Add transcription for: frames_zips/CGMA_IntroAssetCreationGames_DownloadPirate.com_Wk09 02 SettingUpBasicRenderScene_frames.zip

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+  "text": " Hi everyone. So just wanted to start with presentation this week. I'm going to talk about the screenshots that I actually did for the project and some of my thought process behind what I was trying to create here and then we'll jump into actually setting up our scene. So for the presentation I wanted to have, as I mentioned in my original plan, some simple presentation or a sort of plain scene where we basically just have a simple background, reflections and some nice lighting and then we have this more hero shot which is the beetle actually posed on the flower as you can see here we have water droplets and other things going on in that particular scene that give it a little bit more life and make it feel a bit more alive so this is the aim that we're kind of going for with the different scenes and we're going to cover the beetle the plane scene to begin with and so we'll work on our setup and everything and talk about the way that I tend to manage those renders and creating the scenes and everything there and then we'll do the flower one after that. So the scenes to actually render out the beatle are also really simple so I thought I'd just show those before we jump into the creation. So here you can see this is the, when we're rendering out the screenshots of the plane beatle, so I basically just have a backdrop here which will go over how to set this up. And then we have cameras and lights and everything. So you can see all the cameras coming in here for different positions. And then we have, if I jump over into the flower sections here, we have another area in this same file where we basically have a series of lights and cameras, and then we have the flowers in here. And depending on the different shot we load in different sections. So in this case we're loading in the actual flowers in the backdrop there, and then if we switch over to this view you can see that we load in some other flowers here. So the setup for these is actually a lot more simple than you might expect. So I'm going to cover obviously how to do all of this, but I just wanted to show just as a overview, this is what we're aiming for this week. So before jumping in with our scene setup here, I just wanted to mention that there's a really great add on call photographer five. This is for manipulating cameras and lights within Blender has a bunch of really great controls. You can see a bit of an overview here gives you some more support for light such as gobos and other things and certain lens effects and it makes managing cameras a lot easier. So the photographer 5 which is the latest version is $24 but alternatively you can get a slightly older version or even a free version which is the photographer 2 add-on which gives you some of these controls as well. So definitely worth taking a look at that if you're going to be working with lots of cameras in a scene and so we will touch on it but I'm not going to set the whole scene up using it. wanted to mention it. So the first thing we want to do in our scene here is we're going to come over to the asset browser and so I'm just going to split this view as well just let me do that and I'll bring in the asset browser. So the first thing I want to do is I want to set my asset browser to link and I'm going to link in my beetle model and the rig and everything. So we're going to bring that into the scene and so once this is dropped in I will just place him in the center of the scene and so if you wanted to set that up so we'll just join these areas back together and we'll come actually just come back over to modeling here so we have our beetle and everything in the file if you want to bring your rig in let me just open up the beetle file and I can show how to actually do that as well if you're not seeing in the asset browser so what you would need to do here to add it is you essentially just right-click and do Markers asset and that's going to bring it into the asset browser and so Then you can set the path of the folder in the preferences So you basically set up where you have this located Within the asset library and it will appear in your other files. So that's essentially how you get that working So if we come over back over to the file So now we have our beetle in here at the moment. He's just a collection and we can't really do anything with him You can see him here. He's linked into the file So to make this editable so we can actually pose and rig and all that kind of stuff We can override this by using what's called a library override So we just right click on the collection and come down Hit make and then select it and content This will break the rig out into its Individual pieces as it was in the original file, but it's still linked so I can jump into pose mode I can move the rig around if I want to set up my scene and I want to move the beetle anywhere my suggestion is that you do that in pose mode using the actual root bone so if we start to move him kind of over here in the scene because we want to set up a little camera or Something over here when we save that scene and we just reload it It's going to stay in that place which is cool If we don't do that so if we come over into here and we were to just try and move him say in object mode Then when we save the scene and we revert this it's just gonna jump the beetle back into Its position so sometimes the position of the beetle will reset basically so something to keep in mind it's much easier to basically move him in pose mode because because you can key frame that and leave them where he is in the position you want to. So I had a lot of instances where the beetle would jump back in position if it wasn't moved using post mode. So I would just suggest using post mode to move it. So next I want to cover how