But there are a couple things we can do to make this look a little bit better. That's to go into the Details tab. Now every light has a Details tab and has these controls. What we can do is we can come in here and crank up the softness of our shadow section here. It's going to take quite a bit to soften up these shadows. Let's go in here and crank this up to 50. Now you can see we actually have these nice soft shadows. They're not as accurate as an area light, but it's just a way to make your light not super harsh, but still be able to use a point light if for whatever reason you need to. And this is the look you want, which is totally fine. That's given us a little bit of just this nice soft look and we could pull that back and see we're pulling that forward so we can pull that forward and see how our light adjusts there. But it's just an interesting look. It doesn't quite match a lot of things from real life. When would you use a point light and why would you? You can use whatever you want all the time. There are no rules. But basically one thing that I think would be a good use of the point light would be for particles to actually effect a volume. Let's go ahead and just set up a scene really quick and I'll show you a good time to use the point light. What I've done in this scene is I've set up a risk shift environment, which we'll cover later. Basically what we have here is we've got a big old emitter up here. It's just going to be twinkling down these point lights, right? So let's go ahead and just let this go for a little bit. And then we'll pause when there's a few down here just to show how this is going to work. Basically, we've got our point lights, each of these point lights here. And it's going to affect the volume, but we don't want it to affect the volume as a whole. Because obviously if we crank this up to 100,000 we're going to get way too much light flickering around all over the place inside the emitter with these non sister render incense. You can see they're flowing in here and they're lining up our scene. And there's just so many of them that they're really brightening up our fog a whole lot. What we can do real quick is just go into our objects here, switch it de linear, turn this down to about ten. So they're just a little tiny dots. Yeah, there you go. Maybe 20. You can see we just have these little dots here. And what we could do is we could just copy and paste a couple in here. And then go into the object and start changing the color of some of the. We have all these multicolored things. If we wanted to, I'm not liking the way this linear is working. Let's just go back to the quadratic and just turn this down to, we're just going to turn off this overhead area light because we don't need it. Let's go ahead and just hide our walls here. Now we have this really nice, pretty lighting effect. It looks like little string lights or fireflies or something floating around, but they actually affect the volume in the scene. Which if they were just point lights with glow on them, they wouldn't a rare scenario here, but just keep that in mind that, that is something that these could do. The neat thing of this versus just using particles that would affect GI or something is that these are actually going to light up your scenes. Let's go ahead and just go back to the frame zero and you'll see our scene is totally dark. And we'll skip ahead here and let it render a little bit. You see as those lights come in, they're actually lighting up our scenes. It's something that you can't really create with anything else except maybe a very tiny sphere light, a cool little effect. You could add some turbulence, you can really create some actual little firefly lights and stuff that are really affecting your scene. Pretty cool use of the point light, in my opinion. But definitely everything in cinema for T D has 1 million uses, right? It could come in, we could go in here and you go with the details. Soften up these shadows by a whole bunch if you wanted to. There you go. You got a pretty cool little scene with some dynamic lighting that you couldn't create any other way. Point lights need to create this little whimsical look. Lots of uses for everything is in 40 when you're going to use your point lights. Exactly. I don't know for sure. They're good at hiding into tiny geometry, things like light bulbs and stuff that are tiny on cars or ships or something like that. Or if you have a bunch of string lights, they're good because you can shove them into really tiny places and they don't take up any space and it just emit E 360 light. If that's something you need in your scene, you can fit, throw those in there, especially something like LED light switch or something like that. You also can throw them in cloners and stuff and make light rays and all kinds of things. Cool. You also can throw them in a cloner and make a really nice backdrop for your scene that is actually going to light your scene. Pretty cool little effect. A little tool you can use to just create these really nice looks, especially with environmental fog. Without environmental fog on, obviously these aren't going to light this up near as much and you're not going to see them. You still get that lighting effect, which is cool to create that interesting lighting look. But with these on the environmental fog on, you actually get these nice looks. And then you could add Boca to your camera and create some really nice Boca look to this as well. Pretty cool little way to use point lights. In the next lesson, we're going to cover the spot light. 18. Spot Light: Lesson, we're going to talk about the spot light, very straightforward light. We're going to go ahead and add that basically. It's a lot like the other lights, except it's very directional. It's a hybrid between the point light and the area light. Because the area light obviously is more directional when it's in a rectangular or circular disc shape. The point light obviously generates from a point. That's how the spotlight is by default. And you can see we have this shape in our scene. We'll pull this up, rotate this down. We're only going to have it be actually lighting. What is in this cone here, you can see how we get this nice moody light. What we can do is into our objects. Again, our intensity value is at 250,000 again just between different lights. Your intensity values are all over the place, which is again another reason why I prefer to use areal lytes. Because I can make area lights do what all these other lights can do, but yet there's more consistency within the intensity values of everything else. Here's what we've got going on here. We'll go ahead and just crank up the exposure of this by three, so we can see this light working here. You can see it's literally just coming in where our cone is coming in. And there's a tiny little bit of softness in the fall off on the edge. So we've got this gray line on the inside which is saying, okay, this is where I'm going to give 100% of the lights to everything inside this gray line. And then I'm going to fade out to 0% by this white line. In order to adjust that, we've got our cone angle and our cone fall off. And we'll see, we'll take a look at this. Well, we can see it in the viewport as well. As we spread out the angle as you'll expect, the cone angle will get wider. We're going to light up more of our scene. Now if we go tighter light, let's go somewhere in between. We'll get a half our light on our objects here. And then we'll start adjusting the fall off angle. You can see how that's going to tighten up the gray interior angle. We're only going to have 100% of our light here in this scene. And then it's going to gradually fade off to 0% by the outside of this white line. Just regardless of how soft the falloff is or anything like that or the angle, it's not affecting the sharpness of our shadows. And that's because it's still coming from a point and it's going to work out just like a point light. Where it's going to give us super hard, crisp shadows regardless of your cone angle. Fall off angle, fall off curve, which the fall off curve is just going to affect how that blends between the edge and the inside Here, bigger number is going to mean it's going to start falling off a little faster. It's going to be a little bit smoother of a fall off and end a little quicker. But without it, it'll go closer to the edge and then fall off faster. Okay. So it's a little more gradual. The larger this number, it's going to smooth that out. And then tighter number or no number at all, we're going to get to the edge and just instantly kind of cut that out. Okay, so we still have the option to come in here and increase the softness of our shadows inside of our shadows seen here, as well as the ability to cover transparency, what this means. And I cover this and all the lights have this, but I'm going to cover it more in depth in the area lights because that's going to be the one that's going to have that I want to have pay the most attention to. But basically you can control the transparency of these shadows, making them softer. If you want to control them for whatever reason, you can make softness affect gobos which will cover later as well. I cool, moody look. Obviously it's going to be cooler. And the most useful I think, again, I like to throw environments in here because I love the way red shaped handles fog. But obviously the spotlight is a pretty cool one to use for fog. One tip I would have for the spotlight, it would be to use a target animation tag on this. Basically, let's create a null or a shape. Let's go ahead and just say we want our spotlight to be looking at this cube now, rather than coming in here and trying to rotate it and get it to the right angle, there we go. It's going to be a lot easier if we just go ahead and click our spotlight. Go to Animation Tags Target. And we're going to drag our cube into the target object here. That's going to make our light point at the axis of our Q peer. Now instead of rotating our light around, we can just go and grab our move tool and we'll go into the multi view here to see this. Wherever we move our light around, you're going to see it's instantly, wherever we move our light around, it's going to remain pointing at this object. Which of course is super helpful when using a spotlight and you need to follow something. Or if you want to control where your spotlight is going easier, you could, instead of putting the spotlight on the object, you could put it on a knull make this null, the target. Then you can just animate that null around. So you could animate your spot light sweeping around in the sky or whatever you want to do, if you want to do a bat signal or something like that. Or just have your spotlight move around. And you can animate your spotlight cone and stuff like this as well. Make our spotlight fat again. Now we could have animate from being over here on our cone. And we could say, okay, we want to move over here and then focus on going. We've just, by moving this knoll, using this target tag, we're able to create an animation of a spotlight sweeping from our object, going over and also adjusting its focus and becoming sharper, and casting a light on our cube here. Pretty cool little way to use a spotlight. Definitely use it with a target tag. It's going to make it a lot easier to control. Again, these are good for obviously spot lights and cars and stuff like that. But again, there's no real need to do this over an area light if you don't have to, but if it just makes more sense to you to set it up, because visually it's just a spotlight and that makes sense. Then by all means, use the spot light. In the next video, we're going to talk about the infinite light. 