[flow_default] Transcription: 02 - Level Up Your Lighting.json

transcriptions/02 - Level Up Your Lighting.json

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+{
+  "audio_file": "02 - Level Up Your Lighting.wav",
+  "text": "Time to cram your brain home with some extra bonus knowledge and what we're going to be talking about today are HDR eyes. So what the heck are they? If you've never heard of them before, they stand for high dynamic range images and basically all you need to know about them are that their high dynamic range images, which means there's a ton more luminance information and just color information, color depth, luminance depth than there are in a typical piece of photography or typical image. And so much so that a typical monitor can't even make out all of that range on just a computer monitor. So, if you've ever heard of an HDR, like if you have that option on your phone, you basically take three different levels of exposures of the same image merge them together and that creates that huge amount of depth and Prevent your photography from being completely blown out or too dark it fills in all those darker values that may be too underexposed and parts of your image that are over exposed so hopefully you're familiar with that term but HDRIs are huge parts of 3d and huge Aspects of 3D because what they allow you to do is use that 360 degree HDR image and use it as an environment map that your objects can then reflect. So here's our scene that we went over in the lesson and just how I use soft boxes to populate the scene for our objects to reflect. We can actually have a huge environment, like a real world image, a picture of an image of some environment that exists in real life, and use that as a source for objects to reflect. So, I'm kinda talking about HDRs, let me actually show you what an HDR image looks like. So, luckily enough, Cinema 4D comes pre-loaded with a whole bunch of HDR images. So, you can actually find them in this window menu. If you go into the content browser, there's a whole bunch of different types of presets. So we have in our, maybe your broadcast, we have 3D objects, we have some cookware, you get a spoon 3D model, we have, you know, materials, example scenes, different renders, a whole lot of elements that are very, very useful. But in some of these folders, we actually have some HDR images. And if you don't have anything in your content browser, make sure when you did the Cinema 4D install, it'll prompt you to maybe download an update, and it'll also prompt you to download the content browser assets. So make sure if you didn't do that, go back into the help and go into check for updates and they should be in a little menu there if you haven't downloaded them yet okay so in the prime folder I'm gonna just kind of help you navigate to where these HDR images are in your presets in your prime we can twirl down this little arrow go into presets so you can see that my little max on updater 8 update to So HDRIs are typically these spherical type of warped images and how you can actually take these images are by using what's called a mirror ball. If I just Google mirror ball HDRI, you can see that it's just the ball that reflects the full environment of whatever area you're in in real life. And what you end up needing to do is you can see this guy, got his iPhone he's taken a picture you basically take a picture or a photo of each side of the ball so 180 degrees on one side and then take the other 80 180 degrees of the sphere on the other side and you can use special software to stitch both of those images together so you get that full 360 degree image or environment this dude's super stoked to have a mirror ball but that's basically how you can take a 360 HDR image like that. There's also a very special camera, one's called a Theta, where it's big enough to just hold in your hand like my Wacom pen and it's got a little ball on it or a sphere on it that automatically takes a full 360 degree HDR image for you. So that's kind of like what's going on and why these images are spherical and kind of warped like that. But what we can do to utilize these to be reflected in our environment and our 3D scene here is to basically create a giant sphere that we can map the image to. And luckily enough for us, in our little menu that we grabbed our floor, and remember a floor is just an infinite plane, we also have a sky which is just an infinitely large sphere. Okay, so there's our sky and you'll see that our background totally changed to gray. Now let me just double click the visibility option here. So turn the stop light off so this sky will no longer be visible in our viewport. And what I want to do is just turn off or deactivate, disable our soft boxes here by making sure these little check boxes go to X and we'll just disable those objects from showing up in our scene. Now remember when I was showing you in the lesson, the reflection lesson that you by default have this kind of crazy image and remember it was kind of like a outdoor scene and I believe it was like the Max on headquarters like a courtyard or something like that and you saw some trees and we're actually seeing a little bit of that. But if I render this, you're not actually seeing that reflection anymore. Basically what that preview image was, was an HDR image that again does not render, it's just there for reference purposes to show you like, oh, this is how shiny your object is. If we use this kind of default preview HDR image to let you know, like give you a little preview of what your reflection looks like. So it's there just for reference. It doesn't actually render. But let me just turn back the sky. Notice if I turn on the sky, you're no longer seeing that HDR image anymore being reflected. It's just this matte gray. So what we can do with this sky is apply one of these little HDR materials onto our sky objects. So that giant, infinitely large sphere. So let's go ahead and to load up an HDR image into your scene. I'm just going to click on one will do. So here's the default cinema environment that I was actually just talking about. We got our trees. We got the little dirt there. So let's actually just bring this. I'm just going to click and drag this and add this to our material manager down here. And you're going to see that load that up into our scene. Now if I double click on this default material you'll see that I basically have my default cinema environment and here's my map sphere, you know my little warped object and if I click on this basically this image path I'll just click on that button. This will show us the actual image itself. Let me just make this a huge window and I'll actually just open this window. I'm just right