- [Nick] We're going to do something pretty fun today. If you've seen it. Who's seen our Ask GSG series on Wednesday? Has anybody been there in the chat rooms? Lurkers? No, okay. So what we do, so first I'm Nick. This is Chris from Greyscalegorilla. We do Cinema 4D training. We do tutorials, we make plug ins, products for Cinema 4D artists and motion graphics artists to try to make their stuff look as good as possible. And to teach everything we do. So one of the ways that we try to teach as much as we can is by having a series called Ask GSG. Every Wednesday we go on our Twitch channel and people like you ask us Cinema 4D questions, motion graphics questions, sometimes business questions about motion graphics and how people do this stuff for a living. So what we try to do is answer as many questions as we can. Sometimes it takes 10 minutes, sometimes it takes an hour. But we try to answer some questions. Today we're going to try to do something similar. Today, with you guys at the booth we thought it'd be pretty fun if you guys have any questions get them ready we're going to be answering them soon. First, the thing we do every time we do an Ask GSG is a little bit of an update on what's going on in Greyscalegorilla and in the Cinema 4D community. So it's a big year not only are we here in the biggest Maxon booth yet with the most presenters with the most people online. Hi internet by the way, thanks for coming. Hi Slack channel. We have almost 1,000 people up there in the chat room. No chat room actually so cheers to the Slack channel. Cheers to my wife who usually checks in and makes sure my hair isn't too crazy. So if you see me check my text messages, then fix my hair, you know who that is. So it's been a big year Cinema 4D has been growing and so has Greyscalegorilla. We've had a lot of fun stuff. We started with a daily render series this year where we post a daily render on Instagram, Tumblr, wherever you hang out. To try to experiment and play with Cinema 4D so that will be a little bit of what we talk about today. We also have ask GSG which is this right now. How late does the season go for Ask GSG Chris? - [Chris] I have no idea. I think we follow kind of a normal school schedule, we take a summer break. - Yeah, we kind of take the summers off on Ask GSG so make sure you stop by on Wednesdays for that. It's around the same time as right now actually, so check the schedule there. We also have upcoming online courses, this is pretty new for us. Something we're experimenting with. So if you're interested in something a little more focused in a group setting training for Cinema 4D, head over to greyscalegorilla.com/live. And we have some news coming out about that soon. This is something we haven't talked about publicly but we're really excited to launch it really soon so I wanted to get you guys in early if you're watching the stream or if you're in the live audience here. Greyscalegorilla.com/NAB and you can be one of the first groups in our more focused courses. We have new product launches, it's a big year. We don't need to talk about all that stuff. I could go on and on about Light Kit Pro and HDRI Studio but we did that yesterday. So we have a ton more tutorials, those aren't going away we're doing at least a tutorial a week right now. So over 400 tutorials on the website if you are interested in learning Cinema 4D at all we have stuff from the very beginner all the way up to advanced stuff about new renders like Octane, Arnold we're experimenting with all this stuff. Also, Half Res is a great motion graphics conference that we throw on September. - 14th - We have dates, thank you Chris. So if you're interested in heading into Chicago, it's the biggest motion graphics conference in the Mid-west and we've gathered people from all over the world actually to come, hang out, meet each other and do this stuff and it's really fun so much more of course. There's the URL if you want to get any announcements. Also, some of the scene files and stuff we'll be sharing through our news letter as well. So what I wanted to quickly do is go through our some of our daily renders mostly to show you some of the stuff that we've been experimenting with and also to make you think a little bit about some of the work that we do. All the renders you're about to see are made by me and Chris, separately or together. Usually separately. But if you have any questions about anything you see I thought that might be a good place to start for our Ask GSG questions. If you see anything here that you want us to break down, you know, please ask those. And also any other Cinema 4D questions we're going to try to be as open and transparent as possible, we only have a certain amount of time but we're going to try to answer as many questions as we can. - Yeah, but one quick thing I want to point out on the daily renders, is that we do the daily renders as a company. And we got like five different people contributing. So I have mad respect for everybody who does these every single day because it takes a lot of time. But if you're not already doing them, they're super fun and I learn so much trying to actually create something so I highly recommend trying to do some, even if it's a once a week render, a weekly render. - Yeah, and that's essentially what we're doing. As a company we're doing weekly render per person and that kind of gives us all of the daily renders for the week. So yeah, big respect for people who do this once a day. But, if you're ever in a position where you want to learn really quickly. I always encourage a daily project or a weekly project. It gets you used to deadlines, it gets you experimenting with the tools that are around you and it gets you showing your work to people and really getting