19. Infinite Light: This lesson is going to be on the infinite light, which, if you can guess by the name, is just a light source. That does not matter where it's coming from because it has infinite power and infinite distance. So all that matters with the infinite light source like we covered in the overview is the angle. So there's no like start point for this light, it's just infinitely away in the distance. Think of it as basically the sun. We can't go and move the sun and just how that's going to affect us, it's just infinitely away. Okay, let's go ahead and add a infinite light to our scene here. Infinite light. And you're going to see by default it's pointing straight backwards. And we're getting a super harsh shadow. And it does not matter where I put this, If I move it left, it's not making our shadows go more left, it's just going straight back still. And it does not matter until I start rotating this. If I rotate this, then we start getting those shadows react to that. Go down a bit, and it's always going to be on the Z axis here. You see our walls here. We're getting this really sharp line from the way that it's hitting our walls again. Our infinite light is way back here behind our scene. It doesn't matter where in the heck this is, it only matters the rotation. Frankly, it's not the easiest in the world to tell what direction it's facing via its rotation. The icon for the direction it's facing is this blue line. But they don't extend it out really or anything. It's a bit punky, it's not the easiest. I wish they made it much easier to see what direction you were facing, so you could make those adjustments faster. But again, just like the infinite light, we have the ability to soften up our shadows if we want. But most of the time you're using an infinite light, you're probably not going to want that because you want it to be a super far away distance. So you might soften them up just a bit, and that kind of creates this nice light like coming through a portal light or something that's coming through a window, or lighting your sun scene up from a distance. It's kind of a nice look that's really easy to control and manipulate, but also easy to get lost and lose control of When you're controlling it, It makes a lot of sense how it works, but it also is super tricky. One main use of this would be, let's make a scene real quick back. Let's go ahead and make a plane. We'll make a huge white on there. We're going to go ahead and make a text, and we're going to say Shadow. We'll go ahead and copy that. Make it better font. It's cooler looking. Let's go with the classic of now. We'll rotate this, oops, our text here. Rotate that hold. Shift that 90 degrees and we're going to bring that up and make it bigger. And bring it up just like that. Let's go ahead and make it even longer. There we go. Now we have this scene here. We'll throw our light on here. We'll go ahead and just look straight down at this. What we can do with this light is go ahead and go into the render view. You'll see we have no light in our scene. Let's go ahead and add that infinite light instantly. You have this really weird result where our light is going perfectly straight into the ground. We actually need to rotate it. Just you just start rotating it. And you can see how that's creating this nice long shadow. Now we can hit W to do the world rotation and rotate that around this way. We can come in here and increase the intensity of our lights, and we can go back to the rotation of our object. Here we go, again, it's not the easiest to do. You can drag this up until we get our shadows going all the way out of here. We have this nice shadow here and our scene is looking weird. What's going on here? Well, basically, we have a bunch of that light hitting the backside of our font super hard, causing a bunch of that bounce to come off of there. But then no light ever getting past that, because all of our light is coming from one point. Everything here is extremely dark. A couple ways you could blend this and make this look a little better. You could add some transparency to your shadow, that gives you a pretty cool little look. Or you can leave your shadow harsh. You can see we've got just hitting that and all we need to do is we can start tweaking this down and you'll see how that's going to start hitting our shadow, making it shorter and shorter. Now our scene is getting really bright, so we can bring this back down. Pretty cool way to create that cool infinite shadow look. You can create some pretty cool little looks. They are interesting because top down, they look pretty cool. But then even at an angle, they still look cool. It's an interesting look. Now, just by using this infinite light, we have this really cool style font. This would be a pretty cool title for a movie or something. It seems like an older type movie. But then you can also can rotate it and get that long shadow that way as well. If you want that classic long shadow, look the infinite light. When are you going to use it? You're going to use it to create long shadows. But it's also very useful for outdoor scenes. If we had a city, let's say we have a city like this from our asset browser, the infinite light. This is the exact same set up, Obviously that's going to be a little sharper look, but as we start rotating this light, you're going to see how that's going to be able to just bring some nice outdoor lighting to our scene and we've got a lot of bloom and stuff going on here. Let's go to crank that off. Bringing that down, you can really see how that just provides some nice quick lighting with just one light. That really gives you a really soft but a really nice exterior. A light look, especially for artz and outdoor scenes. It's really pretty light. And again, we can just soften up those shadows a bit if we want to. Pretty cool, pretty neat light when you're able to control it well. All right, in the next lesson and we're going to talk about area lights. And this is going to be a big one because the area light basically is almost all of the lights except the dome light wrapped up into one light with the most control and the most options. It's going to be your best friend. Let's go ahead and cover that next. 20. King of Lights, Area Light: This lesson, we're going to talk about the area light. Now the area light is the most versatile light that you have at your disposal. It can pretty much act like any other light in the red shift lighting system. Basically, it has the most control and the most versatility to use for multiple things. Now, the dome light is probably going to be when you go for a lot of reflections and stuff for that, you're still going to want to use that a lot as well, but you don't always have to. But an aerial light is my go to light and my favorite light to use because it gives me the most control and options to use it. Let's go ahead and just talk about this. Let's go ahead and we have our simple scene here. And all we have to do is click area light. And you'll see it just spawns it right in the middle, facing backwards always as a tiny square. Let's go ahead and grab that and pull that up a bit, just so it's up above our light. And you can see how that's working. It's casting these nice soft shadows out and it's based on the size of our light here. As we scale up our light, you're going to notice one, the shadows change, but also it gets brighter. The size of the area light determines the intensity of the light as well. Now it doesn't always have to. The way to control that is to just scroll down here in the area light settings and click Normalize Intensity. Now with this option, you are going to need to type in pretty much gigantic numbers here, like 10 million to get our light back to where we want it. But the beauty of this is now that we have this here, we can scale our light down. And that's going to control not the intensity, but just the softness of the shadows and where our light is coming from. If you have a very small light, our shadows are going to be very harsh. And then if you have a very big light, our shadows are going to be very soft, pretty cool way. If you have a whole bunch of lights in your scene that are all different sizes and stuff and you just want to lock in the intensity and you just want to move and scale them that way you told it can. With the normalized intensity, it's not something that I do a lot, but that is an option that the area light has. Now, with that off, let's just go back here and turn the spec down and you'll see that the scale of the light does make it higher. Really all you have to do is when you adjust it, just come in here and adjust this accordingly to whatever you want. Lower it if it got brighter and so on. Now you'll notice that that doesn't change the softness of the shadows for us at all in the scene. What we can do to do that, let's pull our light back here just a little bit, so it's not right on the edge there. What we can do now is go down here to the shape. And we have different options here. We have the same options, it's every other light up here. The linear, quadratic, the exposure, the color. Now we'll talk about texture in a little bit because it's really cool to use gobos and stuff with this. But let's go ahead and talk about the shapes here now. Before we talk about the shapes, I just want to talk about controlling the shadows real quick. And that comes down here to the spread. Now, this is going to be a little bit dependent on the type of light you have, like the shape, but let's go ahead and talk about this. By default, the spread is set to one. So we're getting these nice soft shadows. Because the way the area light works is basically think about this big rectangle, not as a giant spot light or a light, but think of it as a giant silk that's up in front of a light. So this is a big white screen that you put up in front of a big light to cause it to diffuse evenly. Basically the light hits the silk comes through and creates this really nice soft spread across your scene to provide really even lighting rather than something like a spot light or something like that where it's going to have a lot of falloff and be really intense in some spots and not so much in others. And this is going to provide a nice even coating of light. Now it doesn't have to, and the way to control that is by the slider. If we take the spread and we start lowering this down, you can start seeing just about 0.345 We see that we're not getting any light all the way over here. We're limiting it to the size of our light here. If we pull this out, we're going to spread that back out. But as we pull this in, and we're going to keep lowering this down, lowering down, lowering down. And you're going to see they were really getting a just locked in view. So think about the spread as barn doors on your light. They're going to block off light. Light is not going to spread out all of that light energy is going to be focused and really focus in and go perfectly straight. If you lower this all the way down, we're going to get a straight square image based on our area light. If we rotate this down a little bit so it's looking at our scene, we'll see how we get. Very harsh shadows. Exactly the same way an infinite light does, except we are only getting it where we have the shape. This is like perfect for doing windows and stuff like that. You can have a really cool effect. So we have this nice bar here of light. This works really well for things like this. Works really well with environments and stuff like that. You can create some really cool creative looks with just adjusting the spread of your light. Let's go back and take a look at this real quick. Take our spread back up to one. Let's move our area light