to set up a basic scene. And I've got a couple of examples of the type of thing I'm aiming for here. So we had the key shot, which is obviously the flower We'll cover in the next video, but in this one I wanted to do something that was a bit more of a plane rendering scene So I wanted something similar to this where we have a plane background potentially with a gradient in the backdrop And then we can have some soft shadows In some cases as well. You can see we have mirror reflections. So I did a darker background for mine So had mirror reflections, but you can do combinations of all of this type of stuff So we'll just set up how I would approach that so let me drop this in and When I did my renders I had gone for plain a plain dark background and then we had the pink of the flower So for this example, I'm probably going to do something. That's just a little bit different so that we can So I can just do maybe like a colorful one or something like that So let's take a look at that The first thing I want to do is I'm just going to make a collection and I'm going to call this backdrop So I can add my backdrop measures into that. So the first thing I want to do is add a Cylinder mesh and I'm going to move the pivot to the bottom of that Actually, let's read that I want to do when I add the cylinder. I want to be a lot of sides on the cylinder So I'll set it to say 200 sides Mostly because we're going to be doing a nice render here. I don't particularly want this to be Any faceting or any issues with that type of stuff? So I'm essentially just going to smooth this out really nicely. We're going to delete the face of the top of the cylinder And I want to move my beat also will move him in pose mode And I'm just going to Let's make sure That we have our gizmo there. I want to just hide the backdrop temporarily I just want to make sure that there's he's a bit more central in the scene there So he's a bit more centralized which is cool And then we can just come back out of pose mode and that's going to look pretty good So now we have our backdrop in there. Next thing I want to do is to create the gradient In the backdrop. I'm basically just going to bevel this cylinder So I'm going to select the edges and we're going to come over Here and actually set instead of a seam. We'll set a bevel weight I'm just going to mark that up and then I'm going to bevel this on that bevel weight So we can get a nice smooth gradient in our background and I'll set that number to a really high value So again, this is going to be really smooth this backdrop here Next I want to set a camera. So we're going to add in Camera here and we'll just set the camera and So if I jump into that camera, it's placed somewhere random. We can't actually see our beat also We'll come into the view menu and do camera to view or Or alternatively we can click up here as well. I think this is part of the photographer add-on though this little button here. So by It's coming over in here. We can check that actually by disable Photographer. Yeah, you don't see any of these controls that we see up here So photographer will add a bunch of extra control. So we'll just say bill it for now and we can enable it back on there So Okay, so yeah, we've got the camera We're just going to sort of position this nicely get a good shot Something like this and then we can turn camera to view off and now we can sort of zoom in and see Arbital so we'll jump in to EV mode so we can actually start to see What we're going to be rendering and how it's going to start to look which is cool So this is how it's looking currently and then I want to make sure and if you don't have this set You need to make sure you have seen lights and seen world enabled If you don't have those you're just going to be rendering with these standard HDRs. So I Think I in this scene already have an HDR Hooked up so we'll cover the process of that so you can actually understand how to bring an HDR into the scene So to do that, it's really straightforward. You come over into your shader editor Just make sure we only have One of these here and then instead of setting objects you'd set world and And then this is my setup here for an HDR. So I just have I think it's a mama set Tom Tomico studio one here and so the way I have this set up is I have the texture plugged into a background layer and into a Mix shader and then I'm using is camera ray from this node light path So you can just search for light path add is camera ray into the factor there and then the background So the way that this works We just disable this portion of it. Essentially what this is gonna do is it's going to mask out the background. So if I jump over into the rendered view and we just make sure that we have everything set correctly. Yeah, so scene world here we can see the scene itself now, right? So this is the HDR that we have in the background. So if I just plugged my HDR directly into the background like this, this is what we would see in the world view. You can see that it's actually rendering, it's creating some lighting for us based on that HDR that we can see. And then when we combine it with the mix shader and is camera path, this allows us to basically just get rid of the background and set a color. So now we could choose like, you know, a blue color and it's going to set a background there. So that's essentially what we're doing here with this particular setup for the HDR. So I just wanted to cover that really briefly. So now let's jump back over into our scene and we'll go over again to modeling. And I'm going to bring back our backdrop. So this is the basic setup. And in EV we can see that we have our scene lights and our scene world. So when we set the scene world, it's now using that HDR that we see in the background. So the first thing I want to do is I want to set my backdrop that I have here. And I want this to have a material to it So we're gonna add a material and I'm just gonna rename