used to that process especially if you're very new. It's hard to show something that you're not 100% in love with and by committing to a deadline of one thing a day. It really can make you quickly look at your work from a month ago and go "I can't believe I posted that" But then you'll be so proud of the thing that you posted today. So highly recommended. This is some of the stuff we've launched. This is some fun mograph stuff. You see I played a lot with atom arrays with these two renders here. Some studio lighting.this is part of the 36 Days of Type series. Anybody seen the 36 Days of Type stuff? It's been popping up on Instagram it's really fun. This is a great render by Chris. Did you do this during one of the Ask GSG's actually Chris? - No. - Yeah, so any questions about this we can answer. Chris tell me about this car, because I didn't get the full story on it. - So kind of as the daily renders, I can't just make a new render every day. So instead it was like oh, I'm going to do a bunch of effort into a single project and maybe I can show off components of it every day. So I was like I've never modeled a car all the way through, I want to try to do that from scratch. And I was like I could make a tutorial out of that. And then 40 hours later it's like Oh, now I've got this car so I was like I probably can't make a tutorial out of that but you know, one day there might be some highlights that's like hey there's a technique I figured out while working on it. - 40 hours, yup that's why I don't model folks, right there, but I'm glad that people like Chris do. That's cool like a batmobile thing going on. We've got some kind of wet grass- kind of weird rainbow, wet-grass thing going on this is from, actually one of your tutorials that I was watching and learning from. Then building something like this. This is beautiful I saw this on our thing and I was like Chris no photos allowed man, it's got to be all 3D and he's like of course it's 3D I modeled this. Can you talk a little about what went into this? - Well there's a whole tutorial on Greyscalegorilla on making this bridge and the technique actually the ice and the bridge were made with very similar technique where you, in Cinema, can kind of design the layout export it into something like illustrator or photoshop bring it back into the spline and do all sorts of really cool rounding and randomizing and colorizing. It's a really quick technique to get a lot of detail out of a model and not necessarily that many polygons. - Yeah, it's really the detail that stands out on this one. Especially when you look at some of my renders like this Kind of a Beeple-Inspired render. Who's not inspired by Beeple looking at his stuff. He's an artist you should folllow. He does stuff every day he's been doing stuff every day for how long now? 8,000, 9,000 days in a row this guys been making art and he's incredible- Beeple, check him out. Here's another fun one this is my foray into sculpting, so of course I grabbed a sphere and bubbled it up and cloned it that's about as far as I get for sculpting. I tend to focus a little bit more on lighting and texturing and Chris definitely knows a little more about modeling and actually making some stuff like that so. This is fun rainbow stuff I've been playing with. Here's another one from Chris. And you actually have the trees as a tutorial as well right? - I think so, yeah that whole thing came together from scratch in like two hours I was super proud of it. Those are X-particle grown trees My main use of X-particles these days is to grow plant life. - Yeah, X-Particles is great if you haven't experimented with that it's definitely fun, actually they're at the booth as well so wander back there and say hi to X-Particles. This was while I was watching one of Chris' videos too this kind of hair bulby thing this is lit with an HDR if you saw yesterday's presentation lit with a nice HDR there. Same thing here just some random emograph experiments. This one's from Chris what's this one called? - Bumper crop I think, I just- I've been enjoying doing landscapes. So many daily renders, and he's included in this, are just like floaty blobs and so I was like what's the opposite of a floaty blob- Landscapes. - I love it look, floaty blob! Oh man. This was fun it's some stuff with Top Coat where we screwed up the refraction and the reflection to kind of get this RGB look to it. Almost like an oil slick. This one's fun, I wonder if it will play for us. So sometime's we'll post animated GIFs to kind of play around. There's actually a cool animated GIF tutorial I did if you're ever interested in making these things. A little Photoshop technique and how you make sure the loop is smooth and doesn't bump around if interested, these are pretty fun to make. Robot hand- Chris when are you going to release robot hand? - I don't know. There's actually a whole robot on the other side of that and I don't know what to do with it. So Maybe some tutorials. - Wait- you have a whole robot? - Yeah. - Aww, come on. Every stream someone shows us some low poly stuff and asks us how to make it and it always ends up slightly differently and this time it kind of ended up looking like this elephant was made out of like paper clips or something. This was pretty fun low poly stuff with an atom array if you're interested and I think some bevels to get these like double-angled things going on. Depth and fields all in physical render Cinema 4D. This thing's gorgeous Chris. What's this? - Yeah, I was just interested in modeling so I was aiming for like an art deco thing got to do some research on art deco. It's really hard to find documentaries on youtube about art deco. But yeah, that was really fun. - Yeah, that's great. Well we can sit and look at our