Cinema 4D Roadshow 2016 - Adapting Warm Winter for Octane: Setting up the Lights and Environment

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Instructor Patrick Goski

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In this video you will learn how to setup the lights in the scene to work with Octane.

In this video you will learn how to setup the lights in the scene to work with Octane. This will start by showing some handy tips for making the Scene easier to interact with, including: Object Manager filters to make seeing lights in the OM easier and Selection filters. The main focus of the video is setting up the Light object to work with the Octane Light tag, translating the Physical sky to the Octane Daylight, and finally how to setup an environment to simulate atmospheric fog.

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Transcript

In this video, we're going to take a look at converting the Cinema 4D lights, into lights that can be used with Octane. Before we start converting the lights, let's take a little moment to speed up our work flow. So, we're going to start by going to the Layers, and we're just going to hide the Crystals, as well as the Ground_Fracture. And doing this is just going to make sure that our viewport is a little bit more speedy. Next, we can also just set this to Constant Shading. That'll give us a little bit of a better view of what we're looking at, and we can switch between the different views, depending on what we want. Now, the lights themselves are currently hidden from the view, so we'll want to use these to help us with the conversion of the lights, because it'll help us to focus on which lights we want to work with exactly. So we have the Light_Pockets, which are clusters of lights around each of the ground fractures. And, then there are also the Crystal_Lights, and these are kind of like floating lights around each of the crystal structures. Now, to help us actually find the lights in the Object Manager, there's a few things that we can do. The first is going to be using the filters. And you can see here, the filter window is open and that's just this eye icon right here. So if you click that, it'll open up your filters. Now, if you press and hold Alt or Option, and click the visibility icon, you can hide everything from the object manager, and then just click on the eye icon again, on the object, and that just means anything that you toggle on now is going to be visible. Just to ensure that we have access to absolutely everything, we can also go to the View, Folding, and then Unfold All. Now, if we take a look down this list, we have an option for lights. And, we can make that visible, then hide the filters, and we now have a list of every single light in the scene. Now at this point, we can actually start converting some of the lights here. So, we will go through and select every light in the list and then go to the Attributes tab, and we want to make sure that each of these lights is being set to an area light. Octane doesn't work with the point lights. You do need to work with area lights for them to show up in Octane. We can then go to the details, and to get something close to an omni-light, we can change the area shape from a rectangle, to a sphere. The next thing that we want to do is right click in the Object Manager, and then go to your C4doctane tags, and add an Octane LightTag. This will add the LightTag to all of the tags that should be included in the scene. And, in the settings here, we can see that we have a Type, a Temperature, some other options, and we're going to use these to allow the light colors from the C4D lights, to show up in the Octane light. So currently the type is set to Blackbody. And this means it's going to use the light temperature. A lower value is going to go towards the orange colors, and a higher value will go towards blue or white. And this is just based off of the real-life color temperature values. To use the Cinema 4D light color, you want to switch the Type to a Texture, and then you want to select the Use Light Color attribute and enable that. So at this point, we want to go to the cameras, and we can go to the baked camera here, and let's take a look at what our scene looks like. So we'll go to the Octane menu and open up the Live Viewer, and let's just make that a little bit smaller, and then start the render. With the render started, you can see that there's a couple of issues with the lights at this point. The first is the actual shape of the lights is visible in the renderer. And then towards the actual flower itself, we have a dome that has appeared. So the first issue is easy enough to fix. We can start by selecting all of the Octane LightTags and then go to the Visibility, and turn off the Camera visibility. Now we'll just get the contribution from those light sources without having to actually worry about seeing them. Now, one of the big things that is missing from the scene at this point, is the actual contribution from the sky. This was something that was being covered by the physical sky using the Cinema 4D renderers. So we want to set up an Octane sky to match. So start by going to the Objects menu, and then we can add an Octane Daylight object. Now, we want to position this new OctaneDayLight object in the same position as the Cinema 4D sun. And, we can do this fairly easily. So start by going to the filters, and we have a filter for the Physical Sky, so let's bring that back. And if we take a look, we can find the original Physical Sky right there. Now, we can hit