Original subtitles

All right, so in this lesson we're going to talk

about how to use a camera and lighting techniques.

So these often go hand-in-hand.

So a definite wanted to kinda mentioning them together.

But we're going to start off with this scene here that is just a plain and then a sphere.

We're going to be using the render button a lot.

So we're gonna have a separate lesson for render,

but to show you where that is real quick,

up top here, you'll see a render to picture viewer button.

Whenever I press that,

you see that's my scene right there that I have rendered.

So basically what we're gonna do is we're gonna take this scene and kinda

take it one step at a time to kind of make it look good with lighting.

So our first step,

let's go ahead and navigate around

this scene here and trying to find a good camera angle that we want to use.

So I'll left-click to rotate around here.

I'll right-click. We'll zoom in a little bit.

Like a tough angle ligament that works right there.

Alright, so now whenever I have my position that I want the camera to be set,

I could simply click on this camera button right here,

and it makes a camera right where my viewport has.

So I can do a couple of things here.

One, whenever I start moving around the the viewport again,

you'll see that the camera doesn't actually move with it.

What you can do is you can select the camera with as little crosshairs are here.

It moves you back to the camera and now you are selected in that camera.

So now when you start moving this around,

you're actually moving the camera too.

So you don't have to be careful though,

because sometimes you start moving the camera and you're not really ready to do that.

So what we can do here now with this camera.

So the cameras in 3D work very similarly to the cameras inside of the real world, right?

Where each one has a different millimeter lens.

Now if you don't know anything about cameras,

to basically kind of tell you this quickly.

Essentially, the lower this number is,

the wider the view is,

the higher the number is,

the less view you have.

So essentially to get the same image with a higher lens,

you'd have to be close.

And with a, with a,

with a, let me say.

Alright, so if we had a 50 millimeter lens,

you see what happens there is we get a wider field of view.

Whenever I change this to 200 millimeters,

you see a kinda zooms in really closely in the field of view is a lot smaller.

So let's go ahead and change this to something like 5050 is good.

It's pretty, pretty standard here,

but you can change it to anything that you want really.

That's really all we're going to talk about as far as the settings go in the camera,

there are a lot of different options here.

Actually, we're gonna talk about the stereoscopic here and a little bit,

but for the most part,

changing the settings on the camera.

There are a lot of things,

but the main thing that you'll be adjusting is that focal length, there.

So now we have that whenever hit render now C, Okay.

So on the right side here we can see a history of all of the renders that we made.

And again, we're going to kind of see this as

a progress kinda thing and we'll kind of see how,

how we go from place to place.

All right, so let's take a look at some of

the other cameras that you can actually use. It.

We click and hold here.

We have a target camera.

Whenever I use this target camera,

i'm going to de-select off of this so I can kind of give you an idea here.

Alright, so now that that is de-selected or deleted,

we can see that whenever I made that target camera,

it actually gave me a target,

this little camera, this little target here,

and then a null.

Now, if I start moving that care Bre,

you'll see it stays facing.

Let's go ahead and I'm gonna change these views a

little bit so you can get a good idea here.

Let's change.

In this view, I'm going to select the cameras so we can see what it looks like.

And then over here I'm going to change a little bit so we can kinda,

so we can rotate around this viewport and

then the left viewport here will be that rendered frame.

So I can move stuff around in here.

I'm gonna remove that can't read, can see exactly what it's doing in that rendered,

in the frame that we will render here.

So if I change it over here, hit render.

It renders that view from the top left.

Alright, so with a target camera then we can see that we're changing the camera,

but it's still pointed at, at the target,

which is just so happens to be a null that's placed directly under that sphere.

So when we grab that target,

we can start moving that around.

And you'll see that it actually moves where

the cameras looking but doesn't actually change the position of the camera.

And that could be good for like scenes that you want to like kind of rotate

something or not necessarily rotate,

but like maybe there's something moving

across the frame and you want to kind of follow it,

you can use a target for that.

For the most part, I personally just use normal cameras,

but because that's how real cameras work.

Real cameras don't have targets.

That's just kind of a helpful tool in 3D.

So the last camera that we're talking about and we click and hold is the stereo camera.