own work all day because that's the kind of people we are but we want to know what you guys have questions about. That's why it's called Ask GSG not Nick and Chris talking although it sometimes turns into that. So if anyone has a question about anything they saw there we can definitely answer those. If anyone has a question about Cinema 4D about anything maybe you're working on. A small project that you're getting stuck with that maybe we can help with that's why we're here. Not necessarily because we know it all, but because we love figuring it out with you. Right? Some of the most fun that we have is going "I don't know is that possible? Let's try it!" Then for the next 20 minutes you'll see us go: "Let's try this, Let's try this." Bring anything you saw there and anything else you're working with, we'd love to be able to help. Absolutely! So I'll give you the short answer here and make sure you contact us later so the question is- with Team Render if you're ever using plug ins like ours or almost any plug ins, how do you set all that stuff up? So the key is to make sure that these plug ins are installed in every team render machine and in the exact same place including textures because textures can get a bit tricky. So you may want to compile your seam down into its textures. What do they call that? Save with assets? - Yeah, and that's a good idea whenever you're sending to any kind of farm. - Yeah so save with assets will- actually let's get into Cinema here. So that's right here save projects with assets. What that does is if you're ever going to use anybody else's farm, this is good or if you want to make sure that your assets are together at the end of the project this will take all your textures and all your extra little bits that you're linking to in your project, into one folder. So now there's only one place to look for all your textures when you start to do team render, when you start to send it out to 3rd party farms if you ever do something like that. When it comes to plug ins you want to make sure it's at the same version. That could get a little tricky sometimes. The farm has an older version than your current machine because a newer version came out and you were excited to update your current machine but you forgot to do the farm. I do that all the time. So make sure everything is the current version and then the textures should be put in the same place on all the farms as well. So for your specific stuff, if it's Top Coat or anything like that giving you problems- Top Coat shouldn't give you any problems. - There are no textures it's all procedural. - Yeah, there are no textures. But either come and talk to us at the booth or contact us directly info@greyscalegorilla or on our support page and we'll make sure you're all hooked up. - And I'm the one who answers all those questions. We'll give you some good tech support. - Awesome, this is nice we're doing tech support too this is good thank you for the question I appreciate it. Yes? - Oh man, this is good. So the question is where did you come up with the name Greyscalegorilla? So I wish I had a really cool story for this. It's actually pretty silly. We were sitting around talking about my friend's new website and he had this name of this website called Pixel Pig. Pixel Pig is his new website and we were kind of like all right tell us more about this and by the end of it he's like "What do you guys think?" And we were all like, that name sucks man, Pixel Pig, we just didn't like it. And he's like well you guys come up with something then. He's like "I like art and I like animals." so we started brainstorming. Kangaroo this and swan that and he was like combining things together and then I was like "Greyscalegorilla" and I was like nope that's mine- screw it. So I went and got it, didn't use it for another couple years until I made a photography blog. Then I was like this is a good name for a photography blog and then the rest of the story I've told 100 times. So that morphed into after effect stuff then that morphed into Cinema 4D stuff so yeah not a great story. Maybe we need like an actual history now that we've been around a while more than just like drinking beers. - Oh yeah update the about page. Yeah, We have to make the story board for it. But yeah that's the truth. I'll always give you the truth. But yeah, anyone else? - Yeah so the question is how to use depth and field with X-Particles and you're right if you don't have geometry tied to your X-Particles then the depth and field engine, at least in standard render, won't see all the pieces because it works on geometry. So because of the way X-particles renders, and because it renders very fast, it's not necessarily geometry. Right? It's kind of a secondary layer. So you do kind of have to make it geometry. What I would also recommend, is if you have any sort of depth and field that ramps from left and right or something that isn't too intricate to just do it in post. My favorite plug in is Frischluft for after effects. I think it's called Lens Care. Great plug in you get a depth mat out and I recommend rendering double res if you ever do any post depth and field. That's kind of like a trick for anybody. Rather than do depth and field in the scene and take the render hit for some of the depth and field stuff, especially for animation, render twice the size it will be four times slower but it will be even faster than if you did depth and field in physical. And then composite with that depth mat and then shrink it back down. - Is it only the depth mat that needs to be the extra high res? - Yeah so the thing with the depth mat, and Chad you're the one who taught me this so let me know if I'm speaking out of turn, but the thing with a depth mat is there is no