this to backdrop So now we can hopefully see that we have our backdrop Material and I can set a color for this so I can choose what type of color I want to go for maybe I'll go for mate more of a blue I was thinking along the lines of like one of these kind of ones where it's like a bit more of a darker blue So, see if we can do something a bit cooler like that. So yeah, that could be a nice contrast. I like that color. That's looking pretty good. So for this, I don't want the background to be super reflective because you can see that it picks up a bunch of light and everything, it's a bit distracting. So I'm gonna basically set my roughness to full rough. So now we don't see any reflections in the background. I can start now just adding basic lights into the scene as well. So we'll come out of the camera view and then I'm just gonna jump into the Control-A menu, Shift-A menu, sorry, to add a light and we'll add just a regular area light into the scene. So we're gonna move this area light up and now you can start to see that we're getting some actual light in here as well. So we can dial this up to be a bit stronger so it can actually start to see that we have a light source and that's impacting things. So yeah, maybe about 50 watts, something like that for now And you can sort of see how this is looking. We're gonna polish and refine our lighting a bit later, but just wanna show that. And also for now, I'm gonna hide the bones because I don't need to see the bones for this particular robot for now. So this is how this is looking. So now I want to effectively set up a couple more cameras just so that we have some views from other directions. So I'll just duplicate the camera a couple more times. And I'm gonna jump over into this one. And then again in view, we'll just lock camera to view. And I'm just gonna move, I want one where I can see the background gradient a little bit better, because that's nice to kind of judge how that's looking. And then I also just want one from, maybe from the back a little bit, so we can just see another view, right? Okay, so we've got our camera set up. The next thing I'm gonna do is just do a little bit more organization. So we're gonna make a folder for cameras and we're gonna put cameras into the background there. And then I'm going to make one for lights and we're just going to put our lights in So now I want a little bit more control over the way I can actually Edit and change the way I'm going to visualize my render. So we're just going to hide our cameras I want to be able to move Lights around easily and like the object how I want have a bit more control over it And I also would quite like to get some more mirror style reflections underneath the object. So I'm gonna set up some controls for that as well. So let's go through that as our next thing. So for the lights, what I wanna do here is I wanna add a empty. So I'll add the empty into the middle of the scene. And then for the light, we want to effectively have this always, as we move this around, we want it to always be facing the beetle, right? And so one way we can do that in the light itself, if we click the object constraints, we can use a damped track. So if we choose the damped tracked option and then color pick that empty. So it can be a little bit hard to select with the backdrop. So you can always just hide the backdrop if that makes things easier. And then we can choose the direction in which we want it to point at. So at the moment this is pointing up, the blue arrow is the Z axis pointing upwards. So we would select negative Z because we want it to point downwards. And so as we now move this light around, you'll see that it nicely just points always at that empty, which is great. So that means that just positioning lights is gonna be a lot easier. We can also just jump into the light and rotate the light if we need a bit more of a specific position, but that just makes things a lot easier when it comes to positioning lights and jumping into the scene and everything there and trying to get our light sources working. So can add more lights in and do different results. And you can kind of see how we can easily light up our beetle in the way that we want. So that's the first step. We'll just leave this light how it is for now. And then the next step I wanna do is add the reflection in. So to add the reflection, I'm gonna come in here with my meshes and I'm gonna choose a circular mesh. But this one I wanna scale him up a little bit. And then I'm just gonna press F to fill this. So now we have a circle underneath the beetle and I wanna just slightly move him up so he's not Z-fighting with the floor. We can change this to be a little bit closer as well if we want to and you can see that now that's really close to the floor, but not Z-fighting, which is cool. So we jump into our camera views, we can see. And one thing to be aware of is if you have camera view, camera to view selected when you zoom on the mouse wheel, Start to zoom in so just untick this and you can actually zoom your camera view in a bit nicer And then in the cameras we can jump between those by just clicking this button here So next I'm going to set up the material for this and I want to Set just a material and we're going to call this floor Okay, so Let me just look at this and then I'm going to change the color of that So we'll set we'll just copy the color from our previous one and paste it in here for this guy We're gonna want this to be nice and shiny because you can see that it creates this reflection for the floor which is Looking really cool But one of the things that we run into with this reflection is that we well There's a couple of issues that we run into first is that We get the well we get the reflection of the HDR which is probably not a huge issue if we were to have this not be such a mirror reflection if it was like slightly blurred it wouldn't be so much of a problem that it picks up some