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+  "text": " When I'm in 3D, I'm like, okay, what would be useful for me? So ambient occlusion, GI reflections, subsurface scattering, subsurface catching raw, specular lighting. So I just kind of pull out the stuff I think would be useful for me. And then I jump into Nuke and create a recipe. All right, so now we're diving into kind of the, you know, lighting and material exploration mixed in with a little bit of how you kind of comped everything together because you already kind of hinted at how much work was done in comp with some of these shots and I'm just super interested to see how you know you got from the raw render to what it finally looked like. So we'll start with that first shot which is it's that nice indoor very inviting indoor kind of space with a little bit of light spilling in with a little bit of like haze in there. So just walk us through the lighting, the materials, everything that made this shot shine as much as it did. I knew this scene, I wanted it to feel warm, very vibrant, like some place you would want to work in, almost like a kind of cool, futuristic, I don't know, museum space, working space. So I knew like the materials had to feel really organic and that's why I went with a lot of woods, You know, and some nice browns and you know, these materials are pretty straightforward for the most parts It's really just piping in a good diffuse texture With a good bump and good reflection roughness roughness is so key But yeah, I think for this one, it's just you know, not overdoing the specular just making sure that yeah You know, you have to strike like this balance of not kind of overdoing it Like you could go really crazy with the specular and it feels super glossy but you don't want it to feel like not reflective enough. So getting that right balance. Yeah, so another thing, like if you look at the plants and I'll just kind of focus in on this area here, like you can see when the light hits it, it feels a little bit translucent. It gets a little bit more like yellow green, but hop into the material. I'm actually not using a subsurface scattering for this, but you know, sometimes it's backlighting translucency. The setting works really well, especially like a flat object. You know, like if we look here, it's really just like more of like a flat geometry of like a volume and sometimes the setting works really well. And if we, you know, to turn this off, actually, we just copied a exact parameter. So I can just paste it back in. You know, if I turn that off, you know, it's totally different. It's a huge difference. Like you're getting a lot of shadow. It's a darker green, it doesn't feel as vibrant, but when you bring that chance to listen to you, it feels again like a whole lot more realistic, a whole lot more vibrant, a whole lot more inviting. And that's essentially what we did texturized to make the plants just feel a lot more, I guess, natural and alive. That's crazy because at first glance it's like, oh, that's subsurface scattering. You almost forget, like I always forget about that backlighting. And I assume those those plans are they like single polygon? It's not like it's just a flat polygon. There's no like depth to it. So it works even that much better with that backlighting. Exactly. So backlighting on all of the plants or yeah, on all of the plants. Because again, these are just like flat polygons. So sometimes when you you get that chance. I mean, in an instance like this, you want to use translucency versus subsurface. Because again, there's no thickness here. Right. So, you know, translucency is a really good option, especially in situations like this. Now, as far as how you have the light kind of filtering in, I just love the shadows that are being cast everywhere. And it's like, like, it looks like you really are directed the light on the on your logo as well. So if you want to like walk us through the placement of the lights and how you kind of ended up putting them where they where they ultimately are. Yeah, you know, lighting is so nuanced. Yes. But this scene in particular too, like I definitely remember like trying a bunch of different lighting setups to see what would look like. I tried a sunlight, it felt too harsh. But eventually, you know, I went with like a really, really bright area light and we have two of them. kind of just like, disabled them and kind of show you what's happening and like where they place in the scene to kind of give us that light. So with the vibe I wanted to carry across was one that it felt again like this space that's really open and very natural and the lighting kind of had to play into that. So yeah, if you navigate the scene, just kind of go back out a bit so we can see where this light is. And this is like a key light. Generally when I'm lighting, I don't like to use more lights than I have to. So we're using one light and we're definitely getting, you know, a good lighting setup. But one thing I think we locked here was that we were getting a little bit too much shadow on some of these areas and it's getting a little bit too dark and I wanted it to feel a little bit more vibrant. Um, so that's why I use like another area light from the other side, just like Diminish some of the shadow and you can see like when we're getting, you know This additional lighting up here It begins to kind of have like that kind of outdoor indoor feel that I was going for and it's kind of like warm and inviting but you know, it looks simple, but you have to like move around this light to get the place in a way that it feel it doesn't feel like two lights. It kind of feels like one. Right. Yeah. You got to be a little bit strategic when it comes to that. But also, you know, you want to set the light in a way where you're getting the shadows in these areas to bring out the details of like these little planks. And again, like look at the difference when I turn this off. Like all of this isn't, you know, it's kind of dark. It's in shadow. And I really like to have gradation on surfaces, like especially. Yeah, this is like too big of a blotcher shadow Yeah, it's kind of leading your eye there because that's so much contrast right there exactly So, you know here we take some of it out and this to see in this generally lights up and then for me and light here We just have like a touch of volume metric light Okay, interesting. So if I turn this retro environment off you can see that for a metric light goes away. So Turn this back on Just that subtle amount of that volume metrics just makes everything feel a lot more natural. Yeah, exactly. It kind of makes it feel like a little bit more vibrant. And if you jump into Nuke, all we're doing here is just making this scene more vibrant. So this is just the raw render of the scene. You're just sitting here. And all I'm doing, I'm like, this is really close. And for a scene like this, all I usually do is just add a little bit more specular here. But also, before I do that, I also like to render the volumetrics as a separate pass. OK. I take it out, and then I do all the editing. I just add a little bit of specular. Then I added that back. And now it's just all little color corrects. So I'm giving it a little bit more saturation from here to here. Not too much. You don't want to go too crazy. And then I'm doing a color grade. And that color grade is really doing a decent amount of work, just in terms of making it more vibrant from here to here. Then a color correct, just to make sure it's light enough. And at CC, it looks good. A little bit of a sharpen to make sure it's crispy. Oh, yeah. Now I like to just do a clamp. Some of these leaves are getting a little bit hot right here. So sometimes a clamp could just kind of help to bring it down a little bit. Over exposed areas, yeah. That's why I use aces for everything now, so. There you go, aces. Chat Ashley, get everyone on aces. I know, it's great. And then I have a little bit of a glow to make it feel like, like when you have a subtle glow to some stuff, it makes it feel not surreal, but maybe like, pristine or- Or dreamlike almost. Yeah, but you don't want to overdo it. It's relatively subtle. So as far as like AOV passes goes, like you rendered out volumetric separately, so you could dial that in as much as you wanted. You add specular and that's about it, right? So no amount of crazy compositing, no object buffers. Yeah, and well, I never do object buffers anymore. It's all about crypto. Really? Yeah. You try to get, oh, cause of crypto math. Yeah, with crypto maths, it's so nice. I can, you know, you could pick any object in here And it creates a mat. Dude, it's, it changed my world when I learned about crypto mats. Yeah, it's great. So you just run that out and you have all the masks that you need. Yeah, and that's about it. And do you always render that out just in case you need it? Because did you use the crypto mat much in the shotter? Yes, it's really, I think I had to touch up something somewhere. I always just run it out in case you never know when you might need to speak something. It's just so easy to do. Yeah. And then Jeremy Cox made this note that I call jailux that just has like a bunch of different settings like chromatic operation and highlights and all that. So I just kind of threw this at the end of every render that kind of give it like some chromatic operation and some of the little things and. And how do you get that? Do you hit up Jeremy Cox on Twitter and be like, hey, jerk, give me this thing or what? I don't know why he doesn't sell this as a new gizmo. I know, right? Yeah. Well, I have to I have to add a little link somewhere to give him a shout out and tell him to release it somewhere. Yeah, I mean, give it to me. I imaginary forces. I use it on every single project. It's great. That's awesome. It's great. So yeah, that's about it for this scene. It's crazy how much you get with some shots, how much you can get done within the camera. And especially, I think that's interesting about the lights. Like, you know, we have lights camera render at school motion with David Ariov. And David is in the mind where it's like, he'll put in 50 lights because he wants to have, you know, every little dial of control and he's a maniac with lights. But then you have, you know, other artists that are just like, I want, like, if I can get away with one light and like bounce cards, like, that's all I want. you know, just the most minimalistic lighting setup is possible. And like really for a very natural scene like this, you really only want to make it look as natural as possible, the like one light source, if it's the sun, you know, maybe a bounce somewhere. So very important considerations with lighting for natural scenes. You know, that's a good point. And I think it really depends on what you're lighting as well. Like if you want something to feel more realistic, like I would probably use two or three lights. For sure. And like if you're lighting a subject, then there's more considerations there into play. Yeah, if it's a studio lighting setup, like you can really go nuts with it. If you want to dial in reflections on a product shot or you know, whatever. And one thing I want to point out in something that David Ariov would be really excited about me to point out is that you're not using an HDRI. This is all just lights. Like he's like some people I know are very much like, HDRIs are fine, but like I never use them. And then there's some people that are like, all I use is HDRIs and that kind of, you're giving up a lot of control when you do that because the lighting's just always baked in and it's you really can't art direct it, but. I always, I usually start off, it just depends on the type of scene. I usually start off with HDRI. Okay, just to quickly get something in there. Yeah, it's like a base. Like if it's a daytimeish scene or like a brighter scene, you need a HDRI to kind of fill in the lights. And then the aerial lights are just like the key lights. Yeah. Yeah. That's typically how I approach it. I think, yeah, I'm actually surprised the scene doesn't have a HDRI. Well, I mean, well, and the thing is, This is like your area light. It was quick to, I don't know if a lot of people noticed, but your light is fairly small and that's what's allowing you to get those, kind of like those hard shadows that looks like it's being cast by the sun. Yes, exactly. Yeah, it is crazy how much, when you also built up your surrounding area, so you are getting all that really nice bounce light. I'm sure if you took that outer wall there away, you'd probably lose a lot of that. Exactly. Yeah, I also take into consideration how global illumination affects all this stuff because that's super important. But yeah, that's a good point too. Yeah, this light is really small for that reason so it can get crisper shadows, so it feels like a sunlight. But sometimes the combination too is, it's crispier here, but then it's a little bit soft. But when you can have those crisper lights, it definitely does help. like, like this is really nice here. Because you can tell like there's a main source light coming from this direction, but you just kind of get like some subtle lighting and shadow over here, but it doesn't feel like too artificial. Yeah, it just looks like it's some kind of spill or something like that. Like it's very hard to tell that there's two light sources in here. Exactly. That's that's how you cheat guys. Awesome. So let's go on to the rock shot because those textures on those rocks are stinking gorgeous. And some of those rocks like have so much detail like the gem look like translucent rocks look like there's so much detailed doubt in there. Did you just find a bunch of rock textures or like how much of it was getting a rock texture and then kind of adding in imperfections and stuff like that. See how about we just hop into this blue stone and you know see what's happened with that material. Yeah that one's like the most striking where I feel like I paused it and spent the most amount of time looking at that texture on that rock. Pretty happy with where I landed with this one. So let's talk about I guess the color first thing. Like a lot of the color is just coming from the refractive color balloon. You know, if I turn this off, it's just like a solid stone. But a lot of the colors coming from this and, you know, just having the right level of roughness. So it doesn't feel like completely transparent. And then, you know, look at the reflect the surface where you way, getting like these little details, all of that is being piped through from this reflection roughness. Let me just zoom in on this node so you can kind of see it. And, you know, it's regenerated by like this texture that I love and probably use on every project. But yeah, like when you look at the, you know, the reflection now, I mean, there's a bump map. So you kind of see some of these imperfections, but like we're still losing a lot of details in those reflections. Let me just pull out this bump map too. So now like the whole surface just feels like super smooth. Let's see what happens when I put back in this roughness, right? Like, you see how much that's doing on the surface to kind of give us like those details to make it feel like really tactile. And that's why reflection roughness is so important when like you want to make something feel realistic. That's really big in the process. And then, you know, bump, A bump map is always to just kind of make it feel a little bit more tactile. And I'm using like two different materials. I'm using like this grayscale griller, crusty material, and then like this normal map. And I like to combine a few like bump layers just to kind of give me like more depth. So I'm just going to plug that back in here. Where does like it look like those little white, like look like ding marks, like someone threw this thing. Like there's so much like story in like, like this rock looks like someone's been throwing it around and you picked it up and made it a part of this animation. You know, like it was been on a journey. So like, because that's so there's actually two materials being blended here, right? So the one we just took a look at was that first material. And I was like, you know, this looks like too perfect. You know, let's figure out a way to create some imperfections. So then I created like this other material. Right, like this kind of white material. But then I'm using like, one of the same crusty materials I'm using for the bump, like this crust material I'm using to blend this white material on the blue material together. Okay. So I put that together. That's where you're getting. get a little bit of those ding mark. Yeah, exactly. That makes sense. And if I let me just plug this into the surface directly so you can kind of see like what that's doing. Okay. Yeah. Well, wherever you see like these white marks, that's where you're going to get the blending between those two materials. And again, when you stack, when you keep stacking stuff together is when you really get to see the detail and can really enhance the look of an object and texture. It's like all the different transparent rocks, so essentially using the same texture. The only thing that's different is just the color of the refraction. So if you wanted to make it like a pink rock, you just make that color pink and it's pink. So you know. So no subsurface scattering on those rocks. It's, you know, it's kind of funny because it's like, well, of course, like a rock. I don't know how much of a rock has subsurface scattering on it. Like it's just translucent, right? And it's got the blurry, you know, the rough refraction on the inside. So yeah, like that's really all you need. A lot of these rocks are kind of like close to glass in terms of, you know, it's material quality. So it's kind of riffing off of that idea when thinking about how to create that rock. And some of these other rocks are just kind of like way simpler textures. This was like a tile texture. It's basically like a marble texture. I just got to diffuse and I got to normal and that's pretty much all that I needed. And I of course used my very favorite metal grime texture for the reflection roughness and boom. You know, like usually what you need to make a good texture is like a good diffuse, a good bump and a good reflection roughness. And that does a lot to the work. But that also just depends on what the texture is. Again, like a lot of these other materials, it's the same concept. But that like wavy, the rock in the center that looks like, almost looks like you use some kind of noise or yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, it's a marble texture. It's a marble texture, yeah. Yeah, it's like the same concepts. You know, this one doesn't even have any roughness because like this, I'm piping this into a bump map. I mean, it did so much work already. Right. You know, I didn't really have to throw anything on top of that. And I probably like, again, like I like to combine bumps. So between this and that, you know, that did, um, did a lot of the work. And I'm just blending these two bump maps together to kind of give it like some of these little imperfections in certain places. Yeah, it's crazy how sometimes you, all the, like if you have a really fine detailed bump, you actually, that does all the roughness for you, you know? And another thing that I feel like a lot of people sometimes lose is like another important aspect of textures is just how big your roughness maps are. Like sometimes I'll see someone with like a fingerprint roughness map or something like that. And the fingerprints relative to the size of the thing are either way too big or way too small, especially when you see the actual fingerprint. You can make it out on the object. So sense of scale is such a huge thing, especially when these are such simple objects and you're trying to... These are tiny little stones, so you got to make those textures fit that scale. Yeah, exactly. And yeah, you really have to be cognizant of that and make sure like all these things work together. And as far as the lights in that scene, was it fairly similar to the last scene where you just have like a couple lights and we got we got three lights in a dome light. All right. Yeah. I mean, this is what I'm saying. Like I usually always use a dome light. So for me not to have a dome light, I think that was like pretty shocking. Well, in this, if you zoom out at your scene, because it looks like you, is it just like a few plain objects that you have different colors on and that's what's making up the overall scene? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. All right. Yeah. That's a good question, you Jay. That's a good one. So like, I'm going to start black. Usually how I approach lighting, I typically start with a dorm light just to kind of give me some really rough fill in lighting. And that's no HDRI, that's just general ambient light. There's an HDRI on it. Oh, okay. But it's just like, it's not really doing the lighting. It's just kind of filling the lights. And then I usually have like a key light. And the reason I have an HDRI is if I didn't, like these shadows get really, really dark and it feels really intense. So then like a dome light helps to just soften that out and make it feels like a more daytime lit scene. And that's why I typically use a dome lights in conjunction with like a other area light. I could have stopped here, but I sometimes like to put a nice little rim light for some extra detail. And this is what this second light is. So I did that. And you know, it just kind of gives us some nice reflections and lighting around the edges here. So like, if it's two lights, I'm gonna add it. It's usually like a rim light and a key light. And then I was like this I had like some foreground stones and they were getting a little bit dark It's like let me just add a little bit of a light Yeah, exactly and that's that's about it. You know, yeah, we've seen like this. I mean Like the key light and the area light they're doing all of the heavy lifting right The rim light, just a little extra some-some. And yeah, and then, you know, then you look for like problem areas like this. And yeah, that's about it in terms of lighting. It's pretty much like, yeah, you, lighting on a base level is like, it's an easy thing, but it's also very hard, right? Like you, I always like to relay it to like painting. You're painting with light and like if you watch Bob Ross, what does he do first? He blocks out the main forms of his painting, right? Like there's gonna be some tree line here and then once he gets the he blocks out those main shapes and where things are gonna be that's where he starts adding in all the highlights and you know all the little details and if you think of lighting like that where you got your big brush strokes, which are your key and and yeah, your key lights, and then you got your tiny brushes to start filling in the details like your fill and your rims and stuff like that. And like once I started thinking about lighting that way, it totally made sense. And like just having a developing that good eye for like what's really distracting or what am I not getting really good detail with it? Because that texture on that rock means jack crap if you can't actually have the light hitting it at the right angle where you see all that detail. And that's the approach. Like I try, certain scenes, I can put more lights, but I don't put more lights than I have to. And that's typically my approach. No, I had just a random question because I feel like certain people place lights differently. Do you, I know some people that do that whole active object as camera, where you can actually look through the light as it was a camera and place your light that way and aim your light, or do you use that much or do you just literally just place things around and rotate? I place my key light usually at an angle, like the left side or the right side, but the whole idea is to get some gradation. There's a clear lighter area and then there's a clear darker area. So it doesn't feel flat. That's what makes lighting boring. what is like large areas of just flat color. Like clearly it's right ahead and it goes from, it's a gradation here. Like it goes from light to darker and that makes it feel interesting. And that's typically just, yeah, how I approach lighting. Yes, this ended up really, really nice. Nice soft shadows there. The textures look amazing. Such a really cool shot. Yeah, and this dome light too is just making it vibrant, you know, it's not doing a ton of lighting, but it's just to kind of make those shadows feel less harsh. And dome lights are another one of those things where I know when I started using HDR eyes and stuff like that. And the biggest thing with the HDR eyes is that if you take it too far, like you can see the exposure level on that dome lights pretty, you took it down on the negatives. Because if you have that too high, then you've run into that problem where you're just talking about where you just make everything look so ambient and flat that you just, yeah, it just looks so ugly. Because now my HGRI is providing like, kind of like real lighting to the scene, and that's not what I want. I want it to just kind of just fill in a little bit so it doesn't, It doesn't feel like too dark. So now, as far as like AOVs, kind of similar set up from the last scene, or did you do anything different? Yeah, pretty similar. Like what I do is I evaluate the scene in 3D and I'm like, oh, this is looking really good. All I would probably need to do is a little color correct and punch up the saturation a little bit. I just like to bring out the specular map because a lot of sexiness is in the specular maps all the time. So let's just, this is like the raw render from cinema. And when you pull out the specular map, you really get to see like, how that roughness map is applied. And like, that's what really gives you like, that realistic detail, like a lot of the specular roughness. So like, I like to bring that, and just kind of apply it back on the difference. You know, this is the difference here in the calm. Oh yeah, really makes it pop. Exactly. So I do that and then from there on it's like, you know, a little saturation to really make it pop. Color correct, make the shadows a little touch of glue. Touch. Very subtle. Yeah, just super subtle. Yeah, a little jail looks action, you know, you kind of get some kind of chromatic aberration on the edge there. Really subtle, don't go crazy with the chromatic aberration. And that's it. You know, with shots like this, when it looks really good from 3D, all I know I need, what I need to do is just, you know, Give that extra, that 1% from 99 to 100. Right, exactly. And, you know, that little extra bit just kind of makes it feel a lot more vibrant. And yeah, that's more push. But again, like the specular, like look what it's doing on the S compared to, you know, what it was before. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. So is that when you bring out because I I have never used That's nuke right? This is nuke. Yeah, so I've never used nuke before as far as like when you put your Specular pass what like are you using a like a after effects equivalent blending mode or what are you doing to add that on? You know you could plus it's just like after effects into it's a better mode. So got you Yeah, you could you could do it you roll plus yeah multiply like all of the same same stuff cool cool you can do and I'm probably like adjusting like one stone or maybe maybe actually I was like the specular for this stone was too much oh for sure yep yep so then I omitted it and that's why it looks kind of blown out right there right especially was right by the logo eyes are really gonna be Drowning there already. Exactly. So that's why, you know, trusty crypto mat is helpful. Yeah, huge. Awesome. That's the stones. And that's the stones. So we got, oh man, the next shot, the bamboo forest, right? So for this shot, like, I love the lighting, the time of day. You can definitely tell you got these shafts of light. What was the process like getting settled on what kind of like time of day or angle of light because there's so many objects that can contribute to the shadows and giving texture to the scene. It might have been a difficult process trying to decide what lighting setup end up with. Yeah, 100%. Like I went back and forth with a couple of different setups. Let me actually just jump back to our older seeding file where I had like three sun sky rigs because I I couldn't decide which one I liked best. So let's loot the render view here. So I think this one here is the one that I ended up going with. And how much of the proceed, did you know that the preceding shot to this was that rock scene where you have the warm lighting there as well to hear was that a consideration for lighting at all? Or did you, for the most part, think about everything in a very modular way? Yeah, that's a good question. No, actually, because there was a different scene before that. And I scrapped that one, and I shuffled it out. But I definitely lined the scenes up based on what felt good coming one after the other. Yeah, that's kind of how I arranged it. So this is kind of the setup that we went with. And maybe I'll just take a quick screenshot in case need to reference that. But before, um, so yeah, for this setup, what I was really liking, um, again, like the changes subtle, but I loved how the light was kind of flooding here. It kind of felt like early afternoon. And then, you know, it's just kind of interesting to see how like these subtle light changes, like changes the vibe of the, you know, entire atmosphere and I'll just do like the next light setup. I'll take a screenshot of that. And we can kind of cycle between them. Yeah, so this lighting setup, it looks like there's more focus on like the foreground almost leading your eye to the logo. And here, wow, this looks just so much more dramatic. Right, exactly. But this one, I was really liking how, you know, there's shadow here. But then the way, you know, the fulens were being lit, the way the specular was bouncing off these fulens, I'm like, wow, this looks really good. like you're getting that specular hits there. And it, I don't know, it feels magical. It feels really, it felt really nice. And I really love that. So I was trying to figure out like what direction I should go in and just take a quick screenshot of that. And we could kind of cycle between the three looks. This is what we ended up going with. Not the final final, but this like is split the difference. So like in one version, we had a lot of lights on the bottom In the other version, we had like a lot of light here. And this vision, you know, we had like light here and some lights on the bottom. But if you went, if you go, it's like the very, very final of vision, just take a look at that. In this version, you see like we're getting tons of light spillage over on this side and in the front. So we really kind of split the difference and really got some of these areas lit that we wanted to touch. But the only thing was that the logo, when I did this light setup, was not lit. So I was like, ah, shoot, I have to create a whole different rig of the light, the logo. And this is why I love light linking in cinema. I mean, with Redshift, all I had to do was just put include, drag the logo in, and it was simple as that. But then too, like if we look at the very final version this. Yeah, it's like it's an animated light as well. So you know, you kind of get some movement with the trees along with the moving bamboo. But yeah, this was it's for this year, I know it's an outdoor scene. So I know it was would have been like a sun sky rig. And I wanted to feel like really outdoorsy. So simple in terms of the light setup, tricky in terms of like, what direction should the light be facing to get the feel that you want. Right, because there's so many, because I mean, you could really spend a lot of time on this scene just taking in all the detail and like where you want the eye to be led to. And I feel like with those first two light options, I feel like there was a distinct focus that your eye would go to, like either the foreground or the right side. And the one you kind of ultimately went with just feels like your eye isn't immediately going anywhere first. It's just like, okay, I start here maybe, but then I'm slowly led to all these different other places versus one part of the shot just dominating and taking all the attention. So I think that was a really great ultimate choice there that you made. And the animation of the lights too just adds so much texture and subtle detail there as well. Like I didn't even notice that the first time you played that, but then the God raise if you want to talk about how you dialed that in, and did you use some kind of, or was that just natural based on the objects in the scene, or did you use some kind of gobo or? Yeah, so I used a spotlight, an additional spotlight, just so I could kind of, a direct way those rays would be coming from without changing the lighting of the sun. Oh, smart, yeah. Yeah, and you know, it's nice, with Redshift, I could dictate how much like this light is actually affecting the geometry of the scene. So I could really pull down the diffuse and glossy. So you know, you still kind of get some highlights from that light, but it's mostly affecting the volume to kind of give us this volumetric light. and I could pull this out as a separate pass for this, but I could then come back in. But then yeah, I enable all the lights and get this lovely vibrant scene. That's the one thing with volume metrics and that fog that really adds a lot of depth and believability to a scene. Because without that fog volume, and you can just see so far back, it doesn't feel real because you don't have that real atmosphere that you were in a very, like this just feels like a very misty, like you could almost feel the dew in the air, you know? And yeah, speaking of fog too, you know, that's why I wanted to have like this fog as well, just to give it like a little bit more atmosphere. Now, is that a separate light creating that fog or how did you get that fog in the background? Cause you got the one like volumetric light with the God rays. Redshift environment object, there's a fog tab here that you can dial that in on here just to create like in a specific fog in the environment. And you can see I mean like how tall it is. So this guy's supposed to point it and falls off in addition with the volumetric lights. So two separate things, contos together. I guess we can jump into materials now because I don't think we cover material is that. So I'm assuming similar trick with the plants where you got that like translucency with the backlighting option there. Yeah, exactly. It's the same set up. It's like, you know, you plug the textures in like the normals, the diffuse, and it's really just adding like a little backlighting to make it feel, you know, just robust, give it like that natural feel. Yeah, but also making sure that the specular was there and it specular felt good. So if I looked at the specular in a past, I could kind of see some of these details that I know it could really help to bring this stuff in comp. So yeah, I mean, in terms of texturing, this probably might have been like one of the simpler ones. You just get like pull bamboo texture from somewhere and. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I had to I had to create this bamboo texture actually. Oh really? Okay. Okay, here it is. So let me just open that bamboo diffuse that I got. It just didn't work well. So I actually just had to find like a high res version, like a high res picture of a piece of bamboo. I just took an image and made a really high res map for that bamboo. And this kind of uses texture as a bump map as well. So you took a high res segment of the bamboo, just copied it to fit a long bamboo stick. Exactly. And just copied and pasted one section over and over again. So the bamboo looks great, even if it did take a little bit of manual work there. As far as comping goes, let's take a little look into that, because we had the volumetric light, and then you also had the fog consideration there for this one. The comp really just helped to make it a lot more vibrant. Yeah, so this is like this straight render from cinema. And if you turn the background like you see that fog, I just wanted to pump that up a little bit here. So you just kind of added it on. Oh, there. Yeah. That really makes it. Yeah. So you can do exactly. Now you can really see it. Then I had those galleries. This was a pass and I just took that made it more intense, blew it. And then put it back onto the render. So this is the difference between the two. So it's just like a little bit more. That blurring is like, I feel like just that subtle blur helps it look like it's filtering through like, you know, the the morning dew or the morning fog versus being so sharp in contrast. Yeah, because like it looks 3D and it's like it's blended onto the render which is like sharp and then you have like the blurry one is blending back onto it. You know, it's just like those subtle touches that really help and I'm using a I'm doing a mask so you're only getting like the top area. I'm applying this like new brighter God ray to the top and it's kind of just like feathered coming down. So it's not blowing out the entire scene. Exactly. And again, it's like gradation. Everywhere. So you're going back to the specular now and again, like I love the specular because this is where you really get to bring out all the detail. like if you look at the blades of grass, there's so much more well-defined in here. I like those highlights make it feel a little bit more real. But I think this was specifically for the bamboo because if you look at this, you're not getting the roughness coming out as much. So if I bring it here, I'm like, oh, let's bring up that roughness up a little bit more. And then I'll just make it green so it blends in. And then I add it back to the scene. And if you just look here, that's doing so much more for the detail. even in the back here. Yeah, it looks like because you know bamboo has got that waxy sheen to it and that's really like before that it was pretty dull and then getting that extra specular really sells it you know. Exactly and that's you know part of the process where you're looking at this here and you have to evaluate what can be improved or what can be fixed. So boom and that's why I love my crypto map because I could just make all those selections all nice and good. I mean, I could just select all the bamboo. So yeah, that was that. And then I just applied specular to the entire scene. So just to show you how that looks, that's a little bit more specular. Sufferly don't wanna go crazy with it. That's a clamp in case anything's too flat out. Done, I just pushed with the saturation. That saturation boost. Yeah. It's huge. It really does. It really helps to make the seed more vibrant. Right. Real subtle color, correct. But the grade is really what I think. Yeah. You know, gives it like that interesting look. So the difference between that and that. And they're just like pushing some blue, a little bit of blue into the mid-toons and the gamma. Give it a touch of sharpen and a little bit of a glow. Gotta get that glow. Yeah, I mean, if you want to see what that glow is doing, you know, it really works because there's like the God rays and all that stuff. Right. And the bluing is here does feel really nice. Yeah, having that overlay a glow just really ties all those different volumetric effects together. kind of seeing like some of the Glow up bouncing off the rock and of course, you know some good old subtle Jere looks Jimmy Cox looks exactly, you know just just here on the edges like As a thing about chromatic operation, you just want to be subtle like some yes, so so but it it does do It does make the render sexier Yeah. So that little cinematic realism, like cinematic quality. Egg. Exactly. Oh, wow. Night and day. Yeah. So, you know, a washed out that looked before. I mean, obviously, runners could take it far, but like, if you know what could be improved, you can definitely take it to a different level and come up. Yeah. I mean, me personally, and I feel like I know a lot of people that do this as well. where it's like you have your main render in Redshift or Octane or whatever, and then just like the finishing, like all the finishing stuff, I feel like I do a lot of that in the post effects option where you could do your color correction in camera. You can add a lot in camera, just the white balance, change the white balance color, whatever, and do that all there. But yeah, I don't know. I feel like there's a certain segment of artists that are like, you know what, I never liked compositing and I'm just gonna do everything in camera and then there's some like yourself where it's like, I want that flexibility. Well, I would say you're kind of in the middle, you know? Like you're not rendering out every single pass or, you know. Yeah, this is just like the push to like, no matter how good a render is from 3D, you can always make it a little bit better and calm. For sure. I remember like Nick Campbell saying like, Never ever just do your raw render and never, they at least bring it in Photoshop, do a little curves adjustment or something. Subtle, you could always just push it a tad. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, as you can see here. It's not too, it's little subtle things. But I mean, it's a bunch of subtle things that you're doing that the end result is very noticeable, you know? All those little things, like even all the little details in how you build up your scene and the different foliage and the lighting considerations and stuff like that. And that's what I love about your work is that, you know, you have that eye for something that can take, when you make these five small decisions, it's like night and day, you know? And that's all that you really need to take to the next level. It takes so long to know what those things are. I like to instinctively know what to do. And yeah, that's kind of what I've been learning. How much of that is just, like I'm sure it's experience and just developing your eye for that kind of stuff. But do you ever do it where, you know, you just walk away for a little bit and come back to it fresh and then you see it with fresh eyes and you're like, you know what? Now that I see this kind of new, I know I need to do this, this and this. You know, but I did do one where I was like going between them. This definitely wasn't the first try. Yeah, as you said, it takes time to figure out what the best combination is. But when you get it, you know. All right, so now we jump into that thread scene where in the viewport, it just looks like a bunch of splines. So everything is done in render and materials using these hair materials. And I'm really interested to see how the Redshift hair material system kind of works. Yeah, so with a scene like this, because there's so much detail, you really don't have to go too crazy with the materials. The nice thing about Redshift is that it just uses Cinema's native hair tools like one-to-one. So there's no special Redshift tag or anything like that. This is all hair material. So if I jump into this hair material, it's the color, you know, specular normal. There's not much to it. There's just like a little bit of variation in the thickness. And yeah, that's about it. And as we mentioned before, we're just using an additional layer to give you some of these stray hairs to make it feel more realistic. But just in terms of texturing, it's really the detail and the fibers that's given us the texture there. Now, as far as lighting goes, it looks like we've got your standard Sikani lighting setup where you got the dome light rocking. You got two area lights and that's about it. And I'm sure with like this kind of scene, like you're zoomed in on this one area, it looks like you were very deliberate as far as where the shadows was being cast because then it's allowing that your logo in the center there to really pop because it's got that darker background. Yeah, exactly. And again, it was always crazy to see DCs before I saw lights. Holy cow. That's pretty psychedelic. It is, that's a whole aesthetic. But you know, just using that dome light to fill in the lights. So that's a pretty, is that dome bright? That looks like it's pretty cranked up. Um, no, there we go. Never mind. Yeah. So it just updated. I would like to pull it down again, just to soften the shadows. Yeah. And then this is my key light. Oh, well, I guess we're using two, there's two key lights in here. I just wanted to like bring some color into it. So that's why it's side by side. So we have like a yellow. So you got a little yellow going on there. Yeah, exactly. just to make it feel like a little bit more vibrant. And then we have like that white key light as well. Are those two key lights? Like they look like the right, yeah, yeah. Against each other. There's overhead lights. Exactly. And that's just to like make it feel lighting wise, like a little bit more vibrant. So like, say far to pull this out. You know, the colors just don't feel as rich. Like you're not getting on yellow. it's just very pink. But now, like, you add that yellow one, you know, you can really kind of get someone out warmer color in there that makes it feel like a little bit more rich. It's also like kind of accentuating those yellow streaks a little bit as well. Yeah, like how the lights are complementary, complementing the the actual colors of the strands. Yeah, exactly. And you know, like, like because the scene is just so dense of information, we don't really need to do that much with lighting and texturing. So from that perspective, it was pretty easy. Let's talk about the little logo and like the hairs on there. Did you just, you know, apply some hair to that and some little purplish material? So actually this came in and like I combed the hair to the direction of the S. Oh, cool. And there's like, there's two layers, like some shorter and some longer. Well, yeah, you know, it's the same thing. You know, hair material, this is the color. And this one has like some kink and clump and some other stuff so it feels like a little bit more frizzy and organic. But yeah, that's the crux of it really. Looks like a cat spit it out or something. Yeah, exactly. But when you're a little bit full for a way, you know, it looks more pristine. Yeah. Yeah, that's about it for this one. Very cool. Now, complies what kind of comping magic did you do? This is the render that's straight from Cinema 4D. And if it looks different, it's because Redshift actually changed the hair algorithm right after I completed the scene. So that's why this looks like I originally intended it to. Oh, interesting. So there's something in the newer version that maybe makes the colors more dull or something like that? Yeah, exactly. could bring that back and comp. But yes, it is what it is. So like, you know, first thing is so like, again, like this one did it like didn't really need a lot of comp. This one really good, like right out the box. For sure. It's like the logo could be a little bit brighter. So I just brought that up. You know, classic. I like to just push that specular pass. This is a specular. This is like the reflection. So I just bring it back, add it a touch. Nothing too crazy. This is the difference. It's a touch. A little bit of reflection. That's some color correct. That's what really pumps that up. A little gray, old shoppin' old glue. And boom, that's it. That's awesome. It's like the secret Sikani sauce for all these renders. I mean, that's it. Is that for the cohesiveness of all these different shots? It's like you don't want to get too drastic with the types of compositing that you're doing and stuff like that, I assume. Yeah, sometimes before project, like I would find like a good, I don't know, sauce and use it across different shots. So I guess that was the same. But yeah, it's great. You know, like this looks good. But then when you're comping it, you're like, Oh, yeah, this really makes it better. Like, look at the difference environment. See with these. Yeah, just all the colors are really more vibrant and I think just kicking that logo off the shadows background there really helps a lot too. Yeah, and it looks motivated too. It looks like it's just out from underneath the little strand that it would be illuminated that much anyways. Yeah Yeah, I really wanted to get like shadow in this area and that's why the light is Up here. Which one's next to B? Oh, it's the B. Yeah Yeah, I mean, because we saw how you modeled everything with the volume builder and all that good stuff. But when you see the model and then the end result, it's like there's a lot of the heavy lifting being done by the textures there. So really interested to see what that workflow is like because you got that like, it definitely looks like you did some subsurface scattering there I'm thinking. You know, just throwing out my guesses here, what you did there and like displacement for the honeycomb little holes. All right, yeah, so this is the render. As you can tell, there's definitely a difference between the scenes. I think that. Well, yeah. One other thing that's in here too, that wasn't checked was this displacer. Yeah. So yeah, with that displacer on, it's also kind of really giving it that organic shape. That's just like, is that a displacer that's just applied to all those wax pieces, Honeycomb pieces. Gotcha. Yeah. So within the honey honeycomb, they're just like a displacer with a noise texture on it. And yeah, what's that's doing is just giving it that really kind of organic look and like the difference between the two. It's it's really, it's really doing a lot. You know, I was thinking about how to get the honeycomb pattern. And I was like, yeah, I'm definitely not going to model this. We could definitely achieve this in texture. And I found it's a really simple black and white honeycomb texture map, which is kind of doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. So that's literally just the honeycomb texture. Yeah. But let me let me just disable a few things and less of you kind of go step by step. So I'm just gonna pull out the diffuse and I'm gonna shut off the subsurface scattering. Right, so I just stripped away a bunch of different things here. I took away displacement, the subsurface scattering and the diffuse color. And this is kind of what you're left with. But in fact, I'll probably just, let me just kind of strip away everything. I'm really sure how we built this shader up. So obviously, you know, this is like base hair. It's just like a diffuser for yellow color, nothing much to it. So the first thing I realized, like, to get an interesting honeycomb pattern, if you know, like you need a displacement map or like a bump map. So I created, again, like I found this cool black and white displacement honeycomb texture. And that's really what's doing a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of getting the shape of that B-Wax. So I'll connect this. I'm just doing this box here so we could see what's happening faster. So yeah, we've plugged that honeycomb displacement in here. And you can see that's already doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Another thing I did is I took that same honeycomb and blended it with like this crust texture. I think I also used it on like one of the stones and one of the last scenes. I wanna just put this in here. And that's not gonna do, it's just gonna give us like another layer of detail. Because that's what I was gonna say, as far as like that honeycomb texture, it's very uniform, geometric, not very organic at all. And I'm guessing that bump map just adds that little variety as far as like the displacement looks? I mean, not even, it's like it's super duper subtle. Like the crust is just to give it like some kind of slight surface imperfections. Okay. But yeah, sometimes I just like to double up the bump on top of the displacement to just get a little extra detail. You know, the first thing, when I saw this, I was like, oh, you know, it's all one color. Like when you look at beeswax, it goes from like a brown to like a yellow. And I was like, well, how am I going to achieve this? And one thing would have been using our ambient occlusion. It's the corners. It could be this brown in the lighter areas. It could be this yellow. And I'm going to disable some of these layers that we have here. So I could build up how we added more detail into the shader. But for now, let's just put that AO into the diffuse and we'll see like how much that's already gonna lift. There we go. So just the AO alone is doing so much. Again, like in the insides, it's that dark. On the outside, it gets a little bit lighter. It's really gonna give us that realistic feel. But then I was like, you know, this might be too uniform. So then I made like a noise pattern. This is like a Maxon noise. And I just kind of like layered a noise on top of this. So when I enabled that. So little subtle shift. Yes. It's pretty like it's not, like even here it's really kind of subtle. And then like I took this and I included it and I made it like dark. And then I was like, oh, let me put this back on top of it to make certain areas even more dark. Oh, okay. So you can see like, there's a little bit more contrast now. Mm-hmm. So if I was to like disable this, it gets a little bit lighter. Enable it, it's gonna get darker again. I was like, oh. Yeah, it's great. Yeah. So that's kind of like what, how we're building up the diffuse. The last piece of the puzzle was the subsurface scattering because that waxy feel is what really makes it feel like wax. Go back into the material, did the multi-SSS and just did like, you know, three B wax colors and like figuring out what the right scale is is always. It's a journey. Exactly. Well, one thing I realized like when I enabled it, it was like, oh, you know, like, like everything is getting subsurface. You know, like it, I wasn't getting like those defined areas of like the inside of the honeycomb. Right, like that varying thickness, like the thicker parts would get less. Right now it looks like everything's getting the same amount. Exactly. So what I did, again, using this same honeycomb texture, I inverted it so now the really bright areas are black. Did a slight color correct to it. And then I just blended it with a white color so that it would be more gray than black, so nothing. So everything gets at least a little bit of subsurface when I mix like the inverted honeycomb texture on this white color. So now when I connect these maps, it's going to like art direct the subsurface scattering to be like on the insides, give it more subsurface, but on the edges, give it less. Yeah. Yeah. That's a huge difference. Exactly. But then what's nice about this mix is that if I want to give like these edges more subsurface scattering, I could just move this slider up. And then that's just giving that map more white into it. And therefore kind of giving more subsurface to those edges. So yeah, that's, that's kind of like the crux. See, there's more subsurface in those edges. And the thing about the, not all, because with a lot of subsurface scattering the texture by itself like I feel like with some surface scattering it makes or break the lighting is the thing that makes or breaks that kind of look. Like I see that you have that light that's kind of in the back where you got that nice rim light and that's where you can really start to see that light penetrating through the edges of the honeycomb which just really saw a nice little rim light. Yeah that's actually a good segue to lighting. Yeah so often I use subsurface scattering and I'm like, why does this look like garbage? And then you forget that like, oh, well, lighting is a massive part of how this looks, you know, how the light gets filtered in and from what direction, what angle? Exactly. You have to have like some either light from the side or like light from the back. So you can kind of see, as you can tell, he looks a little bit busy. So let me actually disable some of these fall-offs. So those were fall-offs. I was mistaken in thinking they were little point lights or something. Yeah. But yeah, as EJ was saying, a big part of sub-super-scattering is the lighting. So I have a light here as my key light. Maybe it's always good to disable. The lights to showcase what's happening. dome light to just kind of give us some basic fill and then that key light. So now we have a key light, but for subsurface to really look like subsurface, it's all about like a little bit of backlighting. So, you know, I strategically put like some lights that's going to backlight the honeycomb to kind of get that desired effect. So now if I enable this light, you know, it's going to give like some really nice backlighting in this area. Like you begin to see like the subsurface kind of shine through over here. And then like I have this super massive backlight in the back here. Yeah. I just want to really, really bring some of that subsurface to the front. And backlighting with subsurface is so important. If you don't have it, you're just not going to get the effect. Like that one light is giving all that subsurface here, that subsurface here, all in between here, we're getting that subsurface scattering. And this is really because of this hero light, this big boy in the back here. I love this is like a little bit of golden hue that I don't know if that's coming from a colored light or what that's coming from or if I'm just seeing things. Yeah, it's part of this. Oh, you mean like around here? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's like a GI from the honeycomb. And then we have another light on the bottom here to kind of help give us even more subsurface scattering. So I was strategically like positioning lights in the back, you know, just to push the back lighting and to push the subsurface as much as possible. And then there's a light on the tippy top here. What's that doing? It looks like it's facing away from everything. What are you doing? What are you doing? No, I think it's supposed to be either lighting the background area here. Oh, because you can't see you have like a plane object or something like that. Yeah, exactly. Okay, gotcha. Yep. And now you see that illuminating the corner. Exactly. So this top light is illuminating the section. But yeah, you know, again, like look at the difference with this light off. You know, you're going to lose so much of that subsurface. And it's exactly what you were saying, EJ. It's like, if you don't have that backlight, it's just no matter how much subsurface you crank into it, it's just not going to look as good. We're just using the ambient occlusion to control the subsurface and to really kind of give detail to the diffuse, to make it feel just a little bit more detailed. If we're just using one color, because it's a little bit darker within the honeycomb, it's just defining the environment. And then you see it here and then you add this displacer. It's just going to make everything feel more organic. Like you get the nice ripples here. You know, it's just like a combination of everything that makes it feel rich. And, you know, we have the bees disabled. I mean, that's another thing. Oh, right. Yeah. Forgot about the bees. Yeah. I mean, it's all being generated by particles. If I just move a few frames ahead, they'll start to see those populace and fly around the scene. And those bees were they, you know, models you found from somewhere that already had materials applied. There was a big deal about tweaking them too much. Yeah, I had to like redo the materials a little bit. But it's really, really simple. So how are we actually doing this bees? Like if you look in the scene, it's just like a simulation, like an X particle simulation with some turbulence. I just needed like to time it correctly and then, you know, just make sure that the particles had like orientation on them. So when I clone the object to it, you know, the move to the correct orientation. But yeah, what I'm doing again, we're bringing back that custom object in the X particle and in the redshift tag. Oh, right. Yeah. Bring it full circle. But this is a new thing I'm using here. Like the B is what is a redshift proxy. So it's like a baked animation. Oh, kind of like a like the redshift version of an X ref or something like that. Exactly. But it has all the textures and animation baked. And it has all like the wings buzzing and you know, all that stuff. Oh, super cool. I've not messed around with redshift proxies before. So good. Another thing, like when we kind of see the bees going, it's the kind of like jittery, like getting the motion for those bees was so interesting. It's like, you know, a bee doesn't, a bee doesn't fly in like a straight line like this. It does like. Yeah, a little hover, they're drunk on honey or something. Right, exactly. Until, so, you know, the X popsicles are doing one thing, but in the modifier, there's also like a random effector that's kind of like giving it. Little bit of an undulation. Yeah, exactly. you put the table and field on. Yeah, and it's kind of just kind of giving it some other additional way to motion to it. And that's why I like it what using X particles to because you could sim and X particles and then you could put more graph on top of it. That's awesome. Yeah, I've not messed around with X particles too too much, but I love the that tight integration in there. Yeah, so you know, you have like as far as passes go, because you just showed that final result. And I feel like you did something to really amp up the subsurface scattering that just made it look, so it just made you think of like, there's some fresh honey in that honeycomb right there, just really gave it a lot more vibrance. When I'm in 3D, I'm like, okay, what would be useful for me? So ambient occlusion, GI reflections, subsurface scattering, subsurface catching raw, specular lighting. So I just kind of pull out the stuff I think would be useful for me. And then I jump into new, can create a recipe. First things first, let's jump in. First thing I do, this is like the reflections pass. So just sprinkle some of that on. Give it a little bit of detail. So one thing I realized too was like the wings here were like really bright some places, but the bees themselves were super dark. So I had to like darken some of the wings a little bit here and then make the bee bodies a little bit brighter. Did that and that's again, beauty of the crypto mat, you know, with mats, you could do that as well. Then I was like, we need some more subsurface scattering and then we had like this this subsurface scattering raw pass. And I just took that, gave it like a color correct, clamped it so nothing was like too burnt out. And I put that back on it. And yeah, that really helps. That's huge. Yeah. It got that honey. And again, like you can see, like, if I jump back into the pass, how the edges aren't getting as much subsurface. Right, right. Because we did that in the texture. So that was pretty nice. Then the next pass we added, this is ambient occlusion pass. Just put some contrast and I graded it and then I multiplied it back on. Because I was like, oh, it's just too bright here. How can we bring it back down? So then I used the AO and put it back on top of it. Yeah, with this, I'm just, yeah, so I don't even know how I figured this out. I was just like, it's like you're taking these passes and you're like, let me see what works. And yeah, this was what was just working. And I just wanted to do a little color correct on the logo. Obviously, we got to bring back the specular, as I was mentioning with all the pieces, the specular is where all the nice detail lives. So I could bring that back, put it on top of it. No, I had to do noise it. So it's taken a little bit longer. So this is the difference. Just brightens up the edges ever so slightly there. That rim light man is doing a lot of the the sexy work in this shot Exactly. I'm maxed. I'm masked. I only wanted like this specular to be on this area here So that's like when I when you see supply this only like on these areas So then I always like sometimes I like to put like a little spillage like a little light spill So I put like a little orange color over on this section and the rest is just like creating a color correct. So So I love how you, you know, you're talking all throughout your shots and how you love the light with that nice gradient. And you definitely see that here. It's almost like that specular that you have masked off is motivated by that hot rim light on the left and then slowly grade eight down to the lower right. Right, exactly. Yeah. And again, like that saturation really punches us up. But that, this grade does a lot. some blues in here. That does a lot. You just taste the honey that's in those honeycombs now just because they look so rich and vibrant. Then that's shopping with a little bit of glue and then another grid on top of that. Now did you do any like that shadow that's making the logo pop? That's all motivated by the lights and shadows in the scene. It's not like you did anything special in post-it. Yeah, exactly. So that second grade is really doing a lot here. And then, you know, some sweet jail looks on here. And that's it. Awesome. I think this scene had the biggest. Yeah, that's a huge shift. Wow. Yeah, like between scenes. And I love that glow, too. Yeah, just kind of make it pop a little bit. But yeah. Yeah, that's that that I think is the most drastic pre-composite post-composite. Yeah, and you know that's why it's important to you know nothing wrong with a little cop guy. Right, yeah exactly like I mean that shows you right there sometimes you could push it a lot more a lot further in post there and in the aspect of like ambient occlusion I feel like like with the advent of third party renders, you don't even think about ambient occlusion as a pass anymore because it's just baked into the GI, but you can use it so creatively like you did here, which without it, everything would look extremely flat. You know, it just really helps to kind of give it that more. Yeah, just like really bringing someone out detail out. Sweet, so we got the birds, the bees and the birds. So we got some of the birds. Some of the birds. And you had that feather texture or the hair material again. So I assume a lot of the same workflows that you use with the yarn kind of set up there. So just like the kind of wool thread scene, like when you have a scene that has a lot of detail, you don't really need to make a texture that has a lot of detail because inherently the scene is already super duper detailed. So all we're really doing here, if I go to one of the feathers, like say one of the feathers from this cloner, there's like the inner part of the feather and that's been, you know, shaded in blue. And then like there's the actual feather. Maybe I could just copy this out to a different scene. So these are actually all represented as splines because I assume when you bake down the actual feather object it breaks it out into three different splines that you can then have control over what material goes where. So yeah, there's like two different parts to the feathers. So I want to just jump back into the scene, hop back into this material. you could realize like what you see is it's not just like one solid color right? Yeah it looks like you're a descend almost like different colors depending on the angle you're looking at it almost. Exactly and how we're achieving it just like what we talked about with the plants is the translucency pumping a ramp into that material to just kind of give it that like translucent, wild looking kind of texture. And I think it's doing a beautiful job. Part of that, too, is adding like a little bit of color into the reflection as well. So like when the light hits it in a certain way, it's going to be like a particular color. And then, you know, I also have some lights that has color. It's the combination of like some lights in the reflection, some color in the lights and the color ramp in the translucency and the material is kind of giving us this really kind of vibrant gradient in the feathers themselves. So that ramp, as far as like how it's working, it's because how the backlighting works, it's basically, you know, black and white values and all you're doing is kind of remapping it's a color. So what's going on there? That's getting like iridescent kind of. Well, the ramp, this is the color of the actual translucency. Oh, okay. This is like what's controlling how translucent it is. I got you. This is like. So that you have a set weight. Right. And this is the color of the translucency. Okay. Depending on where the light hits it, it's going to be like a slight, It's going to be like a slightly different color. I gotcha. So that's why it looks like you have a little backlight there in the top right. And those are like more that left side of the gradient, which is that blueish. Exactly. And that's a colored light as well. So it's getting lighting from that translucent. See, plus you're getting some lighting from this light as well. And the combination of those two is really what's making like these feathers look that color. Again, I'm just kind of angling some of these lights in different places where I want some of those colors to pop a little bit more. Maybe this might be a good time and just kind of see like what. You know what that lighting setup. Yeah, what's so many slides I'm doing. So we have this dome light and then obviously again, to just bring that lighting back into the scene that let's enable this area lights. All right, so you know that dome light is really just kind of being like the fill light And then this is our key lights right here in the top right. So again, you're just building up that gradient top left, bottom right kind of deal. Exactly. Right, and that's providing most of all light, but we're realizing we're not getting in any of that color. So that's why that's where these colored lights come in. Okay, because yeah, I was wondering if that iridescent was kind of like a trick with just the lights you were using in the scene. Yeah, it's a combination of the lights and the translucency in the material. So when I enable this light, you're going to see we're going to get a lot of that vibrant color. And you see that's just kind of really pushing those blues in there. And it really just makes it feel like significantly more vibrant. We're going to do the same for this left side. Again, it's kind of crazy just like adding a light with some translucency. like you know you could add like this extra you know it's level of depth and if you look up the edges I think that's where you really kind of see right shine and this one was like specifically for the logo and again that's where that light linking comes in. Oh right right right yep so it's specifically light. One thing I want to point out is uh you know you use the the hair material in the last one, which I guess in the hair material, is there like a translucency option in there? No off the top of your head. There's a transparency, but I don't think there's a translucency. I got you, because I noticed that like what you're using here is that you actually have splines with like redshift materials on them. And I'm wondering if like that gives you that extra bit flexibility as far as material options go. It does. But what's also different is that with because I'm using, you know, red shift to render the cues, actually cylinders. So they have like, oh, they're actual, like geometry. Right. Yeah. So they have some volume to it. So I got you. Okay. Unlike the edges, you're catching like so not translucent. Okay. That makes total sense. Okay. Yeah. But I think translucent you could work whether it was flat or whatever. No, it's just, yeah, it's just really quick to render as well. I love how much you're using the translucency backlighting trick. I feel like I never use it because I feel like it's a cheap trick. But like you've totally sold me. I'm like, nope, this is like a real production thing that you should be using a lot more. Yeah, it depends for what, right? Is this is more of like artistic stuff? Like I wouldn't use this on the B scene, for instance. Yeah, exactly. That's what I was going to say, like probably would not look as good for that scene. Yeah, the good news is the scene was already just, you know Pretty good to begin with so it looked really vibrant in camera Yeah, I didn't really have to do that much of course. We're gonna get some of that specular and And of course some of the reflection. That's like those two Passes no matter what I always add them in so if you're going back, I just did a little color correct Which makes it a little bit more vibrant Then I add some some specular just a little color correct on the logo. And I love the foreground feathers that are falling to just such a good just really give some depth to the scene. 100 percent. So saturation punched up or really subtle, but the grade is really kind of making it more like. I don't know. It's a darker blue. It just looks a little bit more sophisticated, bring it back some of that saturation in there. And yeah, that's about it. Some jail look love, subtle glow. Yeah. And boom. Yeah, because it looked like really super bright and tropical and cartoony, which, you know, doesn't really fit with the rest of the different shots. So yeah, that grading really kind of made everything like color wise, look consistent with all the other shots. Yeah, it just feels like a little bit more sophisticated when you do the grade. It's like all purple, but now you have like the blue to purple in here, which you know Helps to make it feel this a little bit more vibrant. But yeah, so yeah well we're on to that last shot with the piece of architecture and the the cacti and Pretty I would assume like you probably had One sunlight in there for the main light source Yeah, like lighting wise, as you said, super simple. I'm going to quickly just load it and run that because it's so, it's such a light scene. Yeah, made different from the hair and the feathers and yeah. Right, but yeah, as you said, it's like boom, there's one light. And as far as the texture goes, it looks like it's like a stucco kind of really cool texture with some, you know, a little bit of, looks like it's been painted over a few times, like there's old paint underneath and you give it a nice coat over top. Yeah. And the bump map is really doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. And it's like three or four bumps in here. You can see these maps. So there's like a plaster normal that I like to use. But then I'm gonna like just pull all these out. Just make sure I know where I'm pulling them out from. So yeah, that plaster is just kind of giving us like those little notches, but then this max on noise. It's like a, just like a Naki from, you know, typical cinema 4D. It has really kind of start to give us that roughness. Yeah, it's not sleeping on cinema 4D noises. Yeah, can't beat them. Yeah. And of course, these edges look super sharp, so you got to throw in the wrong corners. OK, yeah. Get those highlights, specular hits. And the last one is just like this concrete texture. You just give it some additional detail. Like you could kind of see those little holes and stuff. Like something that the Maxon noises can't do by themselves. They can contribute to get into an end result, but you need those real bump maps. So like when I put it on now, you're going to see like little different holes and stuff in here. So yeah, that's kind of like the bump map is doing mostly heavy lifting. And of course, you know, I'm just using a roughness channel to make the specular a little bit more interesting like you can see over here. That's about it. That's the same thing I'm using for each one of these textures. Well, what about the what's the comp look like for this? Sumo, a lot of the same secret sauce of a lot of the other shots. Yeah, I mean, the only difference with this shot was I had to to replace the sky. So I need to add to the sky to kind of give it some extra detail. And it's really subtle, you know, it's just like get some clouds in there. Yeah, I'm like a little star, moon, you know, just to give it a little bit more atmosphere. But yes, same thing's really, it's like color correct, saturation. Yeah, this one is not as drastic. It's just like finding those areas. Like did a little bit of the crypto mat with some of the cacti. Yeah. Yeah, and I also just rendered it with the logo in this whole shot as well. So yeah, I made it darker and then I added in the logo after the fact. Okay, so you just got a little bit of like a more contrast drop shadowy kind of thing on it. Yeah. So like when I put the logo on top of it now, like there'd be, you know, yeah, it would just like pop a little bit more. Yeah. And there's rendered out that shot together. Boom. And yeah, just transitions to that. Precisely. Like, you know, jail looks is kind of doing a bunch of this dramatic operation and Louis stuff. Yeah, it's always hard to like, I feel like it's hard to mix the like a 2D element with the 3D elements. And the grade is a big part of that. Otherwise, it looks like it's just kind of slapped on haphazardly and just like, you know, just put a Photoshop layer on top of that sucker and call it a day. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes it's, yeah, I like to add some this little hint of bells and whistles. Yeah, I mean this shot, it's all lighting, composition, materials, just to add that little bit of detail in there. And subtle, subtle movement, which transitions very nicely to that next subject we'll talk about, which is how you made everything move in all these shots. Yes, let's go.",