so it's overhead, it's clunky to get the move tool out. Move it over and then rotate it and move it up. That's fine, but it's a little tiresome, especially if you want to do a lot of finagling. What I like to do is if I have a subject or an object that I know I want to light, I can make that the target or I'll take a null and move it to the middle of my object where I want it to be lit. Then I'll right click my Area light. Go to Animation Tags Target, Grab that knull. Put it in there. Now, wherever I move this aerial light, it's automatically going to be shining on our knull. There towards our knull, which is going to be where our scene is. Sophie, spread this out. We can increase this back up. You'll see as we move this around, our light, it's constantly facing our scene, which makes it much easier to move around. So we can just say go right above and then just pull it up, there we go. Scale that up and move that up. So now we have a big area overhead light. A big overhead light is a very common thing, especially in a studio or something. You can have a very large silk above something. This is going to be what you're going to use for cars or stuff like that, but we're just going to talk about the way that this works real quick as demo. Huge overhead light you can see provides a really nice just soft light throughout the whole scene. We're getting a really nice look here. Now if we start hating this down, you can see how you can really focus that in. You could get shapes and stuff like that. Even a box. The one thing with the spread is it works really well with environment lights. You can see the difference between the area light and let's say like a point light or a spot light is when we have this beam of fog, it's not coming from a point. We actually can have entire shapes meshes, or disc or squares, just like this one. If you have a window, let's pretend that this is a window coming in from over here. We get this really nice, clean light coming from the fog. And it's just going to be just like that. We can spread it out a little bit, then we can obviously lower the intensity because once it gets inside the environment, it starts bouncing around a whole lot more and we might get a little too much power there. We have this really nice fall off light that we're getting that we can't get with the spotlight and stuff like that. It's a lot more control and a lot more versatile. With the area light and the adjustable spread, you can create really nice guide rays and stuff coming through windows and stuff like that in your scene, you can get nice full areas. It's not always coming from a point, it's coming from your entire shape. Obviously, you could just come in here and change the shape to a disc if you wanted to. By default, it's not going to adjust it to make it square, so you're going to have to do perfectly round, so you have to do that on your own. But you can see here, if you look at the floor here, we get a nice round shape here from our aerial light. Very cool. You can see how just the shape, the spread control, the normalized tendency, all of these things just give you a lot of control and versatility with the area light itself. Let's go ahead and get rid of our environment fog and just go back and take a look at just the different shapes of the area light. Here we have our area light. Overhead light is going to be very nice. We could a sphere. Again, it's not going to be rounds 2500 by 500, 500. We have this shape here, we'll take a look at in our scene. Basically, this is just acting like a point light. It's going to emit light all the way around in 360 degrees. Even inside of itself, it's basically a point light that you can scale up if you want to or scale down. There's also the cylinder, which is a pretty cool one. A lot of times we want these to be like tall and skinny. Let's say ten for the X, ten for the Z, and 500 for the Y. We can move this up above our scene here. Let's go ahead and crank up the brightness of this. Let's go ahead and make this visible so you can see. It creates a little bar of light. Let's go to 20.20 It creates a nice little light bar for. This is exactly the same as like a light wand, or a light saber, or something like that, if you wanted to. But this is how you can get some really nice, cool lighting and shadows from a light. And the really cool thing is, let's go ahead and take this out and just reset this real quick. We'll take it out of the target. We'll reset it real quick. What we're going to do is we're going to throw it in a cloner. Put the area light in a cloner. We can go ahead and change our cloner to like a radial effect. We can spread this out. We can just create this nice round, cool little studio light. Let's change it to 2020, 500. Now we have all these nice lights up here. You can see how this is going to provide a really nice look on here. And if you put something a little shinier on our text here, you're going to get these really nice cool dynamic reflections. It's just a cool way to create different lighting effects and stuff. The versatility of the area light is literally limitless scale. Our cloner down here make it really cool light. That's going to give us some cool reflections and stuff. Pretty cool way to build actual lights and stuff and nice little fluorescence. This is a really good way to do fluorescent lights and stuff like that. And obviously you can still change the color of all these and stuff, just like all the others. Very cool, interesting ways to get all kinds of cool looks. Lastly, the last type of shape that we have is going to be the S shape. To recap, rectangle shape, common soft box look windows, stuff like that for sure. Disc, pretty cool one to just have a different look. You can use it for the sun and stuff like that as well. Spheres not going to be as useful, but you actually can possibly use a sphere instead of a dome light if you wanted to. But you don't really need to cylinder pretty cool one to create some really cool looks and make more fluorescence and stuff like that. Mesh is going to be really, really cool. One area lights are the only one that has the option to be a mesh light as well. The way this works is if you switch it to mesh light right now, that is going to happen because we don't have a mesh set for it to be the shape of. Let's just go ahead and create a shape of quick. We'll do a Taurus. We're actually going to slice it in half. We'll just scale it up here around our shape here like that. Now what we can do is in our area light, we can just grab this Taurus. Throw it in our mesh. Now we have that mesh shape acting as a light. If you can make it visible, we'll see, we've created that light. One issue with red ship is if you use an incandescent or emissive material on an object, it's not actually going to light your scene, it's just going to affect the GI. But using an area light as a mesh actually will light your scene and work correctly. You can do this, you can make copies of your clone. You can make copies of your shapes or whatever that you want them to be. Mesh specific for the lights if you want. But really cool way to create some really unique, neat lighting tricks. Obviously, we couldn't spill this light without the shape. Really cool way to create some really nice lighting effects and stuff like that. Obviously you can turn off your light and still have that nice effect. And we could take this and rotate it behind. So if you're just back lighting it, you're just going to get some cool effects, wrap it around it, make it a ring light. This is how you could do an actual ring light, stuff like that. Let's say we want to make our text a light. Let's go into our text and make it a little thinner here. It's more like real thin font. We want to use this as a light. Okay, What we're going to do is go to our area light. If you just see on this, it's going to make a bunch of different objects together which we don't want. We want to right click our text and go to Connect objects. That's going to create just one text layer here. We can turn off this text, now we just have our original text here. What we can do is go to our grab this text. Switch dish Aero lytes, switch it to mesh, and then grab our text one and throw it in there. Now we have actual font that is lighting up our scene and not just the GI actually lighting it up. If we even had environments coming in here, it would be actually working, which is really cool. We have our area light actually affecting our GI and our volumes together. Really cool way to use lighting and create this really cool effect and how it's actually lighting you're seeing up and not just using GI and stuff like that. You can come in here and brighten it up, change the colors, whatever you want, and it's just going to work just like a light, it's a font. Then you could come in here, A, shift effects, B it up, get some crazy glow. There you go. You have lights, shapes that actually are going to light your scene. Now one thing with aerial lights set to a mesh is you don't have control of that spread like you do. It's just going to use the ish as whatever shape it is. Just going to be a nice soft area light from that pretty cool feature though, that you can actually just create objects that are actually lighting your scene. Not just casting GI and stuff like that. We'll cast shadows and everything. Let's just take a look at one more scene really quick. I just got it hidden here. Here we have a really nice Roman bust head lit with three area lights with just one light on. You'll see we have this nice back light coming in soft. Then we have a light from the side that's a little sharper and it has a nice complementary blue color to it. Then we fill that up with this front light, that's a nice, really soft light on their own. But just one of them, it doesn't look really that great. But when you start layering them in together, they really start to complete and create this really nice, you know, images just like you would set it up lighting for a real thing. So you can come in here and turn this one down a little bit if you want it to be a little more dramatic there. You can adjust the colors. Just gives you the option to create a lot more than a HCRI map does. Yes, an HCRI map will give you basically lighting from all around, but you can create that and build that with aerial lights really well and still get a really nice look. You can see we'll cover how to do a studio set up in a later lesson, but basically area lights, super powerful, super cool colors. We'll talk about gobos and we'll talk about the textures there when we do that for the area lights. But basically, I know it's hard to show off the area light because there are so many ways to use it. It's hard to show every single way to do it. Hopefully, that helped you understand some applications without overwhelming you with the power of the area light. A lot of the other lights are a lot simpler because they have one purpose. The area lights are a little more complex because they can do so much, but they also just work really well just to create really nice soft shadows. But then if you want to, you can go in there and really build them out and make them do a lot more than just nice soft shadows. You can see a very simple set up. We've just got a couple of lights around here. Some are tall, some are short, and they're all pointed and targeted at a null. It makes it really easy and quick to set up a really nice scene. And it's just fine tune your lighting, Get your lights exactly where you want them. Pretty cool area lights, super powerful. I know that's a lot and I'm not sure I even covered everything, but I think I covered the most of it. We've got the same controls, we have everything else. We have the ability to make them visible. Just remember if you do make them visible and you want to put them in front of your camera, you're going to need, it's not going to work well. Basically, if you put it between your camera and your object, you're going to see through it. Visible is not going to work that way. You're not going to be able to see through your light. Don't make it visible unless you want to see the front side of the light. Visible Excel, the covered all the shapes, the cylinders spread the visibility of the bidirectional, The normal intensity area lights, super versatile. They have a ton of purpose, a ton of different uses. And on their own, normally you're going to need more than one to get the job done, and that's one of the downsides of them. But normally a scene you can't light with just one light anyway. Even a dome light needs help sometimes. Let's just go ahead and say that area lights are probably going to be a must in your scene. Then we'll talk about the dome light next in the next video, and we'll use this exact same scene so we can see the difference here. All right, let's go ahead and take a look at that and the next lesson. 