- [Robert Whiting] Hello, hello. Welcome to NAB. Hope you've had a great week if you've been here for a while. Just give a brief thank you to MAXON and NVIDIA for inviting me. It's a great thing to be out here. You guys have been great. Just go briefly what my plans are, what I'm going to show you guys, what I'm go through, just kind of give you an idea. The aim of my presentation is to show you how I've been using NVIDIA's Iray recently in my workflow. I work for the events industry so lot of previsualization sort of things, what it's going to look like. Quite more on the architectural side, it ends up being a lot of the corporate stuff and things like that. So what I was planning on doing was, if I show this whole thing, as I was meaning. I was going to work through a few different project. This is one project I've worked on recently, which is about to happen. I've had to remove a lot of the branding on it because a lot of the work that I'm doing end up being NDA sort of things, but to be honest, you wouldn't know what it is from here anyway, so it covers myself, my options, and how I've use Iray to produce this work, and speed up my workflow really, another sort of angle, and things like that, and those things. And I'll try then after that move on to a bit more pizazz, shows and that, bit of volumetric light and that kind of stuff, so we'll go through that afterwards. Back to me. A little bit about me. My role is a CAD and 3D Event Designer from a company called Hawthorn in the UK. The company, as you can see here, we do a number of different events from corporate, we've done events in the back of Buckingham Palace. Really big stuff to a lot of small conferences in someone's village hall somewhere where they hire a single light off us. So a big diversity of the kind of stuff we do. We've recently been doing stuff, Battersea, we're doing an Adobe summit in the UK coming up in a few weeks, so running their summit where we provide all the technical knowledge and know-how for the screens, the projectors, the rigging stuff for it as well. So it gives us a good idea of where it is. We do work for the BBC. We did their showcase in the UK where they got all of their partners from all over the world in. We've done that for the last few years and things. It's a great thing, as I was saying earlier, Coronation Festival, which was at the back of Buckingham Palace and stuff like that. Really does give you a good idea of what the company does. A lot of the previsualization stuff is very lighting heavy because, yeah, it's not just architecture. We're trying to sell the product that Hawthorn owns, like projectors, lighting, sound, so I'll often do starting off very architecture sort of side of things, and then throwing a lot of light on it to show what's it's going to look like, changing the feel or the atmosphere of the place. Just that kind of stuff, really. So from the BBC Showcase, which was an empty arena to lots of lighting, bit of pizazz sort of thing. What I'm going to do is start off with a quick demo reel of just some of the work I've worked on, give you an idea of other bits and pieces. Here you go. ♪ [music] ♪ Okay, I think that give you a starting point. Thank you for the applause. So the work is quite diverse. There's some installation stuff and it really does vary what I do and things. What I'll do now is jump into C4D, give you an idea of what you can do with it. Give you a brief overview of Iray, because what's quite nice, it is very simple to jump into and get working with it. Let me open with a scene a bit and just give you an idea of just the layout, what you can do with it, render settings. I'm sure a lot of the guys online and you guys want to see what you can actually do with it before I jump into any of my scenes and stuff. Give me a second, okay. Got a basic scene, which you may have seen. Quite a simple scene. Adding Iray to things is very simple. Once you've got it up and running, just end it with a new menu system here, and all your stuff for Iray's in there. Like C4D, you can customize and put wherever you want on the GUI, and that kind of stuff. So it gives you a good starting point, so it's all in one place. What I'll do is I'll just jump through it briefly, not go into too much detail at this point. What I'm going to do is just show you... What's the best way to start? With rendering-wise, Iray you've got a few different options. You've got a live render window, which you can just pop open, and it'll be black at the moment because... See, live render window. So you can see live what you're doing, which allows you to move in, do things around, and it will refresh and things. So it's quite easy there. You've also got remote rendering, which basically means you can render on another machine, but live on to your screen. So I've been working in the UK, but rendering in the US. So I've been using some of their render farms in the US, but live rendering on my screen, Which is great, so you can actually get a lot more power with quite a small machine doing your building, models, and things, you're rendering somewhere else on more graphics cards somewhere else, which is great. Get some quite good power, things can get going. Also then you've got the traditional queueing things up, lining things up for render, use your render settings, picture view. You can use early take system, all the usual things you can do with rendering-wise. All it does appear if you can look in the render settings. We just end up with a new option here for your rendering, so you've got usual physical, that kind of stuff. You just got a new one now, which is called Iray. And to be honest, the settings are very easy. There's not a huge amount of settings you can get lost in, and can't figure out what's causing your issues. If we jump into it briefly, it's got only four tabs. It's not vastly deep that you can get lost. I've only been using it for about a month, so I've been able to jump into it very quickly. Most of them are fairly obvious what they are, motion blur turning on, blooming, just that kind of stuff really. Get more