anti-aliasing on a depth mat. A depth mat is a black to white image or white to black image to show you the depth of your 3D scene. And this is one of those great paths that you could spit out to after effects or any of your compositors to then use things like fog and depth and field and know which objects in your scene are closer and further from the camera. So if you have a depth mat that's black to white or white to black you can't do normal anti-aliasing on the edges because anti-aliasing kind of introduces grey pixels to make it look round. Right? And those will break the depth mat. So instead- I'm still looking to make sure Chad's not going like this- instead you render higher res and you get a lot more detail in your depth mat so that you can composite properly. You're not going to get a lot of those halos. I've seen especially if you have a lot of blur. You don't get those halos, or as much of it, and then you can shrink it back down. So give that a shot and then actually ask the X-Particles guys to see if there's a way to bake their stuff with depth as well. - They know what they're talking about back there so go say hello to them. - Yeah, the whole team is right behind us now. Any X-Particles questions go hug them. So yeah, anything else? Anything you guys have been working on? Any modeling stuff? - Yeah, so the question is, I'll pay you later for that question. - Can we talk about HDRIs? And so yesterday I talked a lot about our HDRI collection. We're trying to build the biggest and most affordable HDRI collection ever made. So we're bringing in artists from around the world to bring 3D, 360 HDRs to Cinema 4D in like record numbers. So we have over 250 now we're shooting for 500 by the end of the year and thousands into the future because the more access to HDRIs you have the more varied your lighting can be and all that stuff so I've been playing around a lot with HDR. And maybe we can do a quick scene- Or maybe let's do this. Chris, why don't we shift to a model idea. Does anyone have a small model idea that Chris can show us? Because I want to get some Chris modeling because I love looking at it. Any little objects? Feel in your pockets and think about it. We've got iPhone. Or we got Theta, can we make a theta? Like it doesn't have to be perfect. - I mean yeah, yeah. Well I mean the basics of this wouldn't take too long but all the fancy tiny little details could take a while. - All right squint your eyes - Well it's not too bad. Low pile of data. - All right we can try to do it. So if this webcam is showing anything here's the object we're going to try and model it's a theta camera this is the camera we've been using to make the HDRs. - Yeah so this is meta here. So yeah, watch the presentation from yesterday, once it's live but this camera makes HDRs in record time you make them in Photoshop and multiple locations it's really fun. I won't do the whole schpeal again, but to get to your question, which we will, I'm going to take Chris's model and then show you how to really quickly light with HDR and be able to switch between different stuff, but first we got to get our model going. Is your mouse plugged in? - Yeah, it's plugged in but a little slower than we're used to so hopefully that doesn't slow me down too much. So it's great to actually have your model here in person because the first thing you have to do in your modeling is get lots and lots of reference so we can skip that step by having it right here. Of course in some ways it would be a good idea to get an image online to get the exact dimensions. But I'm not going to worry about that for right now, though. So one of the first questions is do we go immediately into poly modeling or could we work from some splines first. I think we're going to go straight from a cube. Most models, I think, do start as a cube so why don't we just try and roughen the most basic of shape from it. Maybe a little bit wider there, a little skinnier, definitely a little taller. All right, cool so there's our basics I'm going to make the editable right away I don't know how many subdivisions I'm going to need but it's very easy to add them after the fact so let's go ahead and open that up and stop me from getting too fancy here. - Oh I will. - Okay so let's see right away I want some additional subdivisions along this edge so I hit UB first to do a ring selection and I can hit MF for using edge cut which I love to add additional subdivisions. So even right now I could just add those two subdivisions in there. And actually I want to maintain this nice even geometry so I'm going to hit D for extrude and do a tiny little extrusion there and then deselect these outer ones and just pull this one polygon up so that gives us this basic curve we see on the top in fact it's quite subtle so I'm going to bring that back down a little. And then it kind of bulges on the outside here so why don't we do that. I'm just going to do a quick Loop selection UL, T and we'll bulge them out a little bit like that, seems pretty good. Let's start moving on. I guess, yeah, there's a nice indentation in the center but there's also a circular lens. I don't know if it's a perfect circle but we're going to do it like it's a perfect circle. I think I'll make a new sphere just for reference here shrink it down until it looks to be about the proper size there.. A little smaller. Okay so now I can work around that shape. I need to jump back into our sphere. And I think I'm just going to scale this wide enough ao that I can start getting the indentation via that. So once I perfectly match that. This actually worked out pretty well. I need some additional cuts along the left and right. You could use the knife tool but I think I'm going to do the other technique I did already