21. Dome Light: This lesson, we're going to take a look at the dome light and how the dome light works, when to use it, and how to use the back plate and the environment as well. So the dome light is really cool because the dome light is going to use I images or environment maps. And basically what these are, are 360 degree images unwrapped into an image that you could put on a light, and then it wraps it into a sphere and puts itself around your entire scene. Okay, so basically we've shot it with a 360 camera from the point of the middle over scene. And that image is being used to generate light from all the way around our object. We don't have like an image or anything in our scene to represent this, but we have our dome light here. And we can do is we can rotate it. And you can see how that's rotating around as well as the light. So you can see that the sun is back here in this image and that's giving us our brightest light source. It just uses the information from the image to generate lighting. It's going to be very helpful with reflection because it actually fills in every inch of space around your object. So there's not going to be any voids where it's not reflecting anything. That's going to make it look a lot more photo real. Because there's never nothing there really. There could still be dark spots, but normally it's not going to be so dark that it's not going to cause reflection and stuff like that. This is going to be your best friend for reflections and things like that. Let's just take a look at some resources real quick on how to use this, as well as, okay, well cool. I have this nice lighting. I like this lighting a lot on my Roman head, but I don't really want it to be out in the middle of a field. What I'm using here is this image right here. Normally HDRIs are either EXR files or HDR files, which just means they have a high dynamic range. This is what that image looks like, It's a rectangle but it's all warpi like this because it's a 360 image. It's been unfolded like when you look at a world map. It's a rectangle even though the Earth is round. Okay, Let's not get into the flat earth argument right now, but really cool way to you can download these from different sites, and I'll show you a site here in a second. But you can just easily get a completely different look and you can adjust the brightness and things. Here's like a city a night and you can see it's a low res CRI and it's really just not a great one, let's not even use it. We have a studio one that we could use. You see how that provides just a completely different look with a different image. We can just grab this and rotate it around and you can see our light and how that's looking. We have this really nice, cool, dramatic light from the studio set up, and we didn't have to set up a single light. Now the only difference is between this and area lights, obviously is you don't have a lot of control. You can adjust the color and stuff, it's just the saturation and the gamma. But you're not going to really be able to just add light over here. You have to add a light like otherwise. All you can do is rotate it around. Once you start rotating around, a little wonky, you get really weird, unrealistic results because normally they're based on a ground plane and a sky plane, let's undo that rotation. But you can see they're super useful for getting some really nice cool reflections and lighting and stuff like that. So we put this guy back on here, very cool, It's a dome light. We're getting these cool reflections here, even on the front of this image, because there's stuff to reflect across our dome. It's not just one area light from back here shining in one area light from back here. We have some ground and some sky and stuff inside of that ACR, so it's all being reflected. It's all looking a lot nicer than if we just had a couple of area lights. But obviously you can add in area lights on top of this. We've rotated our dome light around. Let's say we like this really harsh light from the side, but we don't like this giant light staring us in the face behind it. Inside the dome light, there's a feature called environment and back plate. Environment basically means we have a background option here that says use the HDRI image as your background, which you almost never really want to do. We're going to go ahead and uncheck that now. We just have all the lighting information from the CRI, but we don't have a background, we actually have Alpha. It's really nice way that we can get the lighting from AHRI and then still put it on whatever background we want or use a back plate which we could enable here. This is where you could load an image if you're doing something like let's just say we want to put this in front of this batmobile. Now we can turn background back on, that's going to use. This batmobile as the background versus this. Now it looks like we've got our scene here. The only reason you do this is most often if you have a flat color or something you know you want to use or if you're doing motion tracking or something like that. And you want to put it in your background in there so you can see it. But a lot of times if you're going to use this, it probably means you're going to do some compositing or you're better off doing compositing afterwards. So go ahead and just use the Alpha without the background. But you totally can use your back plate. Because the thing with the backplate is that it does not provide any reflections for your scene. If you come in here and add a plane, this doesn't make sense. We're not at the same angle. Now we have a top down view. You can see our lighting on our subject and stuff doesn't make any difference. We're not seeing any reflections from our object, whatever. However we rotate our object and stuff, it's not getting any reflections from that. This is literally just as if we took this layer with an alpha and put it on top of this image, really. You only want it for when you're lining things up or motion tracking. You don't want to use this to do reflections and stuff like that. Now I'll show you how to do a background that actually does reflect your floor later in another lesson. Yeah, the dome light, super cool, really fast way. Let's go ahead and take a look at a website here. This website is called Polyhan.com HGRIs used to be HGRI Haven, but now they have even more free things, but basically you have all of these really high res environment maps that you can load in and you can have previews of what it's going to look like and you can just load in these and just have your lighting based on your AHRI. Let's go ahead and say let's download this brown photo studio. Okay, what we could do is just download this four K HDR file, then we can just click and drag that into our texture here under our dome light. We can uncheck and recheck our background here. We can see how that's being applied in our scene. We've instantly changed the entire look of our scene just by changing a color or just changing the image. Really cool way to get completely different looks much faster. We have this nice preview of what the statue would look like inside of this apartment studio with this nice wood floor. You're going to get all that GI, you're going to get all that lighting and stuff from this so we can just turn off the background. We still have this really nice image. And then we could put in an image of a room or something here in post if we wanted to. But we have this nice image and look from that, we didn't have to create a floor with wood on it or anything to get that color. We're just automatically getting all that information there. We'll just do one more. For example, an interior. Let's take look at like this forest scene here, an exterior with trees and things. Will download that. We'll click and drag that in. You'll see the color information and stuff is going to be completely different. There we go. We can turn the background on here so we can see what we're doing. We have all these trees here. We can rotate this around. And it's not updating live here because we're doing it in here. You can see you have this nice information from all these trees. You got all the brown color in the green and everything is reflecting nicely. Completely different look than before. Again, super fast way to completely light your subject with a nice look without having to set up a single light. So if you don't know a lot about lighting, it's very easy to fall into the trap of just using a dome light and nothing else. Sometimes it's good enough, it really is, sometimes it's not. But this looks fine and it's totally cool. You can add in both specs and you can see how easy it is to get nice reflective metals and things and preview that just with a simple dome light. And all your reflections and things are going to look really nice. Like all of these textures and roughness maps look really nice with all this dome light. Very easy way to quickly get a nice clean result that we can turn our studio back on here. We're back in here, we've got this scene exactly how we want it. It's pretty cool. Dome light, a lot like Areal lights. You're going to probably use them a lot. They're just really handy. And they're not as versatile, but the dome light really don't need to be. They're super powerful how they are. You're going to want to use them mainly for reflections and filling in those gaps in your scene, because without a texture map, they are pure white and it's just a flat white image. Keep that in mind. Dome lights are only as good as the texture that you put into them. If you just try to take a normal texture, that's not an CRI map, you can and it will try to wrap it around your object, but it's probably not going to give you as good a results. But sometimes it really might throw stuff in there. It's just a gradient map that we've thrown into our dome light and it's just lit our scene but nothing is like brighter than others because it's not an HDR file or anything like that. It's just a peg thing. There's no, like, bright spots or anything. It's all pretty even because it's not an HGRI file or anything like that. You can use whatever you want. Dome lights are only as good as the texture that you throw in there. The good news is there's a lot of cool textures and there's even a lot included inside of here. We have photo studios and stuff inside of the asset browser here that we can just click and drag in and instantly use these really nice cool studio set ups. There you go. Let's fix the coordinates here. Nice soft box studio just built right in there for us. Just grab a sunset, throw