settings through down here. Just little things for tweaking it. In your rendering, you can set up to... It's a progressive render, so it starts off and then refines itself, and refines itself, and refines itself. So you've got parameters that you can set on that so if you've got a timeframe, you've only got a couple of minutes for your renders, go and change it to a couple of minutes. If you've got a few hours, let it keep refining for hours. You can be a bit more free. You can do what you want to on it. And there are just other little things you can tweak, for making it a little bit more crisp, little bit more things...most of these things, best what to do is, do whatever fits into your workflow. Have a play with it. I think it's 90-day trial at the moment. You can go and download online. They released it a few days ago. Again, pass system, that's not pass system, sorry. Yeah, passes. So you can do different passes out, render them out, like in most render engines now. That's just about the software really. So render settings are very simple, very easy to do. Iray is a physical-based render, so it's all real world sort of things, so what you get out of it is what you'd expect in the real world. If you stick a light there, you're going to get the same things out of it. It's very physically based. And the same with the material sort of setup. Iray will take the default C4D materials, and convert them when you hit render. It uses MDL materials, which is I think a language NVIDIA have been writing. And they are very physically based materials. So if it's a piece of rubber, you light it, it'll look like a piece of rubber no matter how you change the lighting, you're going to get the very consistency out of it. Up until now, a lot of my work was I'd make a nice bit of set, render off, that's not looking right, I'll tweak, add a bit of fluorescents or two, a bit more transparency to that or give it a bit of light so it looks right in that image. And the client would come back and go, "Oh, we now want it blue." So I changed the lighting in the room, and then I'd have to re-tweak the materials again. It could get quite tedious. The nice thing about Iray is, you're using physically based materials that are based on real life, so that hopefully as far as I found, you know what you're going to get out of it. There's no guesswork behind it because it's going to follow conformity in real world. And also the nice thing about it is if I jump in here, just got to find the settings now, is Iray doesn't just use your standard... I can't find it now. It's in a different screen. If we jump into the preferences quickly, Iray doesn't just use your GPU. It will use your CPU as well. So you can set it up to use both, which is quite nice so... You can see here, I've got it set not using my CPU, but you can pick in, say I just want to use this graphics card, don't use that graphics card, or use all of them. The nice thing I found about that is as you build your geometry up, you start with something quite simple, yeah, it's really fast. It renders, great. With a lot of GPUs sort of side of things, when you hit the limit of your graphics card RAM, you then can't render, which is a bit of a pain really, because you then have got to go rush out, buy more graphics cards or something to be able to get past that barrier you hit. With this though, you just enable your CPU and it'll go, "Okay, yeah, it'll be a bit slower, but yeah, I'll just render it on your CPU instead." So you've got that get out jail free card when your client's coming in the following day. Yeah, you're going to set to render a bit longer, but you know you've got that little bit of time to sort something else out to move forward, or spend time refining things. I should jump a bit further. What I'll do now is let's jump into another scene to give you a good idea of where I've been working, and then my workflow in the events industry really. I'll show you... What I'll do is I'm going to go through some of these. We'll start with this one. So this job here. So my general workflow with this would be usual sort of client thing, client contacts you, you get your usual, yeah we've got NDAs, can't do this. By that time, they've already picked the venue they want to use, so it's jumping into it. Then they'll give you a brief of, they want this many people in the room, and it's going to be this event. And then the point where you where you simply start with a bit of 2D CAD layouts or things, and just saying "Will it fit? Can I get the projection flow distances? How many people join the room?" And going back to them and saying, "It's not going to fit." The usual sort of things, having to tweak stuff, and move things around for a while. Then usually, the client comes back and goes, "Great, we're quite happy with that. Can we see a bit what it looks like?" On that note, a lot of the clients that work at Hawthorn's, our production company, so we work at the level below, so the production company deals with the end client. We then supply them with all the technical know-how, we work with visuals, the whole package really, from sound, lighting, projection. So a lot of it, they want to then build up their own presentation to go to their client further on. And generally in that sort of case, I would be thrown into a quick set. Tending after the client, saying, "How's this? What do you think to this?" It ends up being a lot of iterations and different versions. "We don't like that stage. Can you make the screens around bigger?" And the usual sort of things. And it's not then until the client comes back to you at the end of it and goes, "Right, we're happy with the set. Yeah, but our client's just got no vision. They can't see what it looks like. They just can't understand what it's going to look like in the room." And that point, you're going to have to go, "Okay, well I've got to build the whole room." So I'll then have to take it in, build a venue quite often, and the venues always change. I can't just bring back stock venues I've used in the past. Quite often it's a new venue this year they're going to use, and they got to go put that together and stuff. Time constraints is always a big thing for me. Generally, if I've got two weeks to do this, I'm doing really well. Quite often this sort of stuff, I'll have to throw together in a week. Quite often the first stuff, the first few stages in a few days to get back to them and say, "Here's what we're designing. Here's what we're looking at doing." Give them a good idea of how we're working on things and going through stuff. Okay, let's jump into C4D and go through a bit more of some projects-wise. Let's see. Give you an idea of what sort of things I end up doing. Okay, so that scene there. At the moment, just a simple little stage. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to [inaudible 00:12:34] modeling the set, gives you a good idea of what it would be. And what I'll do is I'll import a 2D CAD representation into this and just bit of a extruding or work over the top of it really, to give you a good idea of scales and laying stuff out at this point. I've already built the screen here. There's no materials in it at all. But if we throw in Iray to start with, at the moment, you get a black window. The simple reason, there's not lights in there, so it's just rendering nothing because it can't see anything. So with Iray, the simplest way to get some stuff out rather than sticking loads of light rigs on and stuff is to throw what's called an Iray object in. Let me just go and do that for you. An Iray environment, sorry. Fairly simple little thing. It's very similar to the sky objects and things within C4D anyway. Once you put into the thing, let's just dock this for a minute. There you go. So you can see our thing rendering there with an environment object is very similar to things. You can go through it, say its time of day, bit of sunlight on there. You can pick the day if you want to. We just throw some of the stuff on. We can stick some ground on. We can, let's do some more stuff. Bit of a reflection, so dial it down a bit so it's not quite such of that, so very quickly live rendering. Give it a good idea of what you're doing. And again, I'm just using the view of the one, two, three keys just to navigate around. You can quite quickly see there's my object and my quite happy as it looking kind of right sort of perspective and scale. Yep, I'm quite happy with that as I'm working on it. And even if I'm not quite happy with the angle of that, you can just grab this object and go okay, I want the sun to be on this side now. All depends on what you're working on. I do some outside events, so it's quite useful. More I use this for is my initial things, just getting an idea of the feel of the thing. Okay, let's go and just throw a stage on quickly, shall we? So if we just go and throw a quick stage on... One thing I love about C4D is the use of multiple references like feet, millimeters, inches. A lot of the work I do with the staging, which is all in feet. But then I go to another company, they work in millimeters. And being able to just type in what I want is great in C4D. So I can say, okay, let's put the height of my stage as one foot and it's done, one foot straight off. It's quite nice not having to go through the whole ritual of having a calculator beside you and converting it, or using Google to give you an idea of it. So okay, let's just change that to 18 inches actually. Let's just quickly throw this together for you. Let's just do it wide for the moment. So I'm just going to the other view, press the mouse button, throw a stage in. Just put it on the floor rather than in the ground. And again, I've actually got no floor object here. It's just purely the Iray producing floor objects. You can do your own floors and turn that off. It's really up to you. And what's quite nice is it's instant. It's rendering here easily, a very client friendly image. Yeah, the huge one does give you quite a bit of nice representation, especially if the client happens to be passing through, or you're working for... I end up working with some of the project managers of the company. They can come and look over my shoulder and go, "Yeah I quite like that. The other client will like that." And they get a very quick of idea of what they're going to get out of it. And really, it's that simple throwing things in. That live viewport is nice, and refresh works really quickly. Let's move over to the texturing a bit more to give you an idea of the MDL textures and things like that. A lot of the MDL stuff is node based. Is it node based? Yeah, sorry. I've only been using it for a month, so it is node based, so it's not quite the same within C4D. But it's supposedly very versatile. I haven't got a huge knowledge about it because I've only been using it for a little while. But I'll jump into that and show you how quickly it is to texture things really. So here you go. So similar sort of thing here. Just restart that again. There you go. This one is, I've already put some texturing on the stage, added a bit of light there quite quickly. And all the light is actually just an object in there. I'll just move it around a bit, gives you an idea of an object here which happens to have some fluorescence to it really. So it gives it a nice bit of light up in the stage really. And texturing works very similar to anything else. It's a drag and drop your texture across. You end up, with Iray, you do get a nice library of stuff to start with, which I've managed to use just library, and it's giving me a really great starting point. So if we jump into MDL materials, with you can get a number of different stuff, and it's quite a big library to start with. Yeah, the interface isn't great at the moment, but I believe they're working on that to make it a bit more smoother and working for it. Okay, so we've already started off with a lot of different types of glass, and it goes on and on really. You got paint types, you've got quite a big library to start with. And lot of the fundamental things, so, especially for architecture, you can really quite throw things together quite quickly. And with