clicking and getting all these options and you can actually get a window here and you can see exactly what that environment looks like. So that's that image that was by default applied to our viewport view. So what I can do now is go and apply this material to my sky. So just make sure I apply this there and you're gonna see that we now have this pixelated image mapped to our sky object. And if I just rotate around here and see if I kind of pan up, there's my sky. There's all of my trees and stuff like that. And you're gonna notice this is very pixelated. And if I actually rendered this, you're gonna see that there's actually no pixelation whatsoever. That's kind of just for our viewport optimization. So if we actually wanna see this, if we wanna see this image at higher quality, in our material editor, we have this editor option. If I click on it, you can see we have this texture preview size. And by default, which is what it's set to right now, it's a very low quality image preview size. But if I choose no scaling, it's not going to scale that down. And you're going to see that now we have this really high quality image, and we can really see all the details here. So HDRIs are really, really nice because they allow for this huge environment, hugely detailed image that we can use for our objects to reflect. I can go into my luminance and remember that this is applied to luminance for a reason so it does not react with light. The same reason why we applied this softbox texture with just this white with a little bit of gradient in our luminance as well. So that's just going to emit luminance information. Let me grab this and if I click on this little image path again, one way I cannot just how bright or dark my exposure is on my images by adjusting the exposure. Now remember, an HDR image has a lot of that luminance information. So I can bring this way down and you're gonna see we're gonna see what an underexposed version of this photo would look like. Okay, so now you can see, and this is such rich detail in these images, you can see the sun's super, super bright and everything else is dark. And I can go the other way and pump up the exposure and now I'm getting this like really overblown super exposed over exposed image. You're seeing that's actually brightening up how my reflections look in my viewport here. So kind of feel around and see what kind of exposure you want, how bright you want your reflections to be. So maybe, you know, maybe I want it just a little bit bright. So I'll do 1.5 exposure. And one thing you're going to notice is that as I'm kind of rendering my scene here, you're seeing that HDR image in the background. We're seeing our sky objects show up in our render. So just like we threw on a compositing tag to our soft boxes so we didn't see them in our render and not seen by camera, we can do the same thing with our sky. We just want this sky object to be used as a reflective environment but not actually show up in render, right? We actually have this background color, this background object that we want to see but it's overwritten by having a sky object here. So let's go and grab our compositing tags. I'm going to right click, go to Cinema 4D tags, go to compositing, and we'll just say turn off this scene by camera, and you're gonna notice that our reflections are still visible here, but it's no longer gonna render, and we should see our background now, so our white background, cool, but you're still seeing that nice reflection. So remember another thing we turned off is this scene by refraction, so if you don't want this HDR image to be refracted in our lens because our lens has a little bit of a refraction because of the transparency here and just a little bit of it. We can also turn that off in our composing tag as well. We don't need this to cast shadows or receive shadows either so we can turn that off as well. Speed up our render a little bit. Now you can see we have a really nice render and we're reflecting our HDR image. So let me just go into interactive render region here. So I showed you how you can adjust how bright the HDR or how dark the HDR image is by adjusting the exposure. And what we can also do is kind of adjust the offset of where this image is kind of positioned on the sphere. So let me just for example or demonstration purposes I'm going to turn on the scene by camera so we can see our image back again. And what I'm going to do is go into my texture tag and use this offset and you're going to see that I'm actually spinning or you know adjusting and offsetting the image and how it's mapped on the sphere. So notice there's the sun kind of right there. How your image is kind of positioned in your scene is going to determine the reflection. So now you can see the sun source is actually behind our sunglasses. And you can see this bright highlight coming from it, which looks really cool. This looks really, really realistic because of the fact that we're using this HDR image. It's an actual image of somewhere on Earth. And it just adds for really nice highly detailed reflection. So let's maybe move this image so we're pushing the sun over to the right side of our image. Okay, so now the sun's kind of over here somewhere to the right. And let's just make this update. And now you're going to see the sun reflected on the right side of our object. So you can see a little hot spot there from that bright sun. You can see it actually reflected in the one lens here. So this, the positioning of where your, how your object or how your image is positioned on that sky object by adjusting the offset can totally change what your object looks like as well and how your object reflects the image. So now you're gonna see like maybe the sun is now directly behind us in the view and you can see a little bit of it, you know, the glint of the sun. Maybe it's actually on this side because you're seeing a little bit of a hot spot over here. So that's one way to adjust things. But really with an HDR image, you can adjust the exposure, you can adjust the offset, you can even scale this down on the length here and basically tile this image. So now you have a bunch of suns kind of tiled here and you'll get for a lot more detail crammed because you have a shrunken image horizontally and everything just looks kind of, you know, squashed horizontally. So that's another thing you can do. you adjust the scale and play around with that. But the problem with HDR images is let me just bring up my content browsers that you can get into the habit of just clicking on a bunch of these and seeing what they look like and you're kind of just stuck with how that image looks and how it's reflected onto your object. So let's just go ahead and say we