which is go to edge mode UB for my ring selection MF to do some cuts I'm just going to add two cuts in here and now I can just hit UL grab that selection and move this up to wherever I want it to be. - So what are those cuts doing? Is it adjusting the nerve at the end or is it actually apart of the geometry now? - No it's just like using the knife tool and cutting across but it does even segments in certain areas- - Oh I see this is to set up the indentation - Exactly. - Oh Okay. - Okay nice outline for that. I'll go ahead- actually the indentation goes down a little bit so we'll just drag this down. And I think we could probably get away with just extruding that in. And honestly this model is pretty dang symmetrical left and right so I could just be doing one half. But when it's a simple model I tend to just grab both sides and work simultaneously. I'm going to hit D for extrude, let's just pull that in a little bit. And I guess I'll get one more cut just to get the circle in there and then we'll start wrapping it up because we want to try to answer as many questions as possible. So one more ring selection, one more MF for cut I'm going to hit apply but I only want one, that's great. So that gives me that subdivision. It's already pretty square I'm going to go ahead and just assume it's pretty spot on. Grab these two ends hit I for inter extrude pull these in not quite square so I'm going to grow my selection. And I want to scale it down- well I'm going to do a loop selection like that and also grab these polys and these.and hit T for scale you see that's very rectangular I want it to be square. So the best way to scale that down would be to hit T for scale and then going to my modeling access and I can move the access based on my current selection straight down to the bottom of the model. And now I can grab my green handle and pull it straight down until I get that square poly back in there. Yeah, that seems pretty good. So now I can just grab these little inner bits and hit D for extrude. I'm actually going to extrude this in and then do a tiny little inter extrude I for inter extrude and then hit D and re-extrude it back out again. - I didn't even know you were making the dang button right there. - Oh yeah, and then there's some fancy metal on the edges which would probably be pretty fun to add in there. - Oh yeah actually I was thinking- So what I'm going to do is when Chris is done, texture, whatever he builds for the rim. I'm just looking at the textures right now and we got a nice little rim with some shiny stuff. We got a little chrome around the sphere, around the lens. More of the glass lens. And then a really flat black material on the front and back. So I'll try to quickly add those and then we'll light it using an HDR. - So just need to get this ring working properly I'm going to grab those but not these. Missed those points hold down shift and I can add to my selection here.and I can T for scale, scale those out- I'm just eyeballing it but now these are pretty flat so that's pretty good there. Now I can grab the entire ring and hit UL for the ring or the loop selection. And then hit T for scale- scale that out sideways just to give it that edge. I don't know what the bottom looks like but we're going to ignore it so we can keep moving on. Technically, there's probably a little bevel in there but we can probably just ignore it. And then actually we can just add this little thing in there and hit I for inter extrude. Actually we'll just skip that part for now. Okay, we need to start smoothing this thing out we've just been doing the box modeling. And to a degree that's a little bit dangerous because some things could change significantly once I turn around our subdivision surface. So I'm going to go ahead and throw that into a sphere. And actually right away that's not that too bad. One of the key things that we are missing though is kind of these- there's these hard edges on it not quite like a 90 degree angle but they're quite sharp and we want to be able to pull that back in but I hate beveling on a model because once you bevel something it's almost impossible to go back and change it because you have this tiny little ratio that you have to maintain wherever you move a point. So if this was beveled and I was grabbing the one little object I have to always make sure that that distance is maintained. So how can we get around that? One of my favorite simple newer tools that they just added was the parametric bevel so I can create this bevel, throw it directly into the cube. And I'm going to turn off our subdivision surface. I'm going to hit the shortcut NB so that we can now see the edges and we see that it's now adding a bevel pretty much everywhere. But we can change it to be beveling edges and I'm going to change it to a solid bevel mode which is going to... - Where's the transfer. It's one or the other it doesn't matter too much, I feel like we're getting an extra subdivision. No, that's exactly what I want it's giving us this hard edge. It's just doing it everywhere we don't want it to do it everywhere. Now, sometimes you can get away with just turning on this huge angle and it's only going to do certain thresholds that are very extreme like anything that's greater than a 40 degree angle it's getting a bevel and anything softer than that is not. And in this instance it actually might be doing an almost perfect job but not quite. But what's great about that is I could take it and throw it into the subdivision surface and you see that it's kind of smoothed everything out but it's maintaining these hard edges. But I don't want it to go everywhere I only want it to go in limited spots so I have to create a selection and pick everywhere I want to bevel. So let's see how quickly