[flow_default] Transcription: 02_night_scene_02.json

transcriptions/02_night_scene_02.json

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+{
+  "audio_file": "02_night_scene_02.wav",
+  "text": "The first lighting layer that we'll add will be a really simple one. Right now we are almost in total darkness. The only source in the blend file that you have downloaded for sure is this environment color. The light source, I mean. Feel free to leave some of that dim light if it makes it easier to see what's going on. But actually I would recommend we just start from scratch. So I'll go ahead and zero that out. The background ambience is black. Completely zeroed out. Now we are officially in the void, eagerly waiting for the scene where the scene geometry ends, to the A the world and we'll make it way bigger. Let's push it backwards and then scale it up like that. It is our backdrop and it will serve as the primary light motivation, at least for the moment. Let's rename it the object and then the material as well. New backdrop underscore 01. Now can go into the shader editor. In the previous chapter we have already tried image-based lighting, so it would be fair to pay homage to it now. We don't need the default material, so X to delete it, Shift-A to add in an image texture, and it can be connected to the material output like this directly. If there is no shader, Blender will assume it's an emissive shader. To keep it clean though, we can add it ourselves though, the emission shader I mean. To not assume, but to know for sure. If no texture is plugged, it shows this amazing shade of magenta, so let's feed it something. Click Open. In the Downloads, you'll find the image that I'm going to use, the nighttime photo with the city lights in the distance. You can always enable thumbnails over there. It's a public domain image from Pixabye, I think, so should be fine to use. And so we just have to orient this image correctly. Shift F5 gets us back in 3D viewport, S and X twice to stretch it on the X axis to make it closer to the widescreen aspect ratio of the original photo. You don't have to copy this placement precisely though, just try to eyeball it close to what I'm doing here so it's somewhere close and you'll be fine. The S shortcut is for making it bigger or smaller. Yeah, I think this constellation of lights on the horizon looks great. What's important, I wonder if you agree, it sets the scene, the mood, and even it gives an idea of what the upcoming light layers could look like, if that makes sense. That's why it's good to start with the backdrop where it makes sense from the production standpoint. It just makes our lives easier. As for me, for now the city lights in the distance look somewhat artificial. Because it's just an 8-bit image after all, these lights should probably be way stronger in contrast to the darkness of the night. Let's repeat the trick from the previous chapter and HDRify the background plane. To do that we need our shader editor opened once more. Gonna make some room for the high dynamic range in any guns by moving some nodes around. Shift D will duplicate the emission material because we'll need a couple of these. Then I'll add the mix shader and it will go in the second socket of the mix like that. Then I'll just plug the texture in the second emission as well, so two of these share the same texture technically. The second shader will be reserved for the brighter points, the street lamps basically. How to reserve it for these lamps only, because as for now it washes out the entire backdrop. It is fairly easy, fortunately. The color ramp comes to rescue. The texture should go there. To preview what this node does to it, hold Ctrl Shift and left-click on it. The black and white mask can be tweaked with these stops, let's say to isolate only the most flurry parts. Then don't forget to hold Ctrl Shift again and click on the last shader in the chain and hook up the ramp up to the mix factor. Now the black and white mask serves as a guide to what is affected by the second much stronger emission. How strong it should be is of course open to discussion though. To my eye it can very well be a few dozen times brighter than the base level than the first shader. It is up to you to choose the strength that feels natural to you or maybe you're going for the expressiveness instead. For the surrealistic look who knows. I'll also crunch the mask contrast to really limit the effect to the core of these hot point lights in the dark. Almost including just the core and excluding the halo. If you wish to check before and after HDRization, if you will, press M to toggle the mixed shade a node and M to bring it back. See the difference? We showed this technique in much more detail in the image-based lighting tutorial from this update. I recommend you to watch it first if you haven't yet, especially if what we are doing seems a bit rushed. Then definitely check the previous one first. Now a quick comparison. The standard dynamic range image used as a light source and how to even call it HDR if fired image used as a light source. We are almost there with our background lights. The only thing I wanted to show you before we move on is how to enhance its reflections in the wet asphalt. Windows and other reflective stuff. First, I'll draw the selection around these nodes and Shift P to create a frame. In the right till shelf, I'll give it a name. HDR Refies sounds good enough. Let's get rid of the shelf. What I'll do next is add a couple of nodes to enhance the reflection of this plane in all the reflective surfaces. First, I'll add the Mix Shader because we'll need one more emission plugged in. And here it goes. Shift A, Shader Emission. Plug our Night City texture into it. So it's one texture powering all the shaders situation. The connection looks a little bit messy, so I'll hold Shift then right-click and drag across this line to make a new stop on it, then one more point here, so it looks nice and clean. And there it goes into the second socket of the mixer. Again, I know it may feel like a flashback, but in a moment we'll be adjusting its strength, but only for reflections, so the background itself, the 2D plane, will not get brighter. I know that probably sounds a bit confusing, if so don't worry, it will become clear in just a moment. For now, let's just go Shift A and put Light Path. This medical node allows us to break down the cycle's render path and do something to the glossy rays only or to the camera rays or diffuse rays. What I'm interested in is glossy rays. I want to kind of extract it to be able to adjust the glossy reflections in our wet asphalt separately from everything else. A little bit of cheating to tweak the reflections until they look just right. We need to grab the isGlossArray output and make it the mix factor of that last mix shader. So now Cycles checks, is it the GlossArray? Is it reflection? And goes to Shader 2 if true. I will Ctrl H to hide the unused outputs of this node. Then I'll select all these guys and Shift P to draw a frame. It will be called glossy. Okay, the second shader now controls the reflection strength separately from everything else so we can make the reflections brighter or dimmer without affecting the diffuse rays and all other rays Pretty cool, right? I'll go all the way to 50 in the strength of this second emission to really crank up the reflections of that light source Well, it was okay before that tweak Maybe even beautiful, but personally I love the wet appearance of this powered up reflection which interestingly reflects the steel sky tones in addition to the orange lamps which creates this warm versus cold vibe right off the start. You just cannot go wrong with the complementary contrast. It just looks great. To sum up this first lighting layer, you cannot go wrong with the backlight. It almost always looks cinematic, especially if you have a reflective surface to bounce the light from this backlight into the camera's sensor. If it wasn't the light located somewhere in the background in the distance, it would be way, way harder to properly reflect the light like that right into the camera's sensor. So we do a few things by choosing this placement. A. We create a certain context for the rest of the light layers. We have a night city there and a blueish night sky. It just sets a context. B. The backlighting works great with the reflective surfaces and creates deep shadows. It's all the good stuff. It's a very moody composition. We can even leave it like that and it will work as a low key render. But we'll go deeper. I love this style. Sometimes a backlight like this is all you need to make it look dramatic and cool and emphasize all the best properties of your models and materials. Feel free to watch the reverse key lighting tutorial on our channel, YouTube if you're interested to learn more about this technique.",
+  "language": "en",
+  "confidence": null,
+  "duration": 755.22
+}