Architectural Visualization with C4D and Octane: Night Time Lighting

Photo of Brandon Clements

Instructor Brandon Clements

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  • Duration: 05:20
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  • Made with Release: 18
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In this video, we will take a look at the differences between a night time HDRI and a texture environment inside of Octane Render, to create the proper night time exposure for our scene

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Transcript

Hello everyone. Welcome back and in this video, we are going to talk about our night scene and our night lighting setup, so let's go ahead and jump right into it. What we need to do is make sure that we turn up the emission power to six, hide the bounce cards, and we're going to unhide these candles so I've went ahead and done that. These small flames have an Emission Texture on them so I went ahead and unhid those. Those are going to be in our scene and we're going to go ahead and turn on our shader to six. We're going to do that for both of our light bulbs, and let's go ahead and throw this into the Live Viewer. Okay, now once that's in the Live Viewer, I am just going to use the Render Region feature just to kind of concentrate Octane on this area of the screen in our Live Viewer. So this would be a great time to talk about the sampling rate between these two elements in the scene, the flame and the light bulbs. So if we bring up the flame, and we go into the Emission Texture, you can see that it's set to 600 and if we go to the light bulb here, it is set to 1500. So comparatively, we could balance this out and say, "Octane, we need to basically have more samples concentrated on the candles," by just increasing this to 800. So if I wanted these candles to be twice as important as this light bulb, I could set it to 3000 which would be 1500 times 2, and you can now see through the power of video editing, the before and after and you can see since these are so tiny...these light sources are so small relative to the actual light bulb and the environment, that these are getting the focus and more attention so there's a little bit more illumination detail from here. You can see that this is going to clean up a lot better. We don't really need to focus so much on this light bulb here because if this is going to appear grainy and we're not going to get the illumination that we need in this area, it's going to make our render look very CG so let's definitely keep that in mind as we go into our final render. The environment that's being used for this image is provided by an artist named Serge. If you go to his website, alsens.net, this is the actual environment that I'm using. It's very hard to find really good exterior night HDRs and this is probably the best example that I could show you that I have used professionally. So you do have to purchase this HDR. I will say it's well worth the money. It's something that I've used in a lot of different visualizations. I want to give you that option. Of course, you don't have to use that. What you could do is just use a texture environment and use a dark, rich color and be able to increase that with your environment here. So let me just show you real quick how we can create a alternative for the night. If you go to Objects, let's create a Texture environment. We're going to hide our previous night scene, we're going to come into this Texture environment. Let's just rename it to...we'll just say "Texture environment night" so we know that it's not an actual HDR. We're going to come to our RGB spectrum and let's just kind of tint this to a darker night type of color and you can see that we can get something that is very, very similar. So let's go ahead and look at the night camera. So, of course, we're going to skip the thin lens again. It's very similar to our sunny afternoon so let's continue on to the Camera Imager. You can see here, most of these settings are the same from the last video from the golden hour. Again, I've adjusted the white point just because I wanted to kind of balance the cool and the incandescent colors in the scene and if we wanted to, we could enable post-processing once again and tweak this to our liking if we kind of wanted to get that more glow from our interior. And of course our candles are going to create this kind of glare. So let's play with this a little bit and maybe bring that back down to two, and we can kind of increase this blur just a little bit. So I like the way that this is looking. It's creating that kind of subtle haze and it's looking pretty nice. Another great thing about the Region Render is that we can monitor how many samples per pixel have been rendered so far so it looks like we're at about 3500 and the scene is looking pretty good. It's looking pretty noise-free. Of course when we increase this to our final output which is going to be 4K, a lot of these areas are going to be very noticeable and we're going to be able to see some more grain creep into our image. So in the next video, we're going to talk about how we can create a noiseless render. We're going to set up our final render settings and we're going to bring that into a Compositing package to make this scene look even more flattering. So thanks so much for following along in this video and we'll see you in the next one.
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