I can do this. We're going to grab that ring, we're going to grab that one, we're going to grab this. Not that one. But yes on this ring. That ring. That one inside. That one right there and definitely around the bottom. I might be missing some- oh, well let's see. I don't know if I'm missing any. So I'm going to go ahead and create our selection. It's on edge mode so we automatically get an edge selection tag going into our bevel drag this into our selection. Now you can see all the edges I just selected are now beveled I can go ahead now and turn on our subdivision surface. Let's turn off NA I can go back to regular mode. Now we get these nice soft- you know hard but soft edges that just really make a model look nice. I think the sphere's maybe a little big there. But we're not going to get into layers of refractive lensing which is too bad. There's definitely a hard edge there that'll be the last thing I do then I'll just made sure you have your texture selection tag. Then I think you can start texturing this all up with Top Coat. - Is that a garbage truck? - Garbage truck? - It's like garbage time right? - Oh, at home you mean? Yeah during a live Ask GSG a garbage truck always pulls up at the office and makes all this racket and everyone in the chat room is always like, "It's garbage time, Hooray!" - See you're always on time, Chris. - Yeah that one bevel there is not behaving like I want it to so maybe I'll just leave that one soft. That's working pretty well it's not perfect. - You've got some nice round stuff. - Let me just create your selection, just to make sure we've got it so that will be the metal. - It's always the bevels and the slight rounded edges on your models or anything you're lighting that really make the difference. Anything super flat with no corners is almost impossible to light because it's just- you're not catching any of the light detail and it's super flat. And it's something that's very common in 3D because when you model something very simply you're just kind of leaving that harsh edge on it. And in the real world nothing has that pure 90 degree edge on it. Everything has a slight little bevel on it, even if it looks 90 degrees, when you come up on it, it won't be that way. Those are the little details that you want to add to your models, not because I know how to model, but because I know when you add those bevels, it's going to look extra good. - So I'm just putting a little extra metal ring here because I think that will catch some highlights for you real nice. So I'm just doing the cheapest way possible. I just made a tube shape there. And we'll shrink down the height and that should automatically be symmetrical on both sides so it should give us that nice metal ring you can work from. I'm going to make your glass material because I'm really quick at that and then you completely take over. So I'm going to make a glass material real quick so I'm going to jump into a new material. Turn off color. Turn on transparency. We're going to set this to a nice glass, right there. And I guess we usually go in reflectance and then kill off the default specular. And now we'll just have the reflection based on transparency. And that should be some pretty nice glass actually. Just based on that built in refraction, so you want to take over? - Yeah, so you have the mats just right here so I guess I can just ask you about them. - Yeah and save. Save and I'll go around the front. - Always save when you pass it off to Nick. - I have a tendency of breaking things. I'm going to switch to the... - Ohput it right here. Sorry. I'm a mouse guy he's a Wacom guy. - The Wacom here. So what we'll try to do quickly here. We have our sphere. We have our matte objects. So for our matte texture I'm going to make a flat black matte. And I'm going to use plug ins, Top Coat. So Top Coat we built to interact with the reflectance layers. And allow you to add reflections very, very quickly using reflectance without all the interface. So we try to make it as simple as possible if you just don't have a texture selected at all you can click matte and actually that's pretty close to this kind of flat black that we're getting on the actual model. So for that we can just dump it on the whole cube and that will cover all of it. Next Chris made these nice selections over here. And so I can restore selections and all that stuff, but the other thing I can do is make a new material and so I'm just going to grab chrome for now and then we can adjust it later. Add it to our cube and then we can drag in these polygons selections. So this one's the edge? - Yeah, you want the polygon. - I want the polygon. So right here it says selection, and you can do this with anything you can select what parts of your object that you want to be different colors or different textures. And just drag that in, so polygon selection, so now that edge should be chrome. The middle should black, I think it should have shown. Maybe not. - Because we use reflectance only it doesn't show up in the viewport. - That could be, that's a good idea. So what I'm going to do is actually change this texture to a wet instead of a pure chrome. And I'm going to take the chrome instead and put it on the tube that Chris made here. And the wet is going to go on the cube and go on the selection and I've got to remember to turn that polygon selection down here. So now- - Yeah, but you still need the glass on those three spheres. I had three so it maybe needed a little a refraction on it. - All right we got two, we got inside here, I'm just copy and pasting and then on the outside as well, correct? - There you go. - All right so now here's what we get. Absolutely nothing. Everything in reflectance is based on real light. Everything in reflectance is