of that light from the surrounding areas from the world and everything but we also have the reflection of the light source in there which is probably not something that we would necessarily want to capture when we're trying to take screenshots and things and then the other issue is we have this scene where it goes from where it's nice and shiny and reflective to completely rough right so we can fix these things really easily so for the seam issue I'm going to come over into shading and so for this what I want to do is I want to come to the object material that we have here and I'm going to press Ctrl T to bring in a texture and so for this particular case I actually just have a one already set up with a texture. So I'm going to grab that. This texture is just a radial gradient basically. So I can show the texture itself. So let me just bring the image editor in here and I'll just choose the gradient. So this is just a radial gradient, right? That's the texture we're plugging in. And we want to plug this into the alpha. And then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to come over to UV editing and I'm going to select that object and I'm just going to UV it right so now you can see that the gradient is in the right place which is cool and if I jump now back over to the shading view we don't see anything the moment we don't really see anything happening though there's still a seam so we need to come into our material and scroll down until we see viewport display and set this to alpha blend so now that will blend out that edge and you can see that we have our reflections without the scene which is looking pretty good so we can save that jump back over now into the modeling tab and let's see if we can fix some of the other issues like the light reflection here for example so for this guy there's a few ways to fix this they used to be in cycles used to be able to turn off the multiple importance option here and it would usually get rid of reflection so So you can see that that is actually doing a pretty good job. We can just disable it and then it's not coming in. So just disable the reflection of the light source there. For some reason, there isn't an issue here, but what happens is when it's rendering, it looks like it's creating a strange problem there. So just something to keep in mind with the render. I don't know why it creates this kind of weird seam. It's just like there isn't a problem there. It's just that it sort of, as it works through the scene itself, it seems to be like having some sort of weird thing, but there's nothing going on there. I just wanted to kind of mention that as well. Cool, so that's all looking pretty good. The other thing that's also worth mentioning is that if you're having any issues with light sources, or you want to do something specific with lights, because later on as we get into, say, adding rim lights into things, We might move a light source kind of down here, and then we want to basically have, sort of move this kind of around here, and then we want to have a very, very bright light to create like a cool rim light, and we can move this down, and then maybe kind of rotate the light, see if we can just position this a bit better. I think also because this has the damped track on it, it's a bit harder to position, So I'm just gonna try and do that there. Yeah, so you can sort of see that as we are trying to create this rim light, which is gonna be a light on the edge of the B tool, the problem we have is it's also impacting the floor and that's not very good. So one of the ways that we can prevent that from happening is by using Blender's light linking feature, which is a new feature they added recently in Blender. So to do that, it's really easy set up. All you do is you click new and it will create a light link for this particular light. And then from there, you drag the collections that you want to be impacted by this light into that area there. And you'll see now that it's only impacting the backdrop. So if we untick that, it's now going to be impacting the beetle. And so with this floor circle, we need to just bring this into the backdrop. And now you can see that the rim lighting that we've added in there is only impacted by the beetle. So this is a nice way to basically have lights that are only impacting certain areas. And so you can use this for impacting reflections and things on the floor as well, because on lights you can individually turn off the way that the reflection is working. So if you come to viewport visibility here, you can see that we have a glossy reflection. So if we turn glossy off, that won't be captured in the reflections. So if you wanted to isolate a light on the floor and remove the reflection, you can turn off the ray visibility and glossy. So that's another way to remove that sharp reflection that you sometimes get. So yeah, but that's the kind of basics of the scene. So let's just get this back into here. At the moment in EV, this is looking kind of crazy, right? Because we have our rim lighting, and in EV, the light linking doesn't work. So if we turn this guy off, it's gonna look a lot more how we'd expect. So as we're working, we're gonna be rendering everything, the final result within cycles. So it's good to just maybe turn on cycles as you're working. It's a little bit harder to visualize when you're working in EV. So that's something that isn't gonna work for say light links if you're relying heavily on light linking and you have lights. I mean, you can definitely position lights a bit better than what I have here so that it isn't going to necessarily be impacting the floor in the same way and maybe tone down the intensity of that as well because it is pretty bright. So yeah, so you can get it to be a bit more reasonable in terms of the EV view, but obviously that's gonna look quite different when you jump over into your cycle. So something to just keep in mind there for how, when you're doing your presentation and everything.",