it in there and we'll get a really nice sunset look on our scene, dome light, awesome. Because you can just throw in an image, just take some time looking through images and stuff to find the right ones, but you will lose a lot of creative control. It's very nice to just add in an extra aerial light just to complement these things. We can always throw in area lights and stuff to help break this apart from our background if you want to to add some extra lighting in our scene together. Super powerful alone. Also still very powerful Dom light, pretty cool light. Definitely going to want to use that a lot. 22. IES Light: This lesson, we're going to talk about the IS light. And the IS Light is going to use IS profiles in order to create a real world light. So this is just going to contain information and the way that the light is going to funnel out of the bulb and how the intensity of it is going to be affected. It's going to be very accurate to real world light bulbs and stuff. So a couple of sites that you can do, you can find a library of IS sites. Or if you need to create your own you can do that as well. And I'll show you how to do that real quick. Just googling IS library gives you access to over 307,000 IS profiles. So let's go ahead and browse this library. You can see here you have all these different looks based on different lights. You've got soft lights, you've got the amount of aluminum and watts that are coming out. And you've got the Luminary Catalog number and everything like that. If you know exactly what you're looking for, you can find it here. There's a lot of very unique and different looking lights. You can just search by manufacturer, things like that. If you know what you're creating, it's going to be very easy. All you need to do is click on this light and download that S One. And then inside of Red Shift, we're just going to click and hold the light icon here. Go to IS Light. We're just going to pull this up here just a little bit above our floor. Inside of the IS light, we have the IS profile here. We just need to drag and drop or click this folder and load in that light IS file. You can see that it generates this weird little shape around your light. The way this works is this basically is 360 graph of how that light is going to be emitting out. So it's going to be coming out and cone out of here. And if you get different looking ones, we'll have a different shape here. We'll rotate this 90 degrees so it's facing down. We'll go ahead and hit Render on this. We're going to need to turn this up. There you go. You can see how that light is hitting that, it's very unique. Light is hitting that with just a harsh circle in the middle. And there's this really big fall off area, which is exactly what we wanted to see. An even better view of how this is actually working, we can add a red shifted environment. Now if you zoom out here, we can actually see the whole actual shape of this light and turn our scattering down. Now you can actually see how that light is, like super bright in the middle and then falls off. And if you look at the profile that we downloaded, that's exactly what it looks like. There you go. Pretty cool. You can see how that's going to be working. Just a neat way to create realistic lights and stuff like that. Now, there is a way to create these on your own. If you look up the IS generator, it will take you to this website, the Wortheim.com IS Generator, where you can download this and install it. And then when you open it up, start off with just a flat bar here and you have a black screen. What this is going to do is this is going to show you how to create IS profiles. Everything over here on the left is going to be the middle of your light. So you've got zero degrees, which is straight down, and then over here we have 90 degrees, which is going to be right here. As we turn that up, you're going to see that lights coming out over there. We have obviously the zero for the lumen here and we go up to a higher value here for the exposure. What we can do is we can create some very interesting shapes. We have a unique look. We'll have this one streak save that IS profile. Then instead of our light, we can just select that IS profile that we just created, streak. We have this really cool light that building this some other way would be pretty tricky. It's really cool way to get some unique looks like that. A lot. That turned out looking pretty cool because you don't think about it because you see it in it's visual and it's two D. You don't think about it being circular and go actually all the way around. So when you actually get that circle look, it's kind of satisfying. Yeah. But that's pretty much the IS lights. You're going to use that for Arc visas and stuff like that and that's how you load in your profile and you can still adjust the color and intency and stuff just like other lights. But really that's about it. The falloff and everything is going to be determined by the IS profile just for example. Let's go ahead and look at this one. And you can see how this one was a lot different. So you can see how it has the starting point where it comes out and it comes out really wide and shallow in all these directions. So we have this kind of weird pentagon look here, coming out. And that's just kind of how this light is being emitted. You have a very tiny, interesting little profile that's basically a 360 render of this. Somewhat how that works, Yeah, for the cool light. The next lesson we're going to take a look at the portal light. 23. Think in Portals Light: In this lesson, we're going to talk about the portal light. What I've done here is I've created a little cube here. And I've punched out a hole in the wall. And we just have some chairs and stuff in here. And the reason you use a portal light most often is to be a window light. Let's say this is an interior scene, there are rendering. So let's go ahead and just use a dome light because we're going to probably use that for our lighting, for our outdoor scene. We'll grab a dome light real quick and we'll see. We'll take a look at this render here. You can see we have the sky or we've got our grass and everything, but obviously it's lighting our wall on the outside in here a lot. But let's go ahead and put a camera inside of our cube here. Let's go ahead and go red shift, standard camera. Go into that thinking the square here, I want to just zoom in here. We want to take a look at this as if we were doing an interior scene. We're probably going to look at 24 top. You just pull it inside the wall here. Real quick. We'll focus on our stable there. Let's say this is our scene. Let's go ahead and render this. We have a really bright dome light and everything, but inside of our cube, all we're getting is that GI coming through that tiny little window. We could try to rotate our dome light around and hopefully get it to shine in there a little brighter. So there we go, we've got the light source actually coming in. So let's go ahead and just put that on the wall there, but obviously still we're not getting realistic lighting in here. That's pretty, but it's not ideal. Let's go ahead and add a portal light here. In order to do this, let's go ahead and get out of our camera, so we don't mess that up. What we do is go to our lights here, click and hold, and go down to portal light. The portal light by default is just a rectangle. So we're going to pull this up and over. We're going to switch views here, so we can see this. We know our hole in our window is right here. We hold shift to rotate that you can see. If we can just make it the size of our window by grabbing these points and or scaling it down here. Always type in the size if you know exactly what it is. We're going to put this up right by this window. Now we have this portal light facing inside. Of course, in this hole of this window. Now we don't have to do a custom environment. If we don't want to, we can tint the color. We can do the transparency which we don't want there to be any transparency yet. This is, you could fake like a tinted glass or something like that. Same with the tinted color, would be a colored glass. If it's coming through a window, you could tint it or color it. Whatever a custom environment is, you could drive the colors of a light or something like that through here. This is basically like using the color output on an area light or something like that cover in the gobos. Let's just go ahead and just go back into our camera here and just take a look at the difference here in the way this looks. This is before the area, the portal light, and this is going to be after the portal light. You can see we're getting all of that color information from that dome light actually coming in. It's not just the light coming in, we're getting that color information and it doesn't look very good. What we can do is just increase the intensity of our portal light here. Now we're getting that lighting from the blue sky. And obviously, since everything is solid white, it's getting a lot of that color being adapted onto there. This is looking much brighter and much more realistic lighting than without the portal light. Let's go ahead and just see what happens if you take a portal light off and we just try to crank up our dome light to be brighter. It doesn't quite give the same effect because we're just going to start blowing this out super bright, here it is, with the dome light cranked up. And it's looking pretty good. But we're not getting really any color information at all from our sky map. We're just getting this white light bounce around. You can see the difference between using the portal light to bring in all of that information from that dome light versus the other light. Now you can see if we were to come in here and change our picture here to a different dome light like the forest one. We're going to get all that color information from the forest versus just it being white light. Really cool way to bring in that natural color and everything back in to your scene. Your light doesn't have to be pointing directly into the window or anything, you're just always rotating. Your light doesn't have to be pointing directly in there. It's just going to channel that exterior light into your room. It gives you much more realistic results. It allows you to control the brightness, see how it's like, nice and soft now versus being really harsh. Let's go back to that. We see that we do have this softness. We actually say we like the harshness of this. All we need to do is take the spread down of our portal light and we can just lower that spread down. And we're going to start getting that to be very finite and less spread out. If we lower that spread down, we're back in the same situation where we have just a sharp light coming in, but we also can rotate this. And basically the way it's going to work, it's just going to take all that color information from the outside and pump it in through this as if it were a normal light. Really, the only time you want to use portal lights is when you have an exterior that you like the environment of and you like the color of, and you want that exterior environment to actually affect your interiors without having to pump in a bunch of special lights and stuff inside your house. You can just use these portal lights to basically take all the information and put it into your house for you. Take them as a portal. Basically, without this portal light here to light inside of our house, we're getting shadow on everything else. Instead, we're taking all this color information from all around and shoving it through. There is a really cool way to shove color information from exterior scenes and HCR's and or environments. You can