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+      "text": " When I'm in 3D, I'm like, okay, what would be useful for me? So ambient occlusion, GI reflections, subsurface scattering, subsurface catching raw, specular lighting. So I just kind of pull out the stuff I think would be useful for me. And then I jump into Nuke and create a recipe. All right, so now we're diving into kind of the, you know, lighting and material exploration mixed in with a little bit of how you kind of comped everything together because you already kind of hinted at how much work was done in comp with some of these shots and I'm just super interested to see how you know you got from the raw render to what it finally looked like. So we'll start with that first shot which is it's that nice indoor very inviting indoor kind of space with a little bit of light spilling in with a little bit of like haze in there. So just walk us through the lighting, the materials, everything that made this shot shine as much as it did. I knew this scene, I wanted it to feel warm, very vibrant, like some place you would want to work in, almost like a kind of cool, futuristic, I don't know, museum space, working space. So I knew like the materials had to feel really organic and that's why I went with a lot of woods, You know, and some nice browns and you know, these materials are pretty straightforward for the most parts It's really just piping in a good diffuse texture With a good bump and good reflection roughness roughness is so key But yeah, I think for this one, it's just you know, not overdoing the specular just making sure that yeah You know, you have to strike like this balance of not kind of overdoing it Like you could go really crazy with the specular and it feels super glossy but you don't want it to feel like not reflective enough. So getting that right balance. Yeah, so another thing, like if you look at the plants and I'll just kind of focus in on this area here, like you can see when the light hits it, it feels a little bit translucent. It gets a little bit more like yellow green, but hop into the material. I'm actually not using a subsurface scattering for this, but you know, sometimes it's backlighting translucency. The setting works really well, especially like a flat object. You know, like if we look here, it's really just like more of like a flat geometry of like a volume and sometimes the setting works really well. And if we, you know, to turn this off, actually, we just copied a exact parameter. So I can just paste it back in. You know, if I turn that off, you know, it's totally different. It's a huge difference. Like you're getting a lot of shadow. It's a darker green, it doesn't feel as vibrant, but when you bring that chance to listen to you, it feels again like a whole lot more realistic, a whole lot more vibrant, a whole lot more inviting. And that's essentially what we did texturized to make the plants just feel a lot more, I guess, natural and alive. That's crazy because at first glance it's like, oh, that's subsurface scattering. You almost forget, like I always forget about that backlighting. And I assume those those plans are they like single polygon? It's not like it's just a flat polygon. There's no like depth to it. So it works even that much better with that backlighting. Exactly. So backlighting on all of the plants or yeah, on all of the plants. Because again, these are just like flat polygons. So sometimes when you you get that chance. I mean, in an instance like this, you want to use translucency versus subsurface. Because again, there's no thickness here. Right. So, you know, translucency is a really good option, especially in situations like this. Now, as far as how you have the light kind of filtering in, I just love the shadows that are being cast everywhere. And it's like, like, it looks like you really are directed the light on the on your logo as well. So if you want to like walk us through the placement of the lights and how you kind of ended up putting them where they where they ultimately are. Yeah, you know, lighting is so nuanced. Yes. But this scene in particular too, like I definitely remember like trying a bunch of different lighting setups to see what would look like. I tried a sunlight, it felt too harsh. But eventually, you know, I went with like a really, really bright area light and we have two of them. kind of just like, disabled them and kind of show you what's happening and like where they place in the scene to kind of give us that light. So with the vibe I wanted to carry across was one that it felt again like this space that's really open and very natural and the lighting kind of had to play into that. So yeah, if you navigate the scene, just kind of go back out a bit so we can see where this light is. And this is like a key light. Generally when I'm lighting, I don't like to use more lights than I have to. So we're using one light and we're definitely getting, you know, a good lighting setup. But one thing I think we locked here was that we were getting a little bit too much shadow on some of these areas and it's getting a little bit too dark and I wanted it to feel a little bit more vibrant. Um, so that's why I use like another area light from the other side, just like Diminish some of the shadow and you can see like when we're getting, you know This additional lighting up here It begins to kind of have like that kind of outdoor indoor feel that I was going for and it's kind of like warm and inviting but you know, it looks simple, but you have to like move around this light to get the place in a way that it feel it doesn't feel like two lights. It kind of feels like one. Right. Yeah. You got to be a little bit strategic when it comes to that. But also, you know, you want to set the light in a way where you're getting the shadows in these areas to bring out the details of like these little planks. And again, like look at the difference when I turn this off. Like all of this isn't, you know, it's kind of dark. It's in shadow. And I really like to have gradation on surfaces, like especially. Yeah, this is like too big of a blotcher shadow Yeah, it's kind of leading your eye there because that's so much contrast right there exactly So, you know here we take some of it out and this to see in this generally lights up and then for me and light here We just have like a touch of volume metric light Okay, interesting. So if I turn this retro environment off you can see that for a metric light goes away. So Turn this back on Just that subtle amount of that volume metrics just makes everything feel a lot more natural. Yeah, exactly. It kind of makes it feel like a little bit more vibrant. And if you jump into Nuke, all we're doing here is just making this scene more vibrant. So this is just the raw render of the scene. You're just sitting here. And all I'm doing, I'm like, this is really close. And for a scene like this, all I usually do is just add a little bit more specular here. But also, before I do that, I also like to render the volumetrics as a separate pass. OK. I take it out, and then I do all the editing. I just add a little bit of specular. Then I added that back. And now it's just all little color corrects. So I'm giving it a little bit more saturation from here to here. Not too much. You don't want to go too crazy. And then I'm doing a color grade. And that color grade is really doing a decent amount of work, just in terms of making it more vibrant from here to here. Then a color correct, just to make sure it's light enough. And at CC, it looks good. A little bit of a sharpen to make sure it's crispy. Oh, yeah. Now I like to just do a clamp. Some of these leaves are getting a little bit hot right here. So sometimes a clamp could just kind of help to bring it down a little bit. Over exposed areas, yeah. That's why I use aces for everything now, so. There you go, aces. Chat Ashley, get everyone on aces. I know, it's great. And then I have a little bit of a glow to make it feel like, like when you have a subtle glow to some stuff, it makes it feel not surreal, but maybe like, pristine or- Or dreamlike almost. Yeah, but you don't want to overdo it. It's relatively subtle. So as far as like AOV passes goes, like you rendered out volumetric separately, so you could dial that in as much as you wanted. You add specular and that's about it, right? So no amount of crazy compositing, no object buffers. Yeah, and well, I never do object buffers anymore. It's all about crypto. Really? Yeah. You try to get, oh, cause of crypto math. Yeah, with crypto maths, it's so nice. I can, you know, you could pick any object in here And it creates a mat. Dude, it's, it changed my world when I learned about crypto mats. Yeah, it's great. So you just run that out and you have all the masks that you need. Yeah, and that's about it. And do you always render that out just in case you need it? Because did you use the crypto mat much in the shotter? Yes, it's really, I think I had to touch up something somewhere. I always just run it out in case you never know when you might need to speak something. It's just so easy to do. Yeah. And then Jeremy Cox made this note that I call jailux that just has like a bunch of different settings like chromatic operation and highlights and all that. So I just kind of threw this at the end of every render that kind of give it like some chromatic operation and some of the little things and. And how do you get that? Do you hit up Jeremy Cox on Twitter and be like, hey, jerk, give me this thing or what? I don't know why he doesn't sell this as a new gizmo. I know, right? Yeah. Well, I have to I have to add a little link somewhere to give him a shout out and tell him to release it somewhere. Yeah, I mean, give it to me. I imaginary forces. I use it on every single project. It's great. That's awesome. It's great. So yeah, that's about it for this scene. It's crazy how much you get with some shots, how much you can get done within the camera. And especially, I think that's interesting about the lights. Like, you know, we have lights camera render at school motion with David Ariov. And David is in the mind where it's like, he'll put in 50 lights because he wants to have, you know, every little dial of control and he's a maniac with lights. But then you have, you know, other artists that are just like, I want, like, if I can get away with one light and like bounce cards, like, that's all I want. you know, just the most minimalistic lighting setup is possible. And like really for a very natural scene like this, you really only want to make it look as natural as possible, the like one light source, if it's the sun, you know, maybe a bounce somewhere. So very important considerations with lighting for natural scenes. You know, that's a good point. And I think it really depends on what you're lighting as well. Like if you want something to feel more realistic, like I would probably use two or three lights. For sure. And like if you're lighting a subject, then there's more considerations there into play. Yeah, if it's a studio lighting setup, like you can really go nuts with it. If you want to dial in reflections on a product shot or you know, whatever. And one thing I want to point out in something that David Ariov would be really excited about me to point out is that you're not using an HDRI. This is all just lights. Like he's like some people I know are very much like, HDRIs are fine, but like I never use them. And then there's some people that are like, all I use is HDRIs and that kind of, you're giving up a lot of control when you do that because the lighting's just always baked in and it's you really can't art direct it, but. I always, I usually start off, it just depends on the type of scene. I usually start off with HDRI. Okay, just to quickly get something in there. Yeah, it's like a base. Like if it's a daytimeish scene or like a brighter scene, you need a HDRI to kind of fill in the lights. And then the aerial lights are just like the key lights. Yeah. Yeah. That's typically how I approach it. I think, yeah, I'm actually surprised the scene doesn't have a HDRI. Well, I mean, well, and the thing is, This is like your area light. It was quick to, I don't know if a lot of people noticed, but your light is fairly small and that's what's allowing you to get those, kind of like those hard shadows that looks like it's being cast by the sun. Yes, exactly. Yeah, it is crazy how much, when you also built up your surrounding area, so you are getting all that really nice bounce light. I'm sure if you took that outer wall there away, you'd probably lose a lot of that. Exactly. Yeah, I also take into consideration how global illumination affects all this stuff because that's super important. But yeah, that's a good point too. Yeah, this light is really small for that reason so it can get crisper shadows, so it feels like a sunlight. But sometimes the combination too is, it's crispier here, but then it's a little bit soft. But when you can have those crisper lights, it definitely does help. like, like this is really nice here. Because you can tell like there's a main source light coming from this direction, but you just kind of get like some subtle lighting and shadow over here, but it doesn't feel like too artificial. Yeah, it just looks like it's some kind of spill or something like that. Like it's very hard to tell that there's two light sources in here. Exactly. That's that's how you cheat guys. Awesome. So let's go on to the rock shot because those textures on those rocks are stinking gorgeous. And some of those rocks like have so much detail like the gem look like translucent rocks look like there's so much detailed doubt in there. Did you just find a bunch of rock textures or like how much of it was getting a rock texture and then kind of adding in imperfections and stuff like that. See how about we just hop into this blue stone and you know see what's happened with that material. Yeah that one's like the most striking where I feel like I paused it and spent the most amount of time looking at that texture on that rock. Pretty happy with where I landed with this one. So let's talk about I guess the color first thing. Like a lot of the color is just coming from the refractive color balloon. You know, if I turn this off, it's just like a solid stone. But a lot of the colors coming from this and, you know, just having the right level of roughness. So it doesn't feel like completely transparent. And then, you know, look at the reflect the surface where you way, getting like these little details, all of that is being piped through from this reflection roughness. Let me just zoom in on this node so you can kind of see it. And, you know, it's regenerated by like this texture that I love and probably use on every project. But yeah, like when you look at the, you know, the reflection now, I mean, there's a bump map. So you kind of see some of these imperfections, but like we're still losing a lot of details in those reflections. Let me just pull out this bump map too. So now like the whole surface just feels like super smooth. Let's see what happens when I put back in this roughness, right? Like, you see how much that's doing on the surface to kind of give us like those details to make it feel like really tactile. And that's why reflection roughness is so important when like you want to make something feel realistic. That's really big in the process. And then, you know, bump, A bump map is always to just kind of make it feel a little bit more tactile. And I'm using like two different materials. I'm using like this grayscale griller, crusty material, and then like this normal map. And I like to combine a few like bump layers just to kind of give me like more depth. So I'm just going to plug that back in here. Where does like it look like those little white, like look like ding marks, like someone threw this thing. Like there's so much like story in like, like this rock looks like someone's been throwing it around and you picked it up and made it a part of this animation. You know, like it was been on a journey. So like, because that's so there's actually two materials being blended here, right? So the one we just took a look at was that first material. And I was like, you know, this looks like too perfect. You know, let's figure out a way to create some imperfections. So then I created like this other material. Right, like this kind of white material. But then I'm using like, one of the same crusty materials I'm using for the bump, like this crust material I'm using to blend this white material on the blue material together. Okay. So I put that together. That's where you're getting. get a little bit of those ding mark. Yeah, exactly. That makes sense. And if I let me just plug this into the surface directly so you can kind of see like what that's doing. Okay. Yeah. Well, wherever you see like these white marks, that's where you're going to get the blending between those two materials. And again, when you stack, when you keep stacking stuff together is when you really get to see the detail and can really enhance the look of an object and texture. It's like all the different transparent rocks, so essentially using the same texture. The only thing that's different is just the color of the refraction. So if you wanted to make it like a pink rock, you just make that color pink and it's pink. So you know. So no subsurface scattering on those rocks. It's, you know, it's kind of funny because it's like, well, of course, like a rock. I don't know how much of a rock has subsurface scattering on it. Like it's just translucent, right? And it's got the blurry, you know, the rough refraction on the inside. So yeah, like that's really all you need. A lot of these rocks are kind of like close to glass in terms of, you know, it's material quality. So it's kind of riffing off of that idea when thinking about how to create that rock. And some of these other rocks are just kind of like way simpler textures. This was like a tile texture. It's basically like a marble texture. I just got to diffuse and I got to normal and that's pretty much all that I needed. And I of course used my very favorite metal grime texture for the reflection roughness and boom. You know, like usually what you need to make a good texture is like a good diffuse, a good bump and a good reflection roughness. And that does a lot to the work. But that also just depends on what the texture is. Again, like a lot of these other materials, it's the same concept. But that like wavy, the rock in the center that looks like, almost looks like you use some kind of noise or yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, it's a marble texture. It's a marble texture, yeah. Yeah, it's like the same concepts. You know, this one doesn't even have any roughness because like this, I'm piping this into a bump map. I mean, it did so much work already. Right. You know, I didn't really have to throw anything on top of that. And I probably like, again, like I like to combine bumps. So between this and that, you know, that did, um, did a lot of the work. And I'm just blending these two bump maps together to kind of give it like some of these little imperfections in certain places. Yeah, it's crazy how sometimes you, all the, like if you have a really fine detailed bump, you actually, that does all the roughness for you, you know? And another thing that I feel like a lot of people sometimes lose is like another important aspect of textures is just how big your roughness maps are. Like sometimes I'll see someone with like a fingerprint roughness map or something like that. And the fingerprints relative to the size of the thing are either way too big or way too small, especially when you see the actual fingerprint. You can make it out on the object. So sense of scale is such a huge thing, especially when these are such simple objects and you're trying to... These are tiny little stones, so you got to make those textures fit that scale. Yeah, exactly. And yeah, you really have to be cognizant of that and make sure like all these things work together. And as far as the lights in that scene, was it fairly similar to the last scene where you just have like a couple lights and we got we got three lights in a dome light. All right. Yeah. I mean, this is what I'm saying. Like I usually always use a dome light. So for me not to have a dome light, I think that was like pretty shocking. Well, in this, if you zoom out at your scene, because it looks like you, is it just like a few plain objects that you have different colors on and that's what's making up the overall scene? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. All right. Yeah. That's a good question, you Jay. That's a good one. So like, I'm going to start black. Usually how I approach lighting, I typically start with a dorm light just to kind of give me some really rough fill in lighting. And that's no HDRI, that's just general ambient light. There's an HDRI on it. Oh, okay. But it's just like, it's not really doing the lighting. It's just kind of filling the lights. And then I usually have like a key light. And the reason I have an HDRI is if I didn't, like these shadows get really, really dark and it feels really intense. So then like a dome light helps to just soften that out and make it feels like a more daytime lit scene. And that's why I typically use a dome lights in conjunction with like a other area light. I could have stopped here, but I sometimes like to put a nice little rim light for some extra detail. And this is what this second light is. So I did that. And you know, it just kind of gives us some nice reflections and lighting around the edges here. So like, if it's two lights, I'm gonna add it. It's usually like a rim light and a key light. And then I was like this I had like some foreground stones and they were getting a little bit dark It's like let me just add a little bit of a light Yeah, exactly and that's that's about it. You know, yeah, we've seen like this. I mean Like the key light and the area light they're doing all of the heavy lifting right The rim light, just a little extra some-some. And yeah, and then, you know, then you look for like problem areas like this. And yeah, that's about it in terms of lighting. It's pretty much like, yeah, you, lighting on a base level is like, it's an easy thing, but it's also very hard, right? Like you, I always like to relay it to like painting. You're painting with light and like if you watch Bob Ross, what does he do first? He blocks out the main forms of his painting, right? Like there's gonna be some tree line here and then once he gets the he blocks out those main shapes and where things are gonna be that's where he starts adding in all the highlights and you know all the little details and if you think of lighting like that where you got your big brush strokes, which are your key and and yeah, your key lights, and then you got your tiny brushes to start filling in the details like your fill and your rims and stuff like that. And like once I started thinking about lighting that way, it totally made sense. And like just having a developing that good eye for like what's really distracting or what am I not getting really good detail with it? Because that texture on that rock means jack crap if you can't actually have the light hitting it at the right angle where you see all that detail. And that's the approach. Like I try, certain scenes, I can put more lights, but I don't put more lights than I have to. And that's typically my approach. No, I had just a random question because I feel like certain people place lights differently. Do you, I know some people that do that whole active object as camera, where you can actually look through the light as it was a camera and place your light that way and aim your light, or do you use that much or do you just literally just place things around and rotate? I place my key light usually at an angle, like the left side or the right side, but the whole idea is to get some gradation. There's a clear lighter area and then there's a clear darker area. So it doesn't feel flat. That's what makes lighting boring. what is like large areas of just flat color. Like clearly it's right ahead and it goes from, it's a gradation here. Like it goes from light to darker and that makes it feel interesting. And that's typically just, yeah, how I approach lighting. Yes, this ended up really, really nice. Nice soft shadows there. The textures look amazing. Such a really cool shot. Yeah, and this dome light too is just making it vibrant, you know, it's not doing a ton of lighting, but it's just to kind of make those shadows feel less harsh. And dome lights are another one of those things where I know when I started using HDR eyes and stuff like that. And the biggest thing with the HDR eyes is that if you take it too far, like you can see the exposure level on that dome lights pretty, you took it down on the negatives. Because if you have that too high, then you've run into that problem where you're just talking about where you just make everything look so ambient and flat that you just, yeah, it just looks so ugly. Because now my HGRI is providing like, kind of like real lighting to the scene, and that's not what I want. I want it to just kind of just fill in a little bit so it doesn't, It doesn't feel like too dark. So now, as far as like AOVs, kind of similar set up from the last scene, or did you do anything different? Yeah, pretty similar. Like what I do is I evaluate the scene in 3D and I'm like, oh, this is looking really good. All I would probably need to do is a little color correct and punch up the saturation a little bit. I just like to bring out the specular map because a lot of sexiness is in the specular maps all the time. So let's just, this is like the raw render from cinema. And when you pull out the specular map, you really get to see like, how that roughness map is applied. And like, that's what really gives you like, that realistic detail, like a lot of the specular roughness. So like, I like to bring that, and just kind of apply it back on the difference. You know, this is the difference here in the calm. Oh yeah, really makes it pop. Exactly. So I do that and then from there on it's like, you know, a little saturation to really make it pop. Color correct, make the shadows a little touch of glue. Touch. Very subtle. Yeah, just super subtle. Yeah, a little jail looks action, you know, you kind of get some kind of chromatic aberration on the edge there. Really subtle, don't go crazy with the chromatic aberration. And that's it. You know, with shots like this, when it looks really good from 3D, all I know I need, what I need to do is just, you know, Give that extra, that 1% from 99 to 100. Right, exactly. And, you know, that little extra bit just kind of makes it feel a lot more vibrant. And yeah, that's more push. But again, like the specular, like look what it's doing on the S compared to, you know, what it was before. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. So is that when you bring out because I I have never used That's nuke right? This is nuke. Yeah, so I've never used nuke before as far as like when you put your Specular pass what like are you using a like a after effects equivalent blending mode or what are you doing to add that on? You know you could plus it's just like after effects into it's a better mode. So got you Yeah, you could you could do it you roll plus yeah multiply like all of the same same stuff cool cool you can do and I'm probably like adjusting like one stone or maybe maybe actually I was like the specular for this stone was too much oh for sure yep yep so then I omitted it and that's why it looks kind of blown out right there right especially was right by the logo eyes are really gonna be Drowning there already. Exactly. So that's why, you know, trusty crypto mat is helpful. Yeah, huge. Awesome. That's the stones. And that's the stones. So we got, oh man, the next shot, the bamboo forest, right? So for this shot, like, I love the lighting, the time of day. You can definitely tell you got these shafts of light. What was the process like getting settled on what kind of like time of day or angle of light because there's so many objects that can contribute to the shadows and giving texture to the scene. It might have been a difficult process trying to decide what lighting setup end up with. Yeah, 100%. Like I went back and forth with a couple of different setups. Let me actually just jump back to our older seeding file where I had like three sun sky rigs because I I couldn't decide which one I liked best. So let's loot the render view here. So I think this one here is the one that I ended up going with. And how much of the proceed, did you know that the preceding shot to this was that rock scene where you have the warm lighting there as well to hear was that a consideration for lighting at all? Or did you, for the most part, think about everything in a very modular way? Yeah, that's a good question. No, actually, because there was a different scene before that. And I scrapped that one, and I shuffled it out. But I definitely lined the scenes up based on what felt good coming one after the other. Yeah, that's kind of how I arranged it. So this is kind of the setup that we went with. And maybe I'll just take a quick screenshot in case need to reference that. But before, um, so yeah, for this setup, what I was really liking, um, again, like the changes subtle, but I loved how the light was kind of flooding here. It kind of felt like early afternoon. And then, you know, it's just kind of interesting to see how like these subtle light changes, like changes the vibe of the, you know, entire atmosphere and I'll just do like the next light setup. I'll take a screenshot of that. And we can kind of cycle between them. Yeah, so this lighting setup, it looks like there's more focus on like the foreground almost leading your eye to the logo. And here, wow, this looks just so much more dramatic. Right, exactly. But this one, I was really liking how, you know, there's shadow here. But then the way, you know, the fulens were being lit, the way the specular was bouncing off these fulens, I'm like, wow, this looks really good. like you're getting that specular hits there. And it, I don't know, it feels magical. It feels really, it felt really nice. And I really love that. So I was trying to figure out like what direction I should go in and just take a quick screenshot of that. And we could kind of cycle between the three looks. This is what we ended up going with. Not the final final, but this like is split the difference. So like in one version, we had a lot of lights on the bottom In the other version, we had like a lot of light here. And this vision, you know, we had like light here and some lights on the bottom. But if you went, if you go, it's like the very, very final of vision, just take a look at that. In this version, you see like we're getting tons of light spillage over on this side and in the front. So we really kind of split the difference and really got some of these areas lit that we wanted to touch. But the only thing was that the logo, when I did this light setup, was not lit. So I was like, ah, shoot, I have to create a whole different rig of the light, the logo. And this is why I love light linking in cinema. I mean, with Redshift, all I had to do was just put include, drag the logo in, and it was simple as that. But then too, like if we look at the very final version this. Yeah, it's like it's an animated light as well. So you know, you kind of get some movement with the trees along with the moving bamboo. But yeah, this was it's for this year, I know it's an outdoor scene. So I know it was would have been like a sun sky rig. And I wanted to feel like really outdoorsy. So simple in terms of the light setup, tricky in terms of like, what direction should the light be facing to get the feel that you want. Right, because there's so many, because I mean, you could really spend a lot of time on this scene just taking in all the detail and like where you want the eye to be led to. And I feel like with those first two light options, I feel like there was a distinct focus that your eye would go to, like either the foreground or the right side. And the one you kind of ultimately went with just feels like your eye isn't immediately going anywhere first. It's just like, okay, I start here maybe, but then I'm slowly led to all these different other places versus one part of the shot just dominating and taking all the attention. So I think that was a really great ultimate choice there that you made. And the animation of the lights too just adds so much texture and subtle detail there as well. Like I didn't even notice that the first time you played that, but then the God raise if you want to talk about how you dialed that in, and did you use some kind of, or was that just natural based on the objects in the scene, or did you use some kind of gobo or? Yeah, so I used a spotlight, an additional spotlight, just so I could kind of, a direct way those rays would be coming from without changing the lighting of the sun. Oh, smart, yeah. Yeah, and you know, it's nice, with Redshift, I could dictate how much like this light is actually affecting the geometry of the scene. So I could really pull down the diffuse and glossy. So you know, you still kind of get some highlights from that light, but it's mostly affecting the volume to kind of give us this volumetric light. and I could pull this out as a separate pass for this, but I could then come back in. But then yeah, I enable all the lights and get this lovely vibrant scene. That's the one thing with volume metrics and that fog that really adds a lot of depth and believability to a scene. Because without that fog volume, and you can just see so far back, it doesn't feel real because you don't have that real atmosphere that you were in a very, like this just feels like a very misty, like you could almost feel the dew in the air, you know? And yeah, speaking of fog too, you know, that's why I wanted to have like this fog as well, just to give it like a little bit more atmosphere. Now, is that a separate light creating that fog or how did you get that fog in the background? Cause you got the one like volumetric light with the God rays. Redshift environment object, there's a fog tab here that you can dial that in on here just to create like in a specific fog in the environment. And you can see I mean like how tall it is. So this guy's supposed to point it and falls off in addition with the volumetric lights. So two separate things, contos together. I guess we can jump into materials now because I don't think we cover material is that. So I'm assuming similar trick with the plants where you got that like translucency with the backlighting option there. Yeah, exactly. It's the same set up. It's like, you know, you plug the textures in like the normals, the diffuse, and it's really just adding like a little backlighting to make it feel, you know, just robust, give it like that natural feel. Yeah, but also making sure that the specular was there and it specular felt good. So if I looked at the specular in a past, I could kind of see some of these details that I know it could really help to bring this stuff in comp. So yeah, I mean, in terms of texturing, this probably might have been like one of the simpler ones. You just get like pull bamboo texture from somewhere and. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I had to I had to create this bamboo texture actually. Oh really? Okay. Okay, here it is. So let me just open that bamboo diffuse that I got. It just didn't work well. So I actually just had to find like a high res version, like a high res picture of a piece of bamboo. I just took an image and made a really high res map for that bamboo. And this kind of uses texture as a bump map as well. So you took a high res segment of the bamboo, just copied it to fit a long bamboo stick. Exactly. And just copied and pasted one section over and over again. So the bamboo looks great, even if it did take a little bit of manual work there. As far as comping goes, let's take a little look into that, because we had the volumetric light, and then you also had the fog consideration there for this one. The comp really just helped to make it a lot more vibrant. Yeah, so this is like this straight render from cinema. And if you turn the background like you see that fog, I just wanted to pump that up a little bit here. So you just kind of added it on. Oh, there. Yeah. That really makes it. Yeah. So you can do exactly. Now you can really see it. Then I had those galleries. This was a pass and I just took that made it more intense, blew it. And then put it back onto the render. So this is the difference between the two. So it's just like a little bit more. That blurring is like, I feel like just that subtle blur helps it look like it's filtering through like, you know, the the morning dew or the morning fog versus being so sharp in contrast. Yeah, because like it looks 3D and it's like it's blended onto the render which is like sharp and then you have like the blurry one is blending back onto it. You know, it's just like those subtle touches that really help and I'm using a I'm doing a mask so you're only getting like the top area. I'm applying this like new brighter God ray to the top and it's kind of just like feathered coming down. So it's not blowing out the entire scene. Exactly. And again, it's like gradation. Everywhere. So you're going back to the specular now and again, like I love the specular because this is where you really get to bring out all the detail. like if you look at the blades of grass, there's so much more well-defined in here. I like those highlights make it feel a little bit more real. But I think this was specifically for the bamboo because if you look at this, you're not getting the roughness coming out as much. So if I bring it here, I'm like, oh, let's bring up that roughness up a little bit more. And then I'll just make it green so it blends in. And then I add it back to the scene. And if you just look here, that's doing so much more for the detail. even in the back here. Yeah, it looks like because you know bamboo has got that waxy sheen to it and that's really like before that it was pretty dull and then getting that extra specular really sells it you know. Exactly and that's you know part of the process where you're looking at this here and you have to evaluate what can be improved or what can be fixed. So boom and that's why I love my crypto map because I could just make all those selections all nice and good. I mean, I could just select all the bamboo. So yeah, that was that. And then I just applied specular to the entire scene. So just to show you how that looks, that's a little bit more specular. Sufferly don't wanna go crazy with it. That's a clamp in case anything's too flat out. Done, I just pushed with the saturation. That saturation boost. Yeah. It's huge. It really does. It really helps to make the seed more vibrant. Right. Real subtle color, correct. But the grade is really what I think. Yeah. You know, gives it like that interesting look. So the difference between that and that. And they're just like pushing some blue, a little bit of blue into the mid-toons and the gamma. Give it a touch of sharpen and a little bit of a glow. Gotta get that glow. Yeah, I mean, if you want to see what that glow is doing, you know, it really works because there's like the God rays and all that stuff. Right. And the bluing is here does feel really nice. Yeah, having that overlay a glow just really ties all those different volumetric effects together. kind of seeing like some of the Glow up bouncing off the rock and of course, you know some good old subtle Jere looks Jimmy Cox looks exactly, you know just just here on the edges like As a thing about chromatic operation, you just want to be subtle like some yes, so so but it it does do It does make the render sexier Yeah. So that little cinematic realism, like cinematic quality. Egg. Exactly. Oh, wow. Night and day. Yeah. So, you know, a washed out that looked before. I mean, obviously, runners could take it far, but like, if you know what could be improved, you can definitely take it to a different level and come up. Yeah. I mean, me personally, and I feel like I know a lot of people that do this as well. where it's like you have your main render in Redshift or Octane or whatever, and then just like the finishing, like all the finishing stuff, I feel like I do a lot of that in the post effects option where you could do your color correction in camera. You can add a lot in camera, just the white balance, change the white balance color, whatever, and do that all there. But yeah, I don't know. I feel like there's a certain segment of artists that are like, you know what, I never liked compositing and I'm just gonna do everything in camera and then there's some like yourself where it's like, I want that flexibility. Well, I would say you're kind of in the middle, you know? Like you're not rendering out every single pass or, you know. Yeah, this is just like the push to like, no matter how good a render is from 3D, you can always make it a little bit better and calm. For sure. I remember like Nick Campbell saying like, Never ever just do your raw render and never, they at least bring it in Photoshop, do a little curves adjustment or something. Subtle, you could always just push it a tad. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, as you can see here. It's not too, it's little subtle things. But I mean, it's a bunch of subtle things that you're doing that the end result is very noticeable, you know? All those little things, like even all the little details in how you build up your scene and the different foliage and the lighting considerations and stuff like that. And that's what I love about your work is that, you know, you have that eye for something that can take, when you make these five small decisions, it's like night and day, you know? And that's all that you really need to take to the next level. It takes so long to know what those things are. I like to instinctively know what to do. And yeah, that's kind of what I've been learning. How much of that is just, like I'm sure it's experience and just developing your eye for that kind of stuff. But do you ever do it where, you know, you just walk away for a little bit and come back to it fresh and then you see it with fresh eyes and you're like, you know what? Now that I see this kind of new, I know I need to do this, this and this. You know, but I did do one where I was like going between them. This definitely wasn't the first try. Yeah, as you said, it takes time to figure out what the best combination is. But when you get it, you know. All right, so now we jump into that thread scene where in the viewport, it just looks like a bunch of splines. So everything is done in render and materials using these hair materials. And I'm really interested to see how the Redshift hair material system kind of works. Yeah, so with a scene like this, because there's so much detail, you really don't have to go too crazy with the materials. The nice thing about Redshift is that it just uses Cinema's native hair tools like one-to-one. So there's no special Redshift tag or anything like that. This is all hair material. So if I jump into this hair material, it's the color, you know, specular normal. There's not much to it. There's just like a little bit of variation in the thickness. And yeah, that's about it. And as we mentioned before, we're just using an additional layer to give you some of these stray hairs to make it feel more realistic. But just in terms of texturing, it's really the detail and the fibers that's given us the texture there. Now, as far as lighting goes, it looks like we've got your standard Sikani lighting setup where you got the dome light rocking. You got two area lights and that's about it. And I'm sure with like this kind of scene, like you're zoomed in on this one area, it looks like you were very deliberate as far as where the shadows was being cast because then it's allowing that your logo in the center there to really pop because it's got that darker background. Yeah, exactly. And again, it was always crazy to see DCs before I saw lights. Holy cow. That's pretty psychedelic. It is, that's a whole aesthetic. But you know, just using that dome light to fill in the lights. So that's a pretty, is that dome bright? That looks like it's pretty cranked up. Um, no, there we go. Never mind. Yeah. So it just updated. I would like to pull it down again, just to soften the shadows. Yeah. And then this is my key light. Oh, well, I guess we're using two, there's two key lights in here. I just wanted to like bring some color into it. So that's why it's side by side. So we have like a yellow. So you got a little yellow going on there. Yeah, exactly. just to make it feel like a little bit more vibrant. And then we have like that white key light as well. Are those two key lights? Like they look like the right, yeah, yeah. Against each other. There's overhead lights. Exactly. And that's just to like make it feel lighting wise, like a little bit more vibrant. So like, say far to pull this out. You know, the colors just don't feel as rich. Like you're not getting on yellow. it's just very pink. But now, like, you add that yellow one, you know, you can really kind of get someone out warmer color in there that makes it feel like a little bit more rich. It's also like kind of accentuating those yellow streaks a little bit as well. Yeah, like how the lights are complementary, complementing the the actual colors of the strands. Yeah, exactly. And you know, like, like because the scene is just so dense of information, we don't really need to do that much with lighting and texturing. So from that perspective, it was pretty easy. Let's talk about the little logo and like the hairs on there. Did you just, you know, apply some hair to that and some little purplish material? So actually this came in and like I combed the hair to the direction of the S. Oh, cool. And there's like, there's two layers, like some shorter and some longer. Well, yeah, you know, it's the same thing. You know, hair material, this is the color. And this one has like some kink and clump and some other stuff so it feels like a little bit more frizzy and organic. But yeah, that's the crux of it really. Looks like a cat spit it out or something. Yeah, exactly. But when you're a little bit full for a way, you know, it looks more pristine. Yeah. Yeah, that's about it for this one. Very cool. Now, complies what kind of comping magic did you do? This is the render that's straight from Cinema 4D. And if it looks different, it's because Redshift actually changed the hair algorithm right after I completed the scene. So that's why this looks like I originally intended it to. Oh, interesting. So there's something in the newer version that maybe makes the colors more dull or something like that? Yeah, exactly. could bring that back and comp. But yes, it is what it is. So like, you know, first thing is so like, again, like this one did it like didn't really need a lot of comp. This one really good, like right out the box. For sure. It's like the logo could be a little bit brighter. So I just brought that up. You know, classic. I like to just push that specular pass. This is a specular. This is like the reflection. So I just bring it back, add it a touch. Nothing too crazy. This is the difference. It's a touch. A little bit of reflection. That's some color correct. That's what really pumps that up. A little gray, old shoppin' old glue. And boom, that's it. That's awesome. It's like the secret Sikani sauce for all these renders. I mean, that's it. Is that for the cohesiveness of all these different shots? It's like you don't want to get too drastic with the types of compositing that you're doing and stuff like that, I assume. Yeah, sometimes before project, like I would find like a good, I don't know, sauce and use it across different shots. So I guess that was the same. But yeah, it's great. You know, like this looks good. But then when you're comping it, you're like, Oh, yeah, this really makes it better. Like, look at the difference environment. See with these. Yeah, just all the colors are really more vibrant and I think just kicking that logo off the shadows background there really helps a lot too. Yeah, and it looks motivated too. It looks like it's just out from underneath the little strand that it would be illuminated that much anyways. Yeah Yeah, I really wanted to get like shadow in this area and that's why the light is Up here. Which one's next to B? Oh, it's the B. Yeah Yeah, I mean, because we saw how you modeled everything with the volume builder and all that good stuff. But when you see the model and then the end result, it's like there's a lot of the heavy lifting being done by the textures there. So really interested to see what that workflow is like because you got that like, it definitely looks like you did some subsurface scattering there I'm thinking. You know, just throwing out my guesses here, what you did there and like displacement for the honeycomb little holes. All right, yeah, so this is the render. As you can tell, there's definitely a difference between the scenes. I think that. Well, yeah. One other thing that's in here too, that wasn't checked was this displacer. Yeah. So yeah, with that displacer on, it's also kind of really giving it that organic shape. That's just like, is that a displacer that's just applied to all those wax pieces, Honeycomb pieces. Gotcha. Yeah. So within the honey honeycomb, they're just like a displacer with a noise texture on it. And yeah, what's that's doing is just giving it that really kind of organic look and like the difference between the two. It's it's really, it's really doing a lot. You know, I was thinking about how to get the honeycomb pattern. And I was like, yeah, I'm definitely not going to model this. We could definitely achieve this in texture. And I found it's a really simple black and white honeycomb texture map, which is kind of doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. So that's literally just the honeycomb texture. Yeah. But let me let me just disable a few things and less of you kind of go step by step. So I'm just gonna pull out the diffuse and I'm gonna shut off the subsurface scattering. Right, so I just stripped away a bunch of different things here. I took away displacement, the subsurface scattering and the diffuse color. And this is kind of what you're left with. But in fact, I'll probably just, let me just kind of strip away everything. I'm really sure how we built this shader up. So obviously, you know, this is like base hair. It's just like a diffuser for yellow color, nothing much to it. So the first thing I realized, like, to get an interesting honeycomb pattern, if you know, like you need a displacement map or like a bump map. So I created, again, like I found this cool black and white displacement honeycomb texture. And that's really what's doing a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of getting the shape of that B-Wax. So I'll connect this. I'm just doing this box here so we could see what's happening faster. So yeah, we've plugged that honeycomb displacement in here. And you can see that's already doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Another thing I did is I took that same honeycomb and blended it with like this crust texture. I think I also used it on like one of the stones and one of the last scenes. I wanna just put this in here. And that's not gonna do, it's just gonna give us like another layer of detail. Because that's what I was gonna say, as far as like that honeycomb texture, it's very uniform, geometric, not very organic at all. And I'm guessing that bump map just adds that little variety as far as like the displacement looks? I mean, not even, it's like it's super duper subtle. Like the crust is just to give it like some kind of slight surface imperfections. Okay. But yeah, sometimes I just like to double up the bump on top of the displacement to just get a little extra detail. You know, the first thing, when I saw this, I was like, oh, you know, it's all one color. Like when you look at beeswax, it goes from like a brown to like a yellow. And I was like, well, how am I going to achieve this? And one thing would have been using our ambient occlusion. It's the corners. It could be this brown in the lighter areas. It could be this yellow. And I'm going to disable some of these layers that we have here. So I could build up how we added more detail into the shader. But for now, let's just put that AO into the diffuse and we'll see like how much that's already gonna lift. There we go. So just the AO alone is doing so much. Again, like in the insides, it's that dark. On the outside, it gets a little bit lighter. It's really gonna give us that realistic feel. But then I was like, you know, this might be too uniform. So then I made like a noise pattern. This is like a Maxon noise. And I just kind of like layered a noise on top of this. So when I enabled that. So little subtle shift. Yes. It's pretty like it's not, like even here it's really kind of subtle. And then like I took this and I included it and I made it like dark. And then I was like, oh, let me put this back on top of it to make certain areas even more dark. Oh, okay. So you can see like, there's a little bit more contrast now. Mm-hmm. So if I was to like disable this, it gets a little bit lighter. Enable it, it's gonna get darker again. I was like, oh. Yeah, it's great. Yeah. So that's kind of like what, how we're building up the diffuse. The last piece of the puzzle was the subsurface scattering because that waxy feel is what really makes it feel like wax. Go back into the material, did the multi-SSS and just did like, you know, three B wax colors and like figuring out what the right scale is is always. It's a journey. Exactly. Well, one thing I realized like when I enabled it, it was like, oh, you know, like, like everything is getting subsurface. You know, like it, I wasn't getting like those defined areas of like the inside of the honeycomb. Right, like that varying thickness, like the thicker parts would get less. Right now it looks like everything's getting the same amount. Exactly. So what I did, again, using this same honeycomb texture, I inverted it so now the really bright areas are black. Did a slight color correct to it. And then I just blended it with a white color so that it would be more gray than black, so nothing. So everything gets at least a little bit of subsurface when I mix like the inverted honeycomb texture on this white color. So now when I connect these maps, it's going to like art direct the subsurface scattering to be like on the insides, give it more subsurface, but on the edges, give it less. Yeah. Yeah. That's a huge difference. Exactly. But then what's nice about this mix is that if I want to give like these edges more subsurface scattering, I could just move this slider up. And then that's just giving that map more white into it. And therefore kind of giving more subsurface to those edges. So yeah, that's, that's kind of like the crux. See, there's more subsurface in those edges. And the thing about the, not all, because with a lot of subsurface scattering the texture by itself like I feel like with some surface scattering it makes or break the lighting is the thing that makes or breaks that kind of look. Like I see that you have that light that's kind of in the back where you got that nice rim light and that's where you can really start to see that light penetrating through the edges of the honeycomb which just really saw a nice little rim light. Yeah that's actually a good segue to lighting. Yeah so often I use subsurface scattering and I'm like, why does this look like garbage? And then you forget that like, oh, well, lighting is a massive part of how this looks, you know, how the light gets filtered in and from what direction, what angle? Exactly. You have to have like some either light from the side or like light from the back. So you can kind of see, as you can tell, he looks a little bit busy. So let me actually disable some of these fall-offs. So those were fall-offs. I was mistaken in thinking they were little point lights or something. Yeah. But yeah, as EJ was saying, a big part of sub-super-scattering is the lighting. So I have a light here as my key light. Maybe it's always good to disable. The lights to showcase what's happening. dome light to just kind of give us some basic fill and then that key light. So now we have a key light, but for subsurface to really look like subsurface, it's all about like a little bit of backlighting. So, you know, I strategically put like some lights that's going to backlight the honeycomb to kind of get that desired effect. So now if I enable this light, you know, it's going to give like some really nice backlighting in this area. Like you begin to see like the subsurface kind of shine through over here. And then like I have this super massive backlight in the back here. Yeah. I just want to really, really bring some of that subsurface to the front. And backlighting with subsurface is so important. If you don't have it, you're just not going to get the effect. Like that one light is giving all that subsurface here, that subsurface here, all in between here, we're getting that subsurface scattering. And this is really because of this hero light, this big boy in the back here. I love this is like a little bit of golden hue that I don't know if that's coming from a colored light or what that's coming from or if I'm just seeing things. Yeah, it's part of this. Oh, you mean like around here? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's like a GI from the honeycomb. And then we have another light on the bottom here to kind of help give us even more subsurface scattering. So I was strategically like positioning lights in the back, you know, just to push the back lighting and to push the subsurface as much as possible. And then there's a light on the tippy top here. What's that doing? It looks like it's facing away from everything. What are you doing? What are you doing? No, I think it's supposed to be either lighting the background area here. Oh, because you can't see you have like a plane object or something like that. Yeah, exactly. Okay, gotcha. Yep. And now you see that illuminating the corner. Exactly. So this top light is illuminating the section. But yeah, you know, again, like look at the difference with this light off. You know, you're going to lose so much of that subsurface. And it's exactly what you were saying, EJ. It's like, if you don't have that backlight, it's just no matter how much subsurface you crank into it, it's just not going to look as good. We're just using the ambient occlusion to control the subsurface and to really kind of give detail to the diffuse, to make it feel just a little bit more detailed. If we're just using one color, because it's a little bit darker within the honeycomb, it's just defining the environment. And then you see it here and then you add this displacer. It's just going to make everything feel more organic. Like you get the nice ripples here. You know, it's just like a combination of everything that makes it feel rich. And, you know, we have the bees disabled. I mean, that's another thing. Oh, right. Yeah. Forgot about the bees. Yeah. I mean, it's all being generated by particles. If I just move a few frames ahead, they'll start to see those populace and fly around the scene. And those bees were they, you know, models you found from somewhere that already had materials applied. There was a big deal about tweaking them too much. Yeah, I had to like redo the materials a little bit. But it's really, really simple. So how are we actually doing this bees? Like if you look in the scene, it's just like a simulation, like an X particle simulation with some turbulence. I just needed like to time it correctly and then, you know, just make sure that the particles had like orientation on them. So when I clone the object to it, you know, the move to the correct orientation. But yeah, what I'm doing again, we're bringing back that custom object in the X particle and in the redshift tag. Oh, right. Yeah. Bring it full circle. But this is a new thing I'm using here. Like the B is what is a redshift proxy. So it's like a baked animation. Oh, kind of like a like the redshift version of an X ref or something like that. Exactly. But it has all the textures and animation baked. And it has all like the wings buzzing and you know, all that stuff. Oh, super cool. I've not messed around with redshift proxies before. So good. Another thing, like when we kind of see the bees going, it's the kind of like jittery, like getting the motion for those bees was so interesting. It's like, you know, a bee doesn't, a bee doesn't fly in like a straight line like this. It does like. Yeah, a little hover, they're drunk on honey or something. Right, exactly. Until, so, you know, the X popsicles are doing one thing, but in the modifier, there's also like a random effector that's kind of like giving it. Little bit of an undulation. Yeah, exactly. you put the table and field on. Yeah, and it's kind of just kind of giving it some other additional way to motion to it. And that's why I like it what using X particles to because you could sim and X particles and then you could put more graph on top of it. That's awesome. Yeah, I've not messed around with X particles too too much, but I love the that tight integration in there. Yeah, so you know, you have like as far as passes go, because you just showed that final result. And I feel like you did something to really amp up the subsurface scattering that just made it look, so it just made you think of like, there's some fresh honey in that honeycomb right there, just really gave it a lot more vibrance. When I'm in 3D, I'm like, okay, what would be useful for me? So ambient occlusion, GI reflections, subsurface scattering, subsurface catching raw, specular lighting. So I just kind of pull out the stuff I think would be useful for me. And then I jump into new, can create a recipe. First things first, let's jump in. First thing I do, this is like the reflections pass. So just sprinkle some of that on. Give it a little bit of detail. So one thing I realized too was like the wings here were like really bright some places, but the bees themselves were super dark. So I had to like darken some of the wings a little bit here and then make the bee bodies a little bit brighter. Did that and that's again, beauty of the crypto mat, you know, with mats, you could do that as well. Then I was like, we need some more subsurface scattering and then we had like this this subsurface scattering raw pass. And I just took that, gave it like a color correct, clamped it so nothing was like too burnt out. And I put that back on it. And yeah, that really helps. That's huge. Yeah. It got that honey. And again, like you can see, like, if I jump back into the pass, how the edges aren't getting as much subsurface. Right, right. Because we did that in the texture. So that was pretty nice. Then the next pass we added, this is ambient occlusion pass. Just put some contrast and I graded it and then I multiplied it back on. Because I was like, oh, it's just too bright here. How can we bring it back down? So then I used the AO and put it back on top of it. Yeah, with this, I'm just, yeah, so I don't even know how I figured this out. I was just like, it's like you're taking these passes and you're like, let me see what works. And yeah, this was what was just working. And I just wanted to do a little color correct on the logo. Obviously, we got to bring back the specular, as I was mentioning with all the pieces, the specular is where all the nice detail lives. So I could bring that back, put it on top of it. No, I had to do noise it. So it's taken a little bit longer. So this is the difference. Just brightens up the edges ever so slightly there. That rim light man is doing a lot of the the sexy work in this shot Exactly. I'm maxed. I'm masked. I only wanted like this specular to be on this area here So that's like when I when you see supply this only like on these areas So then I always like sometimes I like to put like a little spillage like a little light spill So I put like a little orange color over on this section and the rest is just like creating a color correct. So So I love how you, you know, you're talking all throughout your shots and how you love the light with that nice gradient. And you definitely see that here. It's almost like that specular that you have masked off is motivated by that hot rim light on the left and then slowly grade eight down to the lower right. Right, exactly. Yeah. And again, like that saturation really punches us up. But that, this grade does a lot. some blues in here. That does a lot. You just taste the honey that's in those honeycombs now just because they look so rich and vibrant. Then that's shopping with a little bit of glue and then another grid on top of that. Now did you do any like that shadow that's making the logo pop? That's all motivated by the lights and shadows in the scene. It's not like you did anything special in post-it. Yeah, exactly. So that second grade is really doing a lot here. And then, you know, some sweet jail looks on here. And that's it. Awesome. I think this scene had the biggest. Yeah, that's a huge shift. Wow. Yeah, like between scenes. And I love that glow, too. Yeah, just kind of make it pop a little bit. But yeah. Yeah, that's that that I think is the most drastic pre-composite post-composite. Yeah, and you know that's why it's important to you know nothing wrong with a little cop guy. Right, yeah exactly like I mean that shows you right there sometimes you could push it a lot more a lot further in post there and in the aspect of like ambient occlusion I feel like like with the advent of third party renders, you don't even think about ambient occlusion as a pass anymore because it's just baked into the GI, but you can use it so creatively like you did here, which without it, everything would look extremely flat. You know, it just really helps to kind of give it that more. Yeah, just like really bringing someone out detail out. Sweet, so we got the birds, the bees and the birds. So we got some of the birds. Some of the birds. And you had that feather texture or the hair material again. So I assume a lot of the same workflows that you use with the yarn kind of set up there. So just like the kind of wool thread scene, like when you have a scene that has a lot of detail, you don't really need to make a texture that has a lot of detail because inherently the scene is already super duper detailed. So all we're really doing here, if I go to one of the feathers, like say one of the feathers from this cloner, there's like the inner part of the feather and that's been, you know, shaded in blue. And then like there's the actual feather. Maybe I could just copy this out to a different scene. So these are actually all represented as splines because I assume when you bake down the actual feather object it breaks it out into three different splines that you can then have control over what material goes where. So yeah, there's like two different parts to the feathers. So I want to just jump back into the scene, hop back into this material. you could realize like what you see is it's not just like one solid color right? Yeah it looks like you're a descend almost like different colors depending on the angle you're looking at it almost. Exactly and how we're achieving it just like what we talked about with the plants is the translucency pumping a ramp into that material to just kind of give it that like translucent, wild looking kind of texture. And I think it's doing a beautiful job. Part of that, too, is adding like a little bit of color into the reflection as well. So like when the light hits it in a certain way, it's going to be like a particular color. And then, you know, I also have some lights that has color. It's the combination of like some lights in the reflection, some color in the lights and the color ramp in the translucency and the material is kind of giving us this really kind of vibrant gradient in the feathers themselves. So that ramp, as far as like how it's working, it's because how the backlighting works, it's basically, you know, black and white values and all you're doing is kind of remapping it's a color. So what's going on there? That's getting like iridescent kind of. Well, the ramp, this is the color of the actual translucency. Oh, okay. This is like what's controlling how translucent it is. I got you. This is like. So that you have a set weight. Right. And this is the color of the translucency. Okay. Depending on where the light hits it, it's going to be like a slight, It's going to be like a slightly different color. I gotcha. So that's why it looks like you have a little backlight there in the top right. And those are like more that left side of the gradient, which is that blueish. Exactly. And that's a colored light as well. So it's getting lighting from that translucent. See, plus you're getting some lighting from this light as well. And the combination of those two is really what's making like these feathers look that color. Again, I'm just kind of angling some of these lights in different places where I want some of those colors to pop a little bit more. Maybe this might be a good time and just kind of see like what. You know what that lighting setup. Yeah, what's so many slides I'm doing. So we have this dome light and then obviously again, to just bring that lighting back into the scene that let's enable this area lights. All right, so you know that dome light is really just kind of being like the fill light And then this is our key lights right here in the top right. So again, you're just building up that gradient top left, bottom right kind of deal. Exactly. Right, and that's providing most of all light, but we're realizing we're not getting in any of that color. So that's why that's where these colored lights come in. Okay, because yeah, I was wondering if that iridescent was kind of like a trick with just the lights you were using in the scene. Yeah, it's a combination of the lights and the translucency in the material. So when I enable this light, you're going to see we're going to get a lot of that vibrant color. And you see that's just kind of really pushing those blues in there. And it really just makes it feel like significantly more vibrant. We're going to do the same for this left side. Again, it's kind of crazy just like adding a light with some translucency. like you know you could add like this extra you know it's level of depth and if you look up the edges I think that's where you really kind of see right shine and this one was like specifically for the logo and again that's where that light linking comes in. Oh right right right yep so it's specifically light. One thing I want to point out is uh you know you use the the hair material in the last one, which I guess in the hair material, is there like a translucency option in there? No off the top of your head. There's a transparency, but I don't think there's a translucency. I got you, because I noticed that like what you're using here is that you actually have splines with like redshift materials on them. And I'm wondering if like that gives you that extra bit flexibility as far as material options go. It does. But what's also different is that with because I'm using, you know, red shift to render the cues, actually cylinders. So they have like, oh, they're actual, like geometry. Right. Yeah. So they have some volume to it. So I got you. Okay. Unlike the edges, you're catching like so not translucent. Okay. That makes total sense. Okay. Yeah. But I think translucent you could work whether it was flat or whatever. No, it's just, yeah, it's just really quick to render as well. I love how much you're using the translucency backlighting trick. I feel like I never use it because I feel like it's a cheap trick. But like you've totally sold me. I'm like, nope, this is like a real production thing that you should be using a lot more. Yeah, it depends for what, right? Is this is more of like artistic stuff? Like I wouldn't use this on the B scene, for instance. Yeah, exactly. That's what I was going to say, like probably would not look as good for that scene. Yeah, the good news is the scene was already just, you know Pretty good to begin with so it looked really vibrant in camera Yeah, I didn't really have to do that much of course. We're gonna get some of that specular and And of course some of the reflection. That's like those two Passes no matter what I always add them in so if you're going back, I just did a little color correct Which makes it a little bit more vibrant Then I add some some specular just a little color correct on the logo. And I love the foreground feathers that are falling to just such a good just really give some depth to the scene. 100 percent. So saturation punched up or really subtle, but the grade is really kind of making it more like. I don't know. It's a darker blue. It just looks a little bit more sophisticated, bring it back some of that saturation in there. And yeah, that's about it. Some jail look love, subtle glow. Yeah. And boom. Yeah, because it looked like really super bright and tropical and cartoony, which, you know, doesn't really fit with the rest of the different shots. So yeah, that grading really kind of made everything like color wise, look consistent with all the other shots. Yeah, it just feels like a little bit more sophisticated when you do the grade. It's like all purple, but now you have like the blue to purple in here, which you know Helps to make it feel this a little bit more vibrant. But yeah, so yeah well we're on to that last shot with the piece of architecture and the the cacti and Pretty I would assume like you probably had One sunlight in there for the main light source Yeah, like lighting wise, as you said, super simple. I'm going to quickly just load it and run that because it's so, it's such a light scene. Yeah, made different from the hair and the feathers and yeah. Right, but yeah, as you said, it's like boom, there's one light. And as far as the texture goes, it looks like it's like a stucco kind of really cool texture with some, you know, a little bit of, looks like it's been painted over a few times, like there's old paint underneath and you give it a nice coat over top. Yeah. And the bump map is really doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. And it's like three or four bumps in here. You can see these maps. So there's like a plaster normal that I like to use. But then I'm gonna like just pull all these out. Just make sure I know where I'm pulling them out from. So yeah, that plaster is just kind of giving us like those little notches, but then this max on noise. It's like a, just like a Naki from, you know, typical cinema 4D. It has really kind of start to give us that roughness. Yeah, it's not sleeping on cinema 4D noises. Yeah, can't beat them. Yeah. And of course, these edges look super sharp, so you got to throw in the wrong corners. OK, yeah. Get those highlights, specular hits. And the last one is just like this concrete texture. You just give it some additional detail. Like you could kind of see those little holes and stuff. Like something that the Maxon noises can't do by themselves. They can contribute to get into an end result, but you need those real bump maps. So like when I put it on now, you're going to see like little different holes and stuff in here. So yeah, that's kind of like the bump map is doing mostly heavy lifting. And of course, you know, I'm just using a roughness channel to make the specular a little bit more interesting like you can see over here. That's about it. That's the same thing I'm using for each one of these textures. Well, what about the what's the comp look like for this? Sumo, a lot of the same secret sauce of a lot of the other shots. Yeah, I mean, the only difference with this shot was I had to to replace the sky. So I need to add to the sky to kind of give it some extra detail. And it's really subtle, you know, it's just like get some clouds in there. Yeah, I'm like a little star, moon, you know, just to give it a little bit more atmosphere. But yes, same thing's really, it's like color correct, saturation. Yeah, this one is not as drastic. It's just like finding those areas. Like did a little bit of the crypto mat with some of the cacti. Yeah. Yeah, and I also just rendered it with the logo in this whole shot as well. So yeah, I made it darker and then I added in the logo after the fact. Okay, so you just got a little bit of like a more contrast drop shadowy kind of thing on it. Yeah. So like when I put the logo on top of it now, like there'd be, you know, yeah, it would just like pop a little bit more. Yeah. And there's rendered out that shot together. Boom. And yeah, just transitions to that. Precisely. Like, you know, jail looks is kind of doing a bunch of this dramatic operation and Louis stuff. Yeah, it's always hard to like, I feel like it's hard to mix the like a 2D element with the 3D elements. And the grade is a big part of that. Otherwise, it looks like it's just kind of slapped on haphazardly and just like, you know, just put a Photoshop layer on top of that sucker and call it a day. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes it's, yeah, I like to add some this little hint of bells and whistles. Yeah, I mean this shot, it's all lighting, composition, materials, just to add that little bit of detail in there. And subtle, subtle movement, which transitions very nicely to that next subject we'll talk about, which is how you made everything move in all these shots. Yes, let's go."
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