+  "segments": [
+    {
+      "text": " Hi everyone. So just wanted to start with presentation this week. I'm going to talk about the screenshots that I actually did for the project and some of my thought process behind what I was trying to create here and then we'll jump into actually setting up our scene. So for the presentation I wanted to have, as I mentioned in my original plan, some simple presentation or a sort of plain scene where we basically just have a simple background, reflections and some nice lighting and then we have this more hero shot which is the beetle actually posed on the flower as you can see here we have water droplets and other things going on in that particular scene that give it a little bit more life and make it feel a bit more alive so this is the aim that we're kind of going for with the different scenes and we're going to cover the beetle the plane scene to begin with and so we'll work on our setup and everything and talk about the way that I tend to manage those renders and creating the scenes and everything there and then we'll do the flower one after that. So the scenes to actually render out the beatle are also really simple so I thought I'd just show those before we jump into the creation. So here you can see this is the, when we're rendering out the screenshots of the plane beatle, so I basically just have a backdrop here which will go over how to set this up. And then we have cameras and lights and everything. So you can see all the cameras coming in here for different positions. And then we have, if I jump over into the flower sections here, we have another area in this same file where we basically have a series of lights and cameras, and then we have the flowers in here. And depending on the different shot we load in different sections. So in this case we're loading in the actual flowers in the backdrop there, and then if we switch over to this view you can see that we load in some other flowers here. So the setup for these is actually a lot more simple than you might expect. So I'm going to cover obviously how to do all of this, but I just wanted to show just as a overview, this is what we're aiming for this week. So before jumping in with our scene setup here, I just wanted to mention that there's a really great add on call photographer five. This is for manipulating cameras and lights within Blender has a bunch of really great controls. You can see a bit of an overview here gives you some more support for light such as gobos and other things and certain lens effects and it makes managing cameras a lot easier. So the photographer 5 which is the latest version is $24 but alternatively you can get a slightly older version or even a free version which is the photographer 2 add-on which gives you some of these controls as well. So definitely worth taking a look at that if you're going to be working with lots of cameras in a scene and so we will touch on it but I'm not going to set the whole scene up using it. wanted to mention it. So the first thing we want to do in our scene here is we're going to come over to the asset browser and so I'm just going to split this view as well just let me do that and I'll bring in the asset browser. So the first thing I want to do is I want to set my asset browser to link and I'm going to link in my beetle model and the rig and everything. So we're going to bring that into the scene and so once this is dropped in I will just place him in the center of the scene and so if you wanted to set that up so we'll just join these areas back together and we'll come actually just come back over to modeling here so we have our beetle and everything in the file if you want to bring your rig in let me just open up the beetle file and I can show how to actually do that as well if you're not seeing in the asset browser so what you would need to do here to add it is you essentially just right-click and do Markers asset and that's going to bring it into the asset browser and so Then you can set the path of the folder in the preferences So you basically set up where you have this located Within the asset library and it will appear in your other files. So that's essentially how you get that working So if we come over back over to the file So now we have our beetle in here at the moment. He's just a collection and we can't really do anything with him You can see him here. He's linked into the file So to make this editable so we can actually pose and rig and all that kind of stuff We can override this by using what's called a library override So we just right click on the collection and come down Hit make and then select it and content This will break the rig out into its Individual pieces as it was in the original file, but it's still linked so I can jump into pose mode I can move the rig around if I want to set up my scene and I want to move the beetle anywhere my suggestion is that you do that in pose mode using the actual root bone so if we start to move him kind of over here in the scene because we want to set up a little camera or Something over here when we save that scene and we just reload it It's going to stay in that place which is cool If we don't do that so if we come over into here and we were to just try and move him say in object mode Then when we save the scene and we revert this it's just gonna jump the beetle back into Its position so sometimes the position of the beetle will reset basically so something to keep in mind it's much easier to basically move him in pose mode because because you can key frame that and leave them where he is in the position you want to. So I had a lot of instances where the beetle would jump back in position if it wasn't moved using post mode. So I would just suggest using post mode to move it. So next I want to cover how to set up a basic scene. And I've got a couple of examples of the type of thing I'm aiming for here. So we