have a dome light that's maybe not on, but you want a different environment light that you wanted to use. And use those colors, you can provide that. Link that up if you want. But basically it's just taking exterior light and color information, shoving it through the portal. Really, it's an area light rectangle that is just using the dome light environment map to drive its color information. That makes sense. Pretty neat light, really useful for archives and interiors and stuff like that. To get that light in there so that you can adjust all your settings separately. Or light can be cranked up without having to crank up that dome light so you don't lose that color information. See no saturation. We still have just a nicer, more well lit image than when we were using just the dome light. Obviously D noiser is helping out a lot here. You really would see a lot more speckles and stuff on the walls, but this just looks a lot more natural. You still get those shadows and stuff from the window. Whereas just using the window light by itself, you lose all that and things just based on GI exclusively, the portal light allows that to be opened back up into being more realistic where light is actually coming through your window rather than just actually hitting a wall and then bouncing off. Really cool use of the portal light to create those. Obviously, you can come in here and if we wanted to, we could tap this and change the whole mood of our scene, right? Pretty cool way to control that. Portal light. Pretty cool, very straightforward Light used to pump in colors from the outside world and adjust the brightness a little easier. Especially good for things that have different entrance points and things like that where you just want to bring in a little more of that GI bounce in without forcing in another hidden light or something like that. Very cool. The next lesson we're going to take a look at the physical sun. 24. Sun and Sky: Okay, in this lesson we're going to cover the red shift sun, but we're also going to go ahead and cover the red shift sun and sky rig because they work together by default, we can go ahead and create a red shift sun which is going to be our last light here option physical sun. And it works a whole lot like an infinite light where it's a tiny little point. It doesn't matter where it is, it only matters the rotation. And it's always going to be going on the Z. So let's go ahead and just bring that up and tilt that over a bit and we'll go ahead and and render this out. Let's throw our alarm here a bit of a city. You can see we, we've got no background or anything, we just have our light coming in here. And the only difference between this and the infinite light is we have a couple options in here. We have the Sundisc scale, which is just going to soften up our shadows. The larger the number sharp, the softer the shadows. Then we have a non physical intensity control, which we don't need to mess with, but we have the turbidity and ozone. What this is going to do is this is going to control the color information of your light. The way that the physical sun works is basically if you go lower towards the horizon, our sun is going to get more golden. As raise up, it's going to be more white. And then as it gets closer to the horizon, again more golden, just like the sun does. Sunsets are more golden and in the afternoon and stuff, it's more just clean, bright, white light. Now, we can adjust the horizon height and stuff on this, but you're not going to see it much here. Let's go a just crank up our turbidity and you can see how that's going to affect the color of this a lot. And we're going to turn up our ozone. We're not going to see that huge of a difference or even really good quality results here. Because by itself, the physical sun light isn't quite as powerful as the sun and sky rig. Now it's basically just an infinite light that's just going to use the angle of the sun based on the horizon to drive the color. But it's better with a sun and sky rig. Let's go ahead and do that. We'll let this physical sun, we'll click this little button right here called the red shift sun and Sky rig. You can see right off the bat it comes in and it's a little brighter. Let's go ahead and just pull our rig up just so we can see it again. It's just a tiny little point. It's only going to matter on how it's rotate it here. So we'll rotate it straight down and then we'll rotate it over. And you can just see it looks a lot different compared to just the physical sun. It looks a lot nicer. Our shadows already have some built in transparency and they have a bluish tint to them. And not only that, but we also can tilt up and we actually have a sky here. We have this horizon line here that you notice. A way to fix this is not really by adjusting the horizon height though. You can, you could bring that down and that will lower that down is basically is going to stretch that out. But what we could probably get away with is just blurring this. It's going to provide a nice gradient. Fall off up into our sky color. Both our sky color and our light color, again are going to be based on the angle. As this rig gets closer to the horizon, we're going to get more of that sunsetty color look coming in. And the cool thing about this is if we rotate this around, we actually have a sun. We actually have like an actual point reference where we can see where our light is actually coming from. Really cool, that we have this sun here and you can see that it creates a red shift sun inside of this. But all the options are just figured out because it's actually being driven by this tab here we have the Sky tab and the Sun tab, which just breaks up those settings between the two in ***, just controls it differently. It's the same buttons and names but just set up differently. What we have here is we have the option to go into the sun tab here. And then we can increase the intensity of our light, which is just going to be the brightness of our sun. We can adjust the disc scale, which is not only going to soften our shadows, but physically make our sun bigger. You can see how once it gets to that horizon line and I have that blur on, it's going to blur that for me. Then lastly, we have the glow intensity which is going to just be that glow around our sun. It's going to give it that glow in the atmosphere look. Now we can go back in our sky options and we can really take a look at the colors here. We can increase the tributity. Up here, you'll see how towards the sun, that tribuity up has really made it a lot more darker and oranger as we look away from it. Our sky is more gray rather than when it was down here. It's more blue. It's going to become darker and redder as that comes up. Then for the ozone, we're just going to get it to be a little less. It not only affects it at the evening time with our tepidity up, but if we come in here and rotate this back so that it comes up and it's more daytime, we have a little more color information here. Let's go into our city here. You can see how this, this light is nice for lighting, really big areas and stuff because it's super powerful and it comes in with nice colors and everything like that. The shadows look really nice and soft and natural. It's a really nice light. We can lower that, DC, have a nice blue sky. Or we can crank that up and now we're getting more of that. We're getting more of that color in here. There's another way to control the color versus just the tripidity. That's by the model. We have two options here. The second one provides a little more of a golden yellow look. Basically, that just changes your sky map. You can increase the tripidy there, you see how that changes our colors. We can increase the ozone there, and that's going to make things just a little softer, blue. I like the second model here better. Actually, I'd like to turn my tripidity up just a bit. Now, we could have a camera in here, come in here, take our sun sky rig and do a nice sort of time lapse effect if we had this oriented the correct way, time morning. So yeah, really, really cool way to get nice, pretty lighting outside. And it also works in interior studio set ups and everything, but you get lights and shadows really quickly with the sky rig. You also can adjust it so the ground color can be something like green or something if you're going to have a green background. But you won't really see it except on the horizon line which we have hidden because we're building is so much we can see. If I pull that up, it's green there rather than the gray. You can plot that back down. Then the night color, we could do like a purple versus pure black. So that when your light actually goes below the horizon and it starts mixing that here before the end, we actually get more of a nighttimy purple twilight versus just pure black and still not going to look great because you're telling it it's nighttime. You can light that up with something like this if you want to. Like a dark blue gray. There's a little bit of light at night for that to mix into. As it comes up, the sun's going to rise. How pretty cool You can animate that. Looping around to do a nice time lapse, obviously grab at the right spot. You could easily do a nice time lapse. Yeah, pretty cool. Let's take a look at it in a cycle. Set up quick, flete our area light and just add in the skylight. And we'll go ahead and just add our guy in here. Scale him up, give him that material. Let's just take a look at this from the get go. Pretty straightforward is straight on a light that we can come in here and rotate it. We get a pretty nice little lighting set up. This is a very natural shadow, very nice soft lighting. We could come in and increase our sun scale a bit if you wanted to, so it's a little softer shadow and then come back to our sky, add some more tribidity into this and some ozone and lower the intensity just a tiny bit. But we get this even lighting really quickly and easily. It's actually a really nice viable option for some really nice scenes and set ups real quick. Pretty powerful light, a lot of customization, some weird controls and stuff, but actually provides really nice natural looking shadows, so don't rule it out. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about global illumination. It's render thing, but it's a lighting thing. Let's go ahead and take a look at that. 25. GI GO! Global Illumination: In this lesson, we're going to talk about GI. Gi stands for Global Illumination, which is when light bounces off of an object and take some of that color information and bounces it on something else. Like when we see something with our eyes, we aren't seeing the color. We're seeing that light bounce off of whatever color that is, and that becomes a color. So if you look in here and we have totally white walls and a white cube, but we had this light coming in and bouncing off this blue floor. And our wall here doesn't look super white. And that's because it's getting a lot of that blue light bounce up off this floor. If we were to come in here and make our floor white, our whole scene is going to become a lot more white because we're bouncing white light around now, instead of blue light blue off of that light, you understand, our whole scene becomes a lot more blue. And we had this blue floor. Especially since we just have one light coming in and bouncing that around, That blue light is bouncing around. And that's exactly what GI is basically before. Gi was a practical thing that you could render easily. What people used was something called ambient occlusion. And you can see how our corners are dark and stuff like that. Basically, ambient occlusion was a way of faking GI. You would tell it to put shadows in dark spots and stuff like that. It looked like our light was bouncing around. More really, with GI, you don't really need to use ambient occlusion anymore, but you definitely can if you still want to add some stylistic control. And just control that a little bit more via, through the textures and materials. But really you do not need it because GI is creating that for you. So let's take a look at what this looks like without GI in our render settings. We can go to the Red Shift tab and go over to Global Illumination Uncheck enabled. And we'll see how this looks. We just have our light come in. It hits our objects and stuff and then stops. It doesn't bounce at all. This is what three D used to look like back before GI and you just have to put more lights in your scene and stuff. This is basically how it works when we enable this. We're telling it to bounce that light back up and you can see how quick my IPR is and stuff. And that's because I'm using brute force. And brute force. Now there are two options. This is a radiance cache, which we can use. You can use both if you want, but radiance cache is going to be a little slower feedback as far as for the IPR and stuff, but it is going to be faster for rendering. The only issue is it's not as accurate and it can cause flickering. If you do everything just radiance point cache and radiance point cloud as your secondary option. Yes, you might get it to work a little bit faster, but probably not really. But we do the bucket rendering, just going to calculate out this irradiance point cloud. First you'll see this image look really white and bright. And all that's doing is calculating out that point cloud and then boom, we have this nice well scene. Let's take a look at that. Let's switch this back to prove force proof force and see if we can see the difference between these two. You can see it feels slower because it's doing it all at once versus how the other one does the lighting first. And then when it gets time to render, it's like real quick because it doesn't have to do the GI. This is calculating the GI while rendering. It seems a lot slower. We'll take a look. We have these two images that look almost identical, but you can tell there's definitely some weirdness going on here. The main thing is this took 12 seconds. This is the irradiance point cloud one, the root force one took 30 seconds. But you can really see the accuracy and the difference in the lighting between these two. With this irradiance point cloud one, we have a lot less natural ambient occlusion. We're not getting these shadows light up here, and our dark corners and things aren't really very dark. Go to the root force, you see we have this nice fall off and stuff from the corners, from our e per swap back and forth again. You see noisy with the radiant point cloud, smooth with root force. This is with the noise or on for both of these. This means that the noise doesn't do as good of a job when it's using irradiance point cloud because it's a little extra noisy. You can see just the shadows and stuff are a little chunkier and a little less fine tuned. I don't know if you can see it in the recording, but there's definitely some variation going on here versus when we use the roof force, it's very smooth and natural looking. You can just see already the root force is a bit slower for sure, but still pretty fast. But yeah, it's definitely more accurate. Now, what if we do readings point point cash first and then brute force second? Well, at that point I don't think you're really using either one of them properly. I don't know. That took 26 seconds, so it's a little bit faster. Let's take a look at that. You can see it's like splotchy, see the splotches. I don't know if they're just showing up on the render, but you can definitely see these splotches. And that's just what a radiance point cache does. Yes, it's faster, but it's not accurate, and you're going to get these weird splotchy images and really it's become outdated. The only difference is it's faster to get nice previews and stuff like that, but you can see how it's spec and the brute force one is not. That's why I always like to use brute force. But force you can increase the number of rays. If you're seeing you're getting really grainy images, you will need to increase the number of rays here to reduce the amount of grain from GI. It will take longer to render, but it will be cleaner. Again, you can increase the number of rays here. I don't recommend going like in using the slider because it goes up to a ridiculous amount of rays, but you totally can't if you want to, you also have the option to conserve reflection energy. Go ahead and turn that on. Basically, that's saying, once it gets to a point where it's falling off and it's not really making a difference, I'm not going to calculate it because you won't be able to visually see the difference if I am not conserving that reflection energy. It's just going to be wasting memory and stuff and not be that great as Point Cloud. Yes, you can come in here and cache this. So you have the option to cache this and you can rebuild it and save it. So yes, when you're doing previews and stuff like that, you can actually get that GI faster. Because once you build it one time, as long as you're not changing your lighting and stuff like that, you can get faster playback and stuff like that because it's already cached and it's just like baking a simulation or anything. Once it's stored in the memory, it's going to load faster because it doesn't have to calculate it. You can increase the no samples size for this to make it more whatever. But basically, once you get a radiance cache up to the point where it's looking as good as brute force, it's not that much faster than brote force anymore. There's not that big of benefit in using it, up to you if you want to use that or not. If it is something you want to use and you're using something like renter farms and stuff, well, basically if it is something you want to use, storage space is always a thing. Anything you got a cache takes up space, blah, blah, blah. Another reason why I just prefer the root force but force, it doesn't use up any extra memory than the point cloud. Anytime I can give my computer more memory, it will both have pros and both have cons. I think for most workflows you're probably going to find that the brew force, but force is where you're going to want to render with. But if you would like to develop your scene with radiance cache while you're going to get a quicker, rougher preview, faster. Definitely an ideal option if you're doing a lot of IPR rendering and stuff, it might be the way to go. Yeah, that's 100% what GI is. If you took this pink, put that on the floor. Our room would be more pink because our light is hitting that and bouncing off of that. Hopefully that makes sense. Purple. The room would be more purple. And then we can do white in the room would be more white. Now if we did the blue floor again. But then we took our light and we lowered it in here. Rotated so it was actually bouncing off of our white wall here and not off our blue wall. We're going to get a little less of that because by the time it's bounced off this and then bounced off that, we're still going to get some color here on some things, but it's not going to be as dramatic. See, this wall is still pretty white because we're just bouncing off the white first. But there's still a little bit of blue coloration here down near the floor. But it's defitely, not as intense as if we were doing just off the blue floor. How your scene is colored and how that light is bouncing around is going to be very, very dependent on what that light is actually hitting. First, the primary ray is exactly what is going to be the most color giving. Basically it's going to lose power as it bounces off of multiple surfaces. Our whole room isn't as blue even though we still have our same amount of blue in our scene. It's because our light isn't hitting the blue with that full power and bouncing back. It's hitting White and then spouncing off and then hitting the blue and bouncing back up. So it's not quite as intense. Now, if we were come in here and turn it back again to go towards our blue, we're obviously going to start seeing more of that blue bounce off into our walls here. But where it's lit up more, we're not going to have that blue. It's really, it's going to affect things with colors a lot and things that are white. But there is some more blue here than if there wasn't any blue floor here. But really, you're going to see it a lot more in that shadowy area and stuff where the light isn't hitting directly. And that's where I live. It lives in the shadows and it lives in the area right next to the lights and stuff like that I is what makes things look real, really. What separates old timey three D stuff from new three D stuff. It's like visually you can be like, oh, that looks really fake. And because there's no GI and stuff like that, I really helps lighting look real and that's the big thing. That's how GI works for you. Most of the time I would just do brute force. But force, that's what I did the most. But definitely feel free to play around the radius point cache, save it, rebuild it. You can do pre pass only. So that's going to be for progressive rendering and stuff rebuild. And then if you have it built up before and you close your scene and you want to load it back up, you can load that back up. You can adjust your presets, obviously low, medium, high. Same kind of thing as everything else. That's all going to be dependent on having this radian point cloud. Even though we have changed it to radiance point cloud, we slid root force rays here. But they're not going to do anything because we're not using boot force. We could rebuild this, set it to high. We can adjust the number of rays to make this work more accurately. We can lower the threshold down to zero, which is going to make it work really hard. Or you can raise that threshold up, and that way it doesn't have to think as accurately. You can get really, really fast results really quickly. Again, the same thing for the point cloud screen radius. Make that bigger samples per pixel, make that bigger, and then it's going to give us a cleaner image faster. We also have filter size retrace threshold, you can show the calculation, which is fine. That's like that little preview you see where if you go to bucket render, we see this is radius point cloud. This right here. This is the calculation, okay. Everything is white. All we're seeing here is just color information based on our light GI, our light is bouncing off. That's all we're seeing. You can see how it's taking much longer now because we cranked up the rays. We cranked up the sample settings and samples for pixel. But it should be a lot more accurate at this time. At this point, you're better off just using brute force, in my opinion, because you don't have as many things to mess with. You can just do but force, force, go to the sampling, leave it at automatic and let it control that. You're not going to get any weird I noise and stuff that you will with a radiant point cloud. There you go. That's why I like it. You also don't have to wait for it to render. Yeah, that is GI in a nutshell. Play around with that, whichever one you would like to use. There's no wrong way to do it. It's whatever works best for you. But if you start noticing splotchiness or noises for animations and stuff, try brute force. It may take a little longer, but you should get cleaner results with less settings to tweak with a couple less headaches, hopefully, and cleaner results, which is always the way I'm going to go towards. There you go Next we'll take a real quick look at volumetric lighting, which is super easy with red shift. Now in the next lesson. 