want to replace this HDR image with this clear sky buildings HDR. So what I'm going to do is click and drag and to replace this material, what I'm going to do is hover over this material here until my arrow points down and you have this little plus sign with a box. And what that's going to do is just write over and overwrite that material. And what you're gonna see is now this HDR image is applied to my scene and is now being reflected by our sunglasses. And now you're gonna see that since this image, this HDR image is a little bit more of a bluish hue, there's more of the blue atmosphere, the sky reflecting the environment, you're seeing that reflected in our project here. So we're getting a little bit more of a bluish tint to our sunglasses because of that environment. And again, we can go ahead and adjust the offset here. And maybe we get the brighter part of the sky. If I just rotate up here, you can see there's our sky. There's some big buildings back here. Let me just command shift Z to undo my camera move there. And now you're going to see that more of the bright sky is in the back part of our image and more of those and is showing and that will just replace that material. And then we can see what this looks like. You're gonna see that this image has some really hot bright spots and some spots where the sun's being reflected very brightly and you're seeing that on our sunglasses here. So again, maybe I offset this a little bit. So maybe the brighter spots are on the backside there. We can see what that looks like. So now there's more bright spots over here. And I can always go into my luminance channel and go into this, click on this little button here with the file path and adjust the exposure. So maybe make this negative and make this much less bright. And what you're gonna notice is that there's actually a lot of contrast now because of these really super bright luminant areas in the scene versus the darker areas. So there's a lot of contrast in your image. There's going to be a lot of contrasty highlights and glints on your reflections. So really definitely play around with the exposure of some of these HDR images to get what kind of feel you're going for. So if you don't want this to be such a bright image, you really make this darkened and you can see we're getting less of that reflective detail. So that's probably a little bit too low of an exposure because we're really not getting any nice reflections going on in that scene. So this is kind of replacing the need for having to make objects like soft boxes in our scene and having those as the only objects in the scene to reflect. So one last one I want to show you is this actual photo studio and in this image, let me just go ahead and just apply this and rewrite over this material. Let me double click this image and go into our preview and you can see what this looks like. I'm just gonna right click and say open window and this will allow me to actually see what this image looks like. And you can see that this is actually like a fake 3D render of a scene like on our objects. And this is kind of like an HDR image version of what we are trying to do with these soft boxes here. But the problem, and again the problem with HDR images is that you don't have the full flexibility to just move a soft box, an actual object in your scene, and move it around to adjust the highlight. The only thing you can do is adjust this offset and try to map where those little umbrellas are. So let's see, there's an umbrella, yep, there's an umbrella right over here. So, you know, maybe we move this, so there's the umbrella right there. So now our umbrella, our highlights will be on this side, okay? And I know there's a few other umbrellas in here too, but you're gonna see that it's kind of, you're kind of stuck with where those umbrellas are in that actual HDR image. Meanwhile, if I turn on these soft boxes, I have full control over moving the soft boxes around and positioning them strategically and art direct them a lot more than you can in actual image, because everything's already baked in that image. So HDRs have their pluses and minuses. Their pluses are they add some really nice high quality, really, really deep quality reflections to your object because of so much information and detail in the reflected HDR image. But you also lose the freedom of these, the you're getting from an HDR image, but none of those glints, none of those highlights are really hitting your object the way you really want them to. So that's one, maybe you bring in a softbox, an actual, you know, plane object in here, maybe it's just one to highlight a single area that your HDR image is not, and kind of art directing that way. So, that's kind of like my advice is a lot of people will try to just use an HDR image and hope that they get their objects looking good. But the problem with that is that an HDR image was not built for a specific object in mind, right? It's just kind of there. So I really recommend that you, if you do use an HDRI, you at least use a softbox or two, an actual object in your scene to really highlight and almost like customize your environment setup just for the specific object that you're trying to render and look really nice and realistic. So hopefully this gives you a little bit of an idea of how you can use HTRIs. Again, there's a whole bunch in the content manager here. And again, if you didn't download the content manager when you installed Cinema 4D be sure that you do. There's a whole bunch of them right here that you can play around with some really great stuff. And every image is going to totally change how your object looks. Let me just go ahead and turn off this from camera, seen by camera so we just get our white background there. So what I want you to do at this point and one thing that's kind of smart as you're progressing in 3D, is there's a ton of free HDR eyes on the internet. So definitely beef up your collection, experiment with like how each image that you're using affects your scene, and just get a feel for using them, and also using them in combination with actual objects in your scene like little soft boxes, whether they be plane objects, whether they be disc objects here, in just really exploring what's possible because I think it's a combination of an HDR image with the sky environment and actual objects in your scene that are acting as soft boxes that are really going to make your objects look really, really nice and shiny, shiny. So have fun experiment find some more HDRIs and have fun kind of playing around with what they can do to help improve your scene and make it look more realistic mode better.",
+  "language": "en",
+  "confidence": null,
+  "duration": 1467.69
+}