So this is a pretty new thing here that is pretty

cool whenever it comes to making virtual reality scenes.

Now if I go ahead and click on this,

I'm going to get my scene in here and a little bit.

All right, so that's where I want the camera to be.

Now what I can do with this 3D camera here,

without selected, I can go over to spherical,

I can go to enable.

And whenever I hit render,

you see it actually gives me a spherical image of the scene.

So just like that,

you can take this and you can put this inside of any sort of VR app.

Now most of these apps, they kind of

Use different kind of setups.

Some of them use a left eye and right eye.

Some of them use the spherical here and then automatically convert it.

But all of your options, and again,

I'm not gonna get too far into it,

but all of your options are in here.

Were the stereoscopic mood.

And again, the spherical camera.

So again, that easy to just get some virtual reality looking stuff in here.

So I'm not gonna talk about that too much.

I'm gonna go ahead and delete that camera here.

And let's go ahead and I'm just gonna make a normal camera again and select it.

And I'm going to try to set up this angle here.

We're gonna go back to that 50 millimeter length and set it up.

We'll say right there,

some sort of interesting composition.

So I'm not gonna get too much into composition,

but one of the,

one of the big rules is rule of thirds,

where you needed essentially think of your screen divided into three parts in,

in, horizontally and vertically.

And what you wanna do is you want to try to place

your focal point on one of those four intersections.

I realize that may be a little confusing, but its composition.

So whenever I render that now,

you see we are currently here. Alright, perfect.

So we want this to look a little bit more realistic.

So in order to do that,

we need realistic lighting, right?

So I'm gonna go ahead and close that.

And I'm going to, I'm going to work mainly in this view.

And we're gonna leave this one over here as the camera view or the render view.

So if we go next to the camera, we can click and hold that.

You'll see that there are a bunch of different lighting options.

I'm willing to talk about a few of these.

But let's start by going into light.

When we do that, everything goes black immediately

because our light is actually under everything.

So if I bring that up,

you'll see I can actually start to see what the lighting does on that sphere there.

Let's say I want to put those right around there.

You can get a good idea of where the highlights hitting on it right there.

And if I hit render is the right now I'm starting to get lighting.

So we had this.

Now we have that, but there's one big thing that's missing and that is shadows.

So whenever we make a light,

it automatically defaults to not making shadows.

If we go down to our options here in this little panel,

we can see type of light that we have

all of our different options that we had up top here.

We can actually change it once we already haven't made.

We can go into shadow.

And I'm gonna change this to,

I'm gonna change this shadow maps.

And then I'm going to hit renders.

We can see what that those.

And just like that now we have a shadow that reacts with the light that we created.

Now, shadow maps work a little bit, not so realistically.

Where if we go into the shadow panel here,

the shadow map is currently 20 or 250 by 250.

Sampling, basically, essentially, the higher this number is,

the sharper that shadow is going to be.

So if I change that to 2 thousand by 2 thousand,

you see all suddenly becomes a really sharp shadow.

If I change it to see if I can go lower here,

I can actually go lower if I change it to like five,

I guess forties loads, you can go.

Now if I render that view,

you see it's super blurry.

So again, so to see these different options,

this was 250 by 250,

this was 2 thousand by 2 thousand,

and this was 40 by 40.

Now what you could do theoretically is just make this kinda however you need it.

You, depending on the light source,

you can kinda change with the shadow does.

That's basically a little not so realistic like I mentioned,

because that's not how lights work.

Essentially how lights work are the bigger the light source is,

the blurrier the shadows.

And the smaller, the smaller the light source,

the harder the shadows.

So one of the things that you can do is you can actually go into,

back into this general tab here.

Go to shadow, change the shadow maps to area.

Now, I want to mention real quick,

ray traced here is going to be all hard shadows no matter what you do.

So it's just perfectly line shadows.

Sometimes you want that for more stylistic stuff.

But let's go into area and see what happens there.

Now. Actually, you know, I'm gonna do,

how am I going to change my Omni light to an area lighten as well.

There we go. So now you see that whenever,

I mean this area light,

it actually made it like a plane.

And essentially what's happening here is light is

going to emit from this side pointing, right?

So let's go ahead and rotate it a little bit just so I can get a good angle at here.