had the key shot, which is obviously the flower We'll cover in the next video, but in this one I wanted to do something that was a bit more of a plane rendering scene So I wanted something similar to this where we have a plane background potentially with a gradient in the backdrop And then we can have some soft shadows In some cases as well. You can see we have mirror reflections. So I did a darker background for mine So had mirror reflections, but you can do combinations of all of this type of stuff So we'll just set up how I would approach that so let me drop this in and When I did my renders I had gone for plain a plain dark background and then we had the pink of the flower So for this example, I'm probably going to do something. That's just a little bit different so that we can So I can just do maybe like a colorful one or something like that So let's take a look at that The first thing I want to do is I'm just going to make a collection and I'm going to call this backdrop So I can add my backdrop measures into that. So the first thing I want to do is add a Cylinder mesh and I'm going to move the pivot to the bottom of that Actually, let's read that I want to do when I add the cylinder. I want to be a lot of sides on the cylinder So I'll set it to say 200 sides Mostly because we're going to be doing a nice render here. I don't particularly want this to be Any faceting or any issues with that type of stuff? So I'm essentially just going to smooth this out really nicely. We're going to delete the face of the top of the cylinder And I want to move my beat also will move him in pose mode And I'm just going to Let's make sure That we have our gizmo there. I want to just hide the backdrop temporarily I just want to make sure that there's he's a bit more central in the scene there So he's a bit more centralized which is cool And then we can just come back out of pose mode and that's going to look pretty good So now we have our backdrop in there. Next thing I want to do is to create the gradient In the backdrop. I'm basically just going to bevel this cylinder So I'm going to select the edges and we're going to come over Here and actually set instead of a seam. We'll set a bevel weight I'm just going to mark that up and then I'm going to bevel this on that bevel weight So we can get a nice smooth gradient in our background and I'll set that number to a really high value So again, this is going to be really smooth this backdrop here Next I want to set a camera. So we're going to add in Camera here and we'll just set the camera and So if I jump into that camera, it's placed somewhere random. We can't actually see our beat also We'll come into the view menu and do camera to view or Or alternatively we can click up here as well. I think this is part of the photographer add-on though this little button here. So by It's coming over in here. We can check that actually by disable Photographer. Yeah, you don't see any of these controls that we see up here So photographer will add a bunch of extra control. So we'll just say bill it for now and we can enable it back on there So Okay, so yeah, we've got the camera We're just going to sort of position this nicely get a good shot Something like this and then we can turn camera to view off and now we can sort of zoom in and see Arbital so we'll jump in to EV mode so we can actually start to see What we're going to be rendering and how it's going to start to look which is cool So this is how it's looking currently and then I want to make sure and if you don't have this set You need to make sure you have seen lights and seen world enabled If you don't have those you're just going to be rendering with these standard HDRs. So I Think I in this scene already have an HDR Hooked up so we'll cover the process of that so you can actually understand how to bring an HDR into the scene So to do that, it's really straightforward. You come over into your shader editor Just make sure we only have One of these here and then instead of setting objects you'd set world and And then this is my setup here for an HDR. So I just have I think it's a mama set Tom Tomico studio one here and so the way I have this set up is I have the texture plugged into a background layer and into a Mix shader and then I'm using is camera ray from this node light path So you can just search for light path add is camera ray into the factor there and then the background So the way that this works We just disable this portion of it. Essentially what this is gonna do is it's going to mask out the background. So if I jump over into the rendered view and we just make sure that we have everything set correctly. Yeah, so scene world here we can see the scene itself now, right? So this is the HDR that we have in the background. So if I just plugged my HDR directly into the background like this, this is what we would see in the world view. You can see that it's actually rendering, it's creating some lighting for us based on that HDR that we can see. And then when we combine it with the mix shader and is camera path, this allows us to basically just get rid of the background and set a color. So now we could choose like, you know, a blue color and it's going to set a background there. So that's essentially what we're doing here with this particular setup for the HDR. So I just wanted to cover that really briefly. So now let's jump back over into our scene and we'll go over again to modeling. And I'm going to bring back our backdrop. So this is the basic setup. And in EV we can see that we have our scene lights and our scene world. So when we set the scene world, it's now using that HDR that we see in the background. So the first thing I want to do is I want to set my backdrop that I have here. And I want this to have a material to it So we're gonna add a material and I'm just gonna rename this to backdrop So now we can hopefully see that we have our backdrop Material and I can set a color for