convert, and that's going to convert it down to the objects inside of the Physical Sky object. If it disappears, go back to the View and choose Unfold All, and those new objects will be revealed. Now, we're just going to take the OctaneDayLight and place it as a child of the Sun light and then we can hit Shift+C in the viewport, and just type in reset. And choose the Reset PSR, and that'll make it so that the OctaneDayLight matches up with the position of the Sun light. Now, we can pull the Octane light out of that hierarchy, and we now have the OctaneDayLight in the exact same position as the old sun. Now, the sky itself is very bright, and we want to simulate something that's more of like a night time feel. So we're going to go into the Main tab on the DayLight Tag here, and go to the Sky color, and we just want to reduce these values. And we're going to go fairly extreme, so like 0.01, and let's go like .05. So now we get a fairly dark sky, with just contribution from the sun. And then with the sun, we want to make that kind of like a little bit less saturated. Now obviously, you can adjust these parameters to taste depending on what you want to see in the scene. Feel free to experiment, and the live viewer definitely makes those experimentations a lot easier. Now, because we are using a lot of subsurface scattering effects, the Direct Light channel here is not going to show us all of the effect of that. So we want to switch this to the Path Tracer just to get a preview of what our scene looks like. Now, we can see here that all of the lights for the crystals are fairly bright. So we may want to go in and edit those. So just like before, we can go in and select one of the light tags, and then Shift+Click down the list to select everything in that list, and then we can take the Power here and just reduce that. And hopefully, we'll get something that balances out a little bit better. Next, we can try the lights up at the top, and let's just select all of those and reduce that as well. So, it looks like the lights around the flower are still much too bright, even though the lights in the foreground have about the correct brightness that we're looking for. So what we can do is try to select these lights. Now, sometimes this can be difficult as the selection is going to really kind of pre-select anything that you are moving the mouse over. And we just want to focus on the lights. So, we can go to the Select menu and then to Selection Filter and choose None. And then go back to the filter, and choose just the lights. And this way, it's only going to consider lights when you mouse over stuff. Or even click on things. So what I want to do is just select the lights that are by the flower here. So let's jump to a different view, and let's just go Quick Shading here, so that we can easily move around and still have our camera view. And then I'll use the rectangle marquee here just to select all those lights. And because we're using the Selection Filter, we know that it is only the lights here that are being selected. So now that I know which lights I am actually working with, we can start editing the attributes just for these specific lights. So let's just select all of them to begin with and lower the Power. And then we can unpause the Live Viewer here, just to see the results. We can also go through these lights and disable them or enable them to see which ones are affecting what in the scene. So, we can maybe take these two Small Lights. If you're just trying to focus on a specific area in the Live Viewer as well, you can set up a render region. And you can just click on this button and then draw out the region anywhere you'd like. And it's just going to focus the rendering on that specific area. So with the render region focused on just that area, it's going to allow us to see the results from each of these changes a little bit faster. So pretty much we are just going through here and we are slowly enabling lights so that we can locate which ones are creating the most change in brightness, and it looks like the Small Light here actually is one of those, so we'll leave that disabled. And, everything else looks like it's fairly fine. Now if we go back to the full render, we want to bring back some of the brightness from the sky here, at least on the mountains. So we're going to locate our OctaneDayLight, and then in the Power, let's increase that so that we have something that is a lot brighter. And we can also increase the Turbidity here, just a little bit. So with the lighting set up, we then want to add in a little bit of an atmospheric effect. And to do this, we will go to the Medium tab on the DayLight Tag and then we can click on Add Fog. Now this is a little bit slower to render, so it is completely optional. So what you want to do is use the Thickness to control just how thick the fog is, and then you can use the Absorption and Scattering settings to control how much light is passing through there. So if we go for fairly dark settings there, and then for the Absorption we can go for something that's closer to white so that we can see the mountains in the background. And we also can adjust the Phase, and this is going to more or less bias the direction of the light in the fog. Now, it's a little bit too thick, so let's bring that back down a little bit here, and then we can just let that converge for a few moments. Okay, and so there is the effect of our atmosphere now. At this point, you can save your scene and move on to the next video.
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