That works.

Now if I hit Render,

you'll see that, hey, look,

starting to get a little bit more realistic shadows here,

because the shadow is based on the size of the light.

So what I can do now,

lets say i, this would be more like

a one of those fluorescent panels letter in-links and sort of Interior.

What I can do it, I can change the size by going into details.

And I can change the outer radius to something like five and you'll see it got,

the light got a lot smaller.

But whenever I render that,

those shadows get harder.

So you can see the two examples there and you can see

what that lighting does on that ball as well.

Where, you know, there's this hard edge.

And then right here we have just more of a softer kinda feel.

So it seems like for this specific seen,

maybe we want to kind of split the difference a little.

Let's go to, let's go to 15 and kind of see how that looks.

Maybe actually a little bit more or

a little bit less because I won't get the shadows a little bit

blurrier and do something like eight or wrong way.

Sorry.

I'm gonna do 25 area, area.

So that's looking pretty cool right there.

We have our highlight. Now.

The other thing, the other thing that's pretty important here as materials,

and the next lesson is going to be on texturing and materials.

So I'm going to talk about that too much here.

But it's, it's, you know,

sometimes it's a good idea to kinda get your lighting figured out first

because all materials kind of react differently depending on how lights are set up.

So if you get your lighting figured out first,

then you can adjust your materials or the other way around.

Honestly, there's no set way that you're supposed to do it,

but just keep in mind that your materials and your lighting kind of

work hand in hand with how the render comes out in the end.

Alright, so also what I wanted to say is we can also change,

if it go into general here and we can change the color of the light.

So let's go ahead and change this to me,

some sort of a red light.

So like that, you know, you can see again it changes that seem immediately.

If I hit render, the light is red.

Perfect.

Alright, I'm gonna kinda go little pink on there.

Ok. So just like this,

you can see that all of the materials and thus are just plain grey.

But by changing the color of the light,

all of a sudden everything changes to that kind of color.

Now in general, each price stay away from that kind of stuff

unless you have a real reason to change the color of the light.

So I'm going to go ahead and close that out.

Let's make this color white, back to what we had.

Perfect. Okay.

So the other type of lights which yeah,

let's go ahead and delete that real quick.

And then I'm going to click and hold and you can see that.

So light is what we had an area,

light is what we ended up creating.

There is a sunlight here that kind of

changes the color of the light depending on the angle,

sort of like how the sun works.

You can essentially make all those same effects using just the light or area light.

But you also have a spotlight here.

Now Spotlight is going to work just like kind of a spotlight on a theatre.

So if we go ahead and position that,

and then we're gonna rotate that down.

There you go to get that ball a little bit there.

Now in that light, I'm also going to go to shadow a and let's change it to shadow maps.

And then in that shadow here,

I'm gonna change the sampling to 1000 by 1000.

Now whenever we hit render on this,

you see I actually get this really cool dramatic lighting now.

And it just makes everything else kinda disappear outside of the cone of the light here.

And we can change that cone by going into details outer angle.

And we can change that code and you see that that's reflected in our viewport here.

So I close that off a little bit.

I'll go ahead and let's go ahead and

try changing the shadow to area and see what that does for us.

So that's pretty cool right there.

That's pretty cool again, scene.

And you know, we're really starting to kinda tell a story with the lighting.

And that's really the most important thing whenever it comes to lighting,

is choosing your lighting angles for a reason.

And I'm not gonna get into cameras set up in proper three-point lighting,

but that's definitely something that you should look into if you're

more interested in kind of studio environments and how they work.

Alright, so that is the lights.

One last light, if I click on here and then there's also a target light,

which is essentially a spotlight with a target,

just like the target camera,

they work exactly the same r.

So let's see what else we got here.

Note one thing that and that allowed people wanna do is

they want to make a scene that just looks really good and they want to get there quickly.

And I'm assuming you do too.

So what I'm gonna do is create a little bit more of

a complex scene and show you some tricks on getting it to look really,

really good, really, really quick.

Now, if I go into light,

I'm going to go to area lights.

And I'm gonna see how that looks real quick.

Alright, that's looking pretty good right there.

Now, let's see.