this so I can choose what type of color I want to go for maybe I'll go for mate more of a blue I was thinking along the lines of like one of these kind of ones where it's like a bit more of a darker blue So, see if we can do something a bit cooler like that. So yeah, that could be a nice contrast. I like that color. That's looking pretty good. So for this, I don't want the background to be super reflective because you can see that it picks up a bunch of light and everything, it's a bit distracting. So I'm gonna basically set my roughness to full rough. So now we don't see any reflections in the background. I can start now just adding basic lights into the scene as well. So we'll come out of the camera view and then I'm just gonna jump into the Control-A menu, Shift-A menu, sorry, to add a light and we'll add just a regular area light into the scene. So we're gonna move this area light up and now you can start to see that we're getting some actual light in here as well. So we can dial this up to be a bit stronger so it can actually start to see that we have a light source and that's impacting things. So yeah, maybe about 50 watts, something like that for now And you can sort of see how this is looking. We're gonna polish and refine our lighting a bit later, but just wanna show that. And also for now, I'm gonna hide the bones because I don't need to see the bones for this particular robot for now. So this is how this is looking. So now I want to effectively set up a couple more cameras just so that we have some views from other directions. So I'll just duplicate the camera a couple more times. And I'm gonna jump over into this one. And then again in view, we'll just lock camera to view. And I'm just gonna move, I want one where I can see the background gradient a little bit better, because that's nice to kind of judge how that's looking. And then I also just want one from, maybe from the back a little bit, so we can just see another view, right? Okay, so we've got our camera set up. The next thing I'm gonna do is just do a little bit more organization. So we're gonna make a folder for cameras and we're gonna put cameras into the background there. And then I'm going to make one for lights and we're just going to put our lights in So now I want a little bit more control over the way I can actually Edit and change the way I'm going to visualize my render. So we're just going to hide our cameras I want to be able to move Lights around easily and like the object how I want have a bit more control over it And I also would quite like to get some more mirror style reflections underneath the object. So I'm gonna set up some controls for that as well. So let's go through that as our next thing. So for the lights, what I wanna do here is I wanna add a empty. So I'll add the empty into the middle of the scene. And then for the light, we want to effectively have this always, as we move this around, we want it to always be facing the beetle, right? And so one way we can do that in the light itself, if we click the object constraints, we can use a damped track. So if we choose the damped tracked option and then color pick that empty. So it can be a little bit hard to select with the backdrop. So you can always just hide the backdrop if that makes things easier. And then we can choose the direction in which we want it to point at. So at the moment this is pointing up, the blue arrow is the Z axis pointing upwards. So we would select negative Z because we want it to point downwards. And so as we now move this light around, you'll see that it nicely just points always at that empty, which is great. So that means that just positioning lights is gonna be a lot easier. We can also just jump into the light and rotate the light if we need a bit more of a specific position, but that just makes things a lot easier when it comes to positioning lights and jumping into the scene and everything there and trying to get our light sources working. So can add more lights in and do different results. And you can kind of see how we can easily light up our beetle in the way that we want. So that's the first step. We'll just leave this light how it is for now. And then the next step I wanna do is add the reflection in. So to add the reflection, I'm gonna come in here with my meshes and I'm gonna choose a circular mesh. But this one I wanna scale him up a little bit. And then I'm just gonna press F to fill this. So now we have a circle underneath the beetle and I wanna just slightly move him up so he's not Z-fighting with the floor. We can change this to be a little bit closer as well if we want to and you can see that now that's really close to the floor, but not Z-fighting, which is cool. So we jump into our camera views, we can see. And one thing to be aware of is if you have camera view, camera to view selected when you zoom on the mouse wheel, Start to zoom in so just untick this and you can actually zoom your camera view in a bit nicer And then in the cameras we can jump between those by just clicking this button here So next I'm going to set up the material for this and I want to Set just a material and we're going to call this floor Okay, so Let me just look at this and then I'm going to change the color of that So we'll set we'll just copy the color from our previous one and paste it in here for this guy We're gonna want this to be nice and shiny because you can see that it creates this reflection for the floor which is Looking really cool But one of the things that we run into with this reflection is that we well There's a couple of issues that we run into first is that We get the well we get the reflection of the HDR which is probably not a huge issue if we were to have this not be such a mirror reflection if it was like slightly blurred it wouldn't be so much of a problem that it picks up some of that light from the surrounding areas from the world and everything but we also have the reflection of