based on, you can set up your Light Kit style lights, you use regular lights. But what it really responds to is luminant scenes so you can use luminant geometry with reflectance it looks really good, but HDR is so special because it captures all the light data and we can just shove it back on the camera. And so this camera looks the way it does because it has all the light from around us to bounce off of it. So let's give this model some HDR to answer the longest question to "How do you light with HDR?" I'm going to add HDR studio. I'm going to drop it down so it's kind of sitting on the floor here. And what HDR studio does is give you a backdrop and reflections with one click, so now we have a matte texture here, we have our glass piece going on here and then our little tube needs a little bit of rounding, remember I said if you have anything round, it's not going to look right that chrome piece is- - NQ, it will put the geometry back on instead of being all black, Ta-Dah! - I love you. This tube is here it's visible, but there's no rounding on it so I'm going to add the little rim around and that's going to add some more light so our chrome is going to reflect more of our scene. So you can see it's taking a little bit to render we have some render settings we can use in Top Coat. I'm going to pick Light Kit low for now just to get it really fast. I'm going to open our interactive render region to get a rough idea of what our scenes looking like. Already we have that nice little chrome bling around it. We've got this glass piece here. What I might do, Chris, is not make this glass because it's so transparent. Actually, it's kind of nice to see through it a little bit. Okay so we have our matte piece here, is our chrome showing up on our edges? It is, see that little chrome bling? It's nice but it's so reflective that it's not giving us any detail. So you could use brush to- like it's kind of a brushed feel, this metal.. I don't know it's kind of a matte chrome. So it's like a blurry chrome. So you go into that material which is not our chrome it's our wet. So first of all I'm going to change it back to chrome to see what that looks like. I'm going to click on the right material, click chrome. You'll see the edge start blinging out. But there's not enough stuff around it to reflect. So we can go to modifiers, blur the amount of edge, and see that start to blur up here? See the edge look a little more matte? Let's look from the top. That's the look it's going for. So it's a little strong. We can go to our reflection amount and tone it down a little bit, tone it down. The only thing we're missing are some shadows all the way around. We could use global illumination for shadows. But if you're going animate or do anything, global illumination can take a bit longer. So we can do instead is use ambient occlusion. So I'm going into our render settings and we have some presets as well. I'm going to select ambient occlusion low and you're going to see it start to add shadows in the bottom here. And we're going to turn that up quite a bit and that's because our model is so much larger. So let's go into our ambient occlusion. I'm going to turn it on for everything now and go to 800. So now it's on for everything, it's on low, let's go down there and see what we got. It's going away on us isn't it? Let's make sure it is on. Ambient occlusion low, 800. - It's there. You can see it on the ground pretty well. - I guess it's more subtle isn't it? So we've got shadows going on, we have our matte texture. I think we can get it a little more sheen on our matte so I'm going to open up this material. And I'm going to our blur, look it's 100% blurry. Right? So even a little bit will make it a little more directional right? So it will give us a little sheen. And what's nice about HDR is that is how easy you can light with HDR. You can add some HDR in your scene and it will start to reflect. The reason we built HDR studio is so you can quickly change between different HDRs and so you could quickly kind of rotate it around because it's all about the angles of your lights so let me turn on the preview. - NQ again. - I'm going to turn on NQ again so we can see the textures again, thank you Chris. We can actually rotate this around this is our HDR. It's a studio right now so if we put the light over here it's going to be more lit from the right, and in fact let's change to something that's more dynamic here. If we open our browser we can use other locations, other stuff. This creative office here has some nice bright corners on it. It's making me think our matte is still a little bit too blurry, I want it darker. I want the reflection amount to go down. I want this to feel a lot more black. Already that feels better. Right? Let the lens kind of shine through the buttons nice, you've got good matte color. Let's check our edge and make sure it's looking good. Let's get some close up detail on our edge. That's pretty good. The wrap around, why didn't that wrap around Chris? - I broke that via the bevel. It's just that way or I'm going to have to go back and fix it- - I'm just making sure we're just open as we can be. So see the edge? This edge has a night little reflection on it. Hopefully you can see it here, especially at home. Maybe again a little too reflective. Let's go to that wet channel, so we open that up in Top Coat we can turn down reflection there. Maybe turn down the blur a little there and now we got it. So what's nice about this rig is we can go into the background and make it more dynamic. I think that's the fifth time I said dynamic. What it really means is it's a black camera right? So the subtleties of reflections need to stand out. Against white, it almost gets swallowed up by the white so by