26. God Rays Volumetric Lighting: In this lesson, we're going to talk about volumetric lighting. And you've seen me use the red shift environment a few times already in the lighting video, so we're just going to cover that real quick. You used to have to set up red shift to enable volumes and stuff with your lights. Now everything is automatic, which is amazing. So we're going to take a look at some of those settings and some ways to control that. Inside of our red shift option here we can go to objects and then red shift environment. Let's go ahead and render this. One thing I will point out is that we do not have this option with real time. This RT does not support red shift environments yet. You can see by default R scene is super white and that's because either our area light is too bright or our red shift environment is scattered too much, soar light bouncing around too much. Or third option, our red shift light inside of there. We go to the Details tab and we actually can come into here and go down to contribution. Inside of here we have the volume option, so we can adjust how much this light is actually going to contribute. Two volume, we can bring that way down if we want to. That's one way to control that a little bit. But most often you're going to want to control it in your ridge shift environment just by lowering that down, 2.001 And that gives us this nice beam of light here. What we can do now is take our area light, go back into our object and we can lower that spread. And that's going to tighten that up as you can see, or we can raise that up and that's going to fill up our area and make it a little more, just even fog, that's really it. With fog, basically the options we have in the red shift tab, we have scattering, which is going to adjust how much that light is going to bounce around within itself. Normally, this is going to be a really low value, but depending on your lights and stuff, it may not be. But the higher the value of scattered, the more it's going to bounce around. You can tint this, you can make it cool look, it's only affecting the fog. So if you come out here and shrink this in, anywhere outside of our light is not going to have that red tint. It's only going to be where that light hits that fog blade runner. Look real quick. Let's talk about fog. And the way this works, fog on its own is default off. Let's go ahead and turn that to, let's say, like a nice, cool orange, right? Nothing's going to happen, and it's only going to come into play when our attenuation is up. As we crank that up, you'll see how that works. As we crank that up higher, the thickness of that is going to get thicker towards the camera. This has created that fog fall off there. As we crank that up more and more, it's just going to become a thicker and thicker fog. Then all of a sudden we can't even hardly see anything because our attenuation is so intense. That is where attenuation is really going to come into play. We can lower that down and really get just a nice fall off fog. We can come in here with our light. Just lower that down, you can see we have this really nice fall off. As our cones go back here into the distance. Again, we can increase that attenuation to our background. Ones are pretty much invisible back there. We just have these front ones. Alternatively, what we can do is we also have the ability to adjust the height of this fog at zero. It's going to be infinite. But if we come in here and we start giving an actual height to this, we're going to actually just give it a height. So it's going to only come up off the ground. So far we can come in here and crank this up. And now it's just going to cover up half of our pipes here versus the other half. Once you mess with the fog height, you lose all of that extra ability to have all that extra volume up there. You're cutting it off at a certain point. But you can still get some pretty cool results this way. You can always blur the horizon because with it set to zero, goes off and then disappears. Right. A weird look. But if we put that horizon, we have a more natural fall off there. Turn our attenuation up, so we can see that as you get closer towards the back, it goes away. But it still looks weird when you can see half of your images and not the other half. Then lastly, the GI settings, we also can transform. And we can actually just adjust this and control it like it's a big fog box if you want to raise this up and animate it and do whatever you would like in here as well. And then lastly, we have the ability to adjust whether it's contributing to the GI or not, and also just the overall intensity of the environment itself. So we can bring that environmental fog down now. It's not attributing to environmental fog, anything, not within our little scene here isn't getting that extra look. But you're definitely going to want that on because that's really what blends it all together. Then GI is off by fold because it takes a while, but we can turn GI on. And now you're going to see we actually are getting this light bounce off of our orange fog and back up onto our objects. Like we talked about in the last lesson of GI, we're getting that color bounce from this. But you've got GI settings down here. Then inside of your lights, you have the ability to go into your details and make them and not affect your volume as much. You don't have to enable them anymore, they automatically work for you. Real quick, little set up and some tips on environmental lighting. The main thing is if you're going to use area light and you really want God rays and stuff real quick, tip is to just lower that spread down. That's going to give you more of that God Ray look. You're going to get these cool, harsh shadows from stuff. That's how you're going to get these really nice cool Guide Ray type looks where you have these little dark pockets from the shadows and stuff and that's from the fog and stuff like that. Red shift handles fog really well. It is a little slower to render, but it's super fast compared to other things as well. A cool way to just utilize red shift environments and create that volume metric lighting. In the next lesson, we're going to go ahead and go over caustics. 27. Caustics: In this lesson, we're going to talk about caustics. Caustics are this really cool effect when light goes through glass or something like that, that's going to refract it and reflect it out. And you get these nice little light beams that hit the floor and stuff like that. Like if you're looking through a prism or if you're just naturally this happens a lot but it doesn't happen by default and red shift you have to enable it because it does take a little longer to render and it's extra calculations and it's not the simplest thing to just enable. You can't just like check caustics and have everything work properly. So we're just going to go ahead and take a look at setting this up and creating this looks and also troubleshooting some things and what lights work best with it, because every light doesn't work best with it. So to start off, you want to use an RS spotlight to cast your caustics. So you're going to have a light source that's going to cast your caustics. So you don't want to have all of your lights on, your seen all casting the caustics. Because it's just going to overwhelm it. And it's going to take forever and it's not going to look right. And I'll show you that in just a second. So let's go ahead and just set this up and recreate this real quick. Okay, so without our light, let's let our lights, okay, we just have a sphere with displacement and we just met with the RS, the regular RS material rather than the Chao graph. And we just are going to go with the glass preset. We'll just throw that on our sphere. And we have a displacer on there that's going to, that has noise animation on there. So it's just wibbly, wobbly in because we just wanted to have a cooler looking caustics. The more distortion and stuff, the more complex an object is there the lights going to refract around in interesting ways? Versus if it was just a perfectly clean sphere, it would just focus in like a magnifying glass, a thing. With this, we'll have some really cool looks like you saw earlier. We don't want to use a point light because we just really don't want to ever use point lights that much. If we use infinite light, it works, but it really takes a whole lot longer and the results aren't really as clean. It's something about it and the fact that the light comes from a much bigger area when it's casting the photons, it's harder to concentrate that down to the point where it's just going to be very speckly. And there's not going to be a whole lot we can do to make it less speckly, even if we keep adding photons. It's just the way that the light works. Area light does work well, You can get away with using the area light for this, but it's not. You have to lower the spread down so much to the point where you might as well be using a spot light instead. And honestly, because the spotlight emits all the photons from one point, we get cleaner results that emits photons from one point. It's easier to get a clean result versus where the area light is going to emit photons from the whole size of the area light. It's just like you're going to need more photons and more photons and it's just never going to be as clean because they're all coming from all over the place. Versus just one exact point. The first thing we want to do, I know there's a lot of sense but you'll see it once we start getting into it. Firstly, is lighter seen with like a dome light. We're going to go ahead and just use an object here. We're going to use, I'm just going to go ahead and do the studio dome light that is not causing caustics or anything. You'll see this is what it's going to look like real quick. This is what I'm talking about, the way the light works. This comes from a spot light from over here. It goes through our object. And then the photon mapping is what it's called. Basically, it maps the point from where the light beam enters, our object, comes out and hits the floor where that hits the floor where it creates these photons. You see that it creates these paths because some of the light and more of the light is going to come back where it's like thicker in areas and stuff like that. That's because more light photons are hitting there after they're refracting through here and so on. That's how it works and what we're going to do, we have our dome light. Let's go ahead and hit render on this. We just want this dome light just to get these reflections and stuff on our sphere. And you can see that we have no caustics or anything going on in any caustic photons. Now we could use the dome light, but it's going to be absolute mess. You're just going to end up with speckling dots all over the place. You just don't want to. We're not going to learn how to do it the wrong way, we're just going to learn how to do it a way that definitely works. We're going to go ahead and add a spot light. We're just going to target spot light. We'll just go ahead and throw that sphere in the target object. We'll just grab the spot light and aim it up above our sphere a little bit there. And pull it back a bit. Yeah. Okay. Now let's take a look at this. We've got our spot light here. We're going to increase the exposure, this up just to one, It's a little brighter there we go. So we can see our lights coming through, hitting our sphere. We're getting these interesting shadows and stuff from this, but we're not getting any caustics at all. And so what we need to do to enable caustics is inside of the light, and every light has this option. But again,