If I go into actually,

you know, first thing we wanna do is actually

make the scene a little bit more interesting.

So just by selecting one of these fears and holding control,

you see this little icon shows up on your mouse.

You can just drag off another kind of sphere like that.

And like I said, I'm just gonna make the scene a little bit more interesting.

And just kinda giving a little bit of the foreground,

middle ground and background.

Alright, so now, now I rendered that.

We can see that again,

it's looking pretty good.

If we if we start taking steps back,

we can see, you know, where we kinda came from.

And our first render right here compared to right here.

So if looking pretty good, now,

the thing that you can do is essentially you can go into this Render Settings menu,

which is next to the picture viewer.

And then there's a whole bunch of different options here.

But what we're gonna do is we're going to add a thing called global illumination.

What this does is it,

it helps lighting bounce off of objects.

You create more of a realistic lighting situation.

For instance, if sunlight's coming through your room,

global illumination is the reason that the ceiling is appears to be lit up in your house?

If light didn't bounce,

then it would just hit the ground and you wouldn't nothing else would be lit.

It would just be the spot on the ground sort of like a spotlight.

So what we're gonna do is go into effect and then we can go into global illumination.

Now for presets here,

there's a whole bunch of different presets,

but I'm just going to go into interior Hi,

just to kinda give you a quick idea of how this works.

And then I'm not going to touch anything else.

I'm just gonna hit render again.

And we're going to see a couple things happening here.

One is that our render is taking much longer to actually render here.

Now, if we click back to the last one,

we can actually see it's a little bit of a difference,

but it, it feels much more realistic because we're getting that bounced light in here.

So this one right here is the new,

new render with global illumination.

And then we have the old one.

Now, real quick, I'm going to just make a couple of materials

just so you can get a better idea of how global illumination kinda helps you're seeing.

To do that, I'm just gonna double-click in the Material Editor here.

And then I'm going to double click again and change the color to something red.

Perfect.

I'm going to drag that to a couple of the spheres here just to give you an idea.

And then I'm going to double-click, make another one.

We'll make this one yellow.

Perfect. I'm again going to just drag it on here.

Thought was born, wouldn't drink there.

Yeah.

And double-click again.

Let's make one more.

That is great.

And I'm just gonna drag that on the other ones.

I can copy material from one object

and paste onto another by again holding control and dragging.

Just like that. There we go.

So now whenever I render that,

basically what I'm doing is whenever you start adding this color,

it's gonna start bouncing color more so than just a grey that we had before.

So again, we start to get this realistic lighting.

We get our colors are bouncing a little bit.

Not too noticeable there actually,

but that's just kinda gives you an idea of how to kind of quickly set something up.

And yeah, so the other thing we can do to kind of make

these look a little close here we see that we

get these like little grainy blurriness here.

Well, what we can do is we can go into lighting.

We can go into oh,

we're Is it into details?

And so that light that we made, it has samples.

Anytime you see samples, the lower it is,

the less quality it's going to be,

but the faster the render is going to be.

Now if I change this to something like 500,

and then I'll render that.

You're gonna see that our render times are gonna take a little bit more.

And we can actually see that render times over here.

If we, you know,

the last render we made was eight seconds,

the first one was 0 seconds.

And this new one here.

Well, I'll tell you when we get there,

but It's going to be longer than eight seconds.

That's for sure. And there we go, 21 seconds.

So changing something like that,

we get less grain,

but it takes longer to render.

So you get the idea and you know,

a lot of times there's this trade-off where it's,

is it really helping that much?

You kinda have to balance your sampling of things to

make an efficient render time as well as good quality.

And for the specifically,

the samples aren't really doing that much.

So I would just turn that down to 40 again,

just because eight seconds is better than 2100 for the results that we're getting.

So that is essentially how you can kind of use lighting.

You know, basically the, the basics of lighting to get something

that goes from this to this.

Now, real quick, before we go,

I just want to kinda zoom out and give you guys a better angle at this, hit render.

Something a little bit closer to that.

That initial render, just so you can get a good idea here.

So great look and shadows greatly and

highlights compared to this thing right here that has no lighting whatsoever.

And it's just really flattened.

All cool.

Great.

So that was camera lighting and up next we'll be texturing.