putting it on a black background, you're allowing that brighter image to come through, right? So now we do some fun things and check out a couple different HDRs to see the difference. So here's our object. It's also not on the ground. So that might help. I'm going to raise our floor up a little. Clip the bottom a little, that's all right. So that's our object. There's a couple things we can do with Studio Rig while were here because I think it will look cool. We can add a reflective floor, so you can see we get a little reflection in our studio. We also have some for now, and blur into the floor. Thank you Chris, that's perfect. So now if you go all the way out you can see the lens in the floor as well. A little blur, you can see any model in here it starts to look really nice. So let's check out a couple other HDRs and then jump on another question. Open browser, all these come with the HDR collection I was mentioning. These are from all over the world from location shoots all over, this one's really fun- European holiday, I always go to this church entrance because it's really fun. I'm going to click it to see it change look at the lighting color change, there's more blue, more sky in it. Right? Let's try this damn road one this one's bright sun. Let's see what it looks like. - I love that damn road - The sun's kind of setting there in the middle so let's rotate that and put it on the edge. Any flat light- It's hard to have flat, flat light in a studio situation in the middle of your scene. I tend to want it to come from one direction or the other even the rear is better than flat on. You can see the difference between this and straight on here. Now this would get you a nice thing if it were really symmetrical if you have a lot of objects and details. But if you have a small object like that, try to introduce a little shadow, rotating it around. So let's pick one more here, something more direct. You'll see this change. - That's one of my favorite ones. - That's a fun one, we can rotate that around so it's brighter coming from the edge. And look at the gradient. One more tip before we move on. Any time you have an object at all, if you can show the gradient from one edge of the object to the other, it's more appealing to your eye. The transition from black to white is the only way we see anything. Contrast is the key for anything you do design wise. Black against white works because it's the most contrast there is. So think about your contrast. If this light was straight on flat, the whole thing is kind of the same color. Right? We don't want that. What we had was where that gradient came through. So let me adjust our render settings to make sure this is higher quality and we'll have a more high res render on our hands that we can look at in a full detail. So I think that's good. Let's do a render here. Now I cranked up render settings so we can really see the detail in this model we see all the blurry reflections. We see all the nice modeling that Chris did with the sweeps all those little extra details, the bevels, really panned out on this. I'm going to do one more little edge render just to see the chrome edge and watch when it gets to the transparence it's really calculating that transparency. It's some of the hardest stuff to calculate right? Any refraction or transparency is really going to bump up your stuff so if you have all glass in your scene and it's rendering slow? It's okay. That's what happens. At least with physical rendering. - The other thing I wanted to mention is something that's really cool when using reflection and reflectance is there is no color channel in this scene anywhere. This is all being built via just the reflectance channel. So that means we don't have to have GI turned on at all. Because we're getting it all via our reflectance. - Yeah, that's a good point. It can be confusing for people using reflectance channel starting off. Because the reflection channel was its own little thing and you needed GI to get those gradients and all the nice light on your scene especially if you're lighting with an HDR. It's the only way to get the light from your HDR to your object was with global illumination. Or else it's just reflections. Right? So now with reflectance you're getting more true textures which means you set up your scenes like you would in real life put lights around it, put object in middle, texture it properly and you get really great results. So the whole thing is Q&A so we don't stop for that. We can move on to the next piece. - We still have 15 minutes. - Chris, look at the chrome. Look at that chrome Chris! - How high did you crank these setting? - I cranked it up! Because are we going to make it ugly? We're going to make it look good. So that looks nice that's why. It's a good looking thing. So if you're interested in this theta thing. It's a cool camera if you missed yesterday. The presentation will be on Cineversity. All of this stuff will be on Cineversity. Especially you watching live, sign up! They will send you links to it! See, there you go! It's just the transparent bit. Now we've got all the pretty stuff. - Oh yeah that's three layers of transparency with a reflection trying to get through all three of them. - Yeah and ambient occlusion which we had on. - Oh yeah we didn't turn it off. - Yeah okay, we'll figure that out later. Okay any other questions. We have plenty of time. Yeah. Yeah so Chris why don't you take- the question is- you saw a demo with Signal from one of our artists from the booth, Steve, he was showing off some Signal workflow. And signal is another product of ours helps you add secondary animation and simple animation to your scene without using key frames and at the end he kind of baked it to key frames. So the questions