the light source in there which is probably not something that we would necessarily want to capture when we're trying to take screenshots and things and then the other issue is we have this scene where it goes from where it's nice and shiny and reflective to completely rough right so we can fix these things really easily so for the seam issue I'm going to come over into shading and so for this what I want to do is I want to come to the object material that we have here and I'm going to press Ctrl T to bring in a texture and so for this particular case I actually just have a one already set up with a texture. So I'm going to grab that. This texture is just a radial gradient basically. So I can show the texture itself. So let me just bring the image editor in here and I'll just choose the gradient. So this is just a radial gradient, right? That's the texture we're plugging in. And we want to plug this into the alpha. And then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to come over to UV editing and I'm going to select that object and I'm just going to UV it right so now you can see that the gradient is in the right place which is cool and if I jump now back over to the shading view we don't see anything the moment we don't really see anything happening though there's still a seam so we need to come into our material and scroll down until we see viewport display and set this to alpha blend so now that will blend out that edge and you can see that we have our reflections without the scene which is looking pretty good so we can save that jump back over now into the modeling tab and let's see if we can fix some of the other issues like the light reflection here for example so for this guy there's a few ways to fix this they used to be in cycles used to be able to turn off the multiple importance option here and it would usually get rid of reflection so So you can see that that is actually doing a pretty good job. We can just disable it and then it's not coming in. So just disable the reflection of the light source there. For some reason, there isn't an issue here, but what happens is when it's rendering, it looks like it's creating a strange problem there. So just something to keep in mind with the render. I don't know why it creates this kind of weird seam. It's just like there isn't a problem there. It's just that it sort of, as it works through the scene itself, it seems to be like having some sort of weird thing, but there's nothing going on there. I just wanted to kind of mention that as well. Cool, so that's all looking pretty good. The other thing that's also worth mentioning is that if you're having any issues with light sources, or you want to do something specific with lights, because later on as we get into, say, adding rim lights into things, We might move a light source kind of down here, and then we want to basically have, sort of move this kind of around here, and then we want to have a very, very bright light to create like a cool rim light, and we can move this down, and then maybe kind of rotate the light, see if we can just position this a bit better. I think also because this has the damped track on it, it's a bit harder to position, So I'm just gonna try and do that there. Yeah, so you can sort of see that as we are trying to create this rim light, which is gonna be a light on the edge of the B tool, the problem we have is it's also impacting the floor and that's not very good. So one of the ways that we can prevent that from happening is by using Blender's light linking feature, which is a new feature they added recently in Blender. So to do that, it's really easy set up. All you do is you click new and it will create a light link for this particular light. And then from there, you drag the collections that you want to be impacted by this light into that area there. And you'll see now that it's only impacting the backdrop. So if we untick that, it's now going to be impacting the beetle. And so with this floor circle, we need to just bring this into the backdrop. And now you can see that the rim lighting that we've added in there is only impacted by the beetle. So this is a nice way to basically have lights that are only impacting certain areas. And so you can use this for impacting reflections and things on the floor as well, because on lights you can individually turn off the way that the reflection is working. So if you come to viewport visibility here, you can see that we have a glossy reflection. So if we turn glossy off, that won't be captured in the reflections. So if you wanted to isolate a light on the floor and remove the reflection, you can turn off the ray visibility and glossy. So that's another way to remove that sharp reflection that you sometimes get. So yeah, but that's the kind of basics of the scene. So let's just get this back into here. At the moment in EV, this is looking kind of crazy, right? Because we have our rim lighting, and in EV, the light linking doesn't work. So if we turn this guy off, it's gonna look a lot more how we'd expect. So as we're working, we're gonna be rendering everything, the final result within cycles. So it's good to just maybe turn on cycles as you're working. It's a little bit harder to visualize when you're working in EV. So that's something that isn't gonna work for say light links if you're relying heavily on light linking and you have lights. I mean, you can definitely position lights a bit better than what I have here so that it isn't going to necessarily be impacting the floor in the same way and maybe tone down the intensity of that as well because it is pretty bright. So yeah, so you can get it to be a bit more reasonable in terms of the EV view, but obviously that's gonna look quite different when you jump over into your cycle. So something to just keep in mind there for how, when you're doing your presentation and everything."
+    }
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+}