it, it is as simple as drag and dropping. So let's actually just go and give some things some textures. So if we grow our screen object, and just throw something on. And quite instantly, it should refresh. There you go. We've now got an image on the screen which is actually giving out light. If I turn off the environment object now, you kind of get a good idea of, there you go. So we've got a nice set with a bit more atmosphere to it. All I've done is just turn the environment objects off. So it's not causing any lighting, but you're very quick to have a nice look, a nice set. And at this point, you'd say, "Okay, it's good. But I'm not quite happy. I want to add some more stuff to it." Let's just put the environment object back on, which just gives us a bit more light to work with. And we can just go through and selecting stuff. The screen's around, let's give it a nice little texture, bit of brand and color to it. There's that thing as well. Let's go and have a look at... Okay, quite often I deal with events, LED tape as you can see, like look on here, the lights have a bit of light to exaggerate the screen. So a lot of the work I'm doing at the moment is putting a bit light around the edge of the screen. What's nice about Iray is, you throw a texture on it, it's instant to render really. If I turn the environment object, it gives a bit more impact so, there you go. So you've got a nice rounding to it. And with the materials, we have a quick look at material for you. Here you go. So it very much appears of that. You end up with a few settings you can change straight out of the box with MDL stuff. And you can build them up, and build them up, and line them up, and do lots of procedural things with it. I haven't been using it that long, so I can't give you too much information on that end, but there's loads of stuff out there. MDL materials have been out for quite a while in other formats and other programs do use them. And on here, I can change the color if I want to very quickly. That's got a nice [inaudible 00:19:25]. A bit more. It's purple, quite quickly, and there you go. Re-renders quite quickly. There's no waiting around like in [inaudible 00:19:35], yeah, that does not work in those colors. You get feedback very quickly, which is great, especially while the heat and render, and waiting for an hour or half an hour for things to come back. So it is nice and quick. Let's go back to some greens again, but the client liked green for that one. The lighting is very simple again as well. It will use the default lights. We can stick them in. So if I just, an ordinary targeted light, throw it in, and quite quickly, you can start seeing here a bit of the light appearing. Let's just crank it up a bit, shall we? You start getting a nice spot on there, so it is quite nice to see it live. Because up until now, within C4D live, you can turn on OpenGL and see some lighting, but as soon as you build up more, and I think the maximum is 20 lights you can show within C4D, the OpenGL side of it, and it does get a bit slower. But this one gives me straight feedback. I can sort of move my lights around, and I got instant feedback and I'm quite happy with it, and that like that. So it is quite a nice thing. Another thing I would always do at this stage would be throw some cameras in. Really, so I've always got some fixed points I can always to with the renders. So I'm always looking from the same angle. When I'm doing the modeling, I'm jumping all over the place, and zooming on that one, changing something, tweaking it. But with the cameras all set up, so I've already put something in here to start with, which are just quite simple things. It's a straight on view, so you get that nice side of it. The key to having fun with events is, especially these sort of things which is reasonably low stage, trying to aim for eye line. You get a lot better angle of view. People sit in their chairs. It looks a lot more impressive if you're a little bit lower down looking up at this stage. They get a little bit more of, "Wow, that's quite an impactful stage." You're going to get some great stuff out of it. Rather than, the top views are nice. It's more of an overview, but with the top views, it makes everything look a bit smaller. And they're like, "Oh, we're getting that stage. Okay, that's fine." There's not the impact for it. So I always try and keep to about five foot for an eye line, or if it's a big seater down sort of event, maybe even go down to four foot. So I lock my cameras in. So here what I've done is, let's pick some of the views. There you go. A view from the angle over there. I've set up my camera where I like it, just created some more, which is simply we're adding cameras really. I've set the heights to be five foot. And then I've added a new tag on them, and all that is a simple restraints tag. Yeah, protection tag. It just means I'm not going to then go back in here, forget I've got the cameras slated, and then move it, which is always frustrating when you're trying to line it up and get different iterations from the same view. So I always lock my cameras and go, "I'm happy with that view. Leave that there." Unless I'm doing animation camera. That's quite different. And then just flick it off to come back to my general workflow sort of view of things. The other nice thing is, as I said, when you have got the camera view, yeah, I'm happy with that. I want to keep a copy of that because I want to come back to it and refer back to it and stuff. I don't want to put that back on so... What's nice is with Iray, you end up with this little save button. So if you wanted to build up your workflow and see how things are progressing, you just hit save, it throws it into your picture view. And then from there, you can do as you would do in your ordinary C4D. Save it out, put it somewhere. You've got that kind of workflow. Saves you having to do into actually render it out for me and render for you again, which I'm not going to do right now because I'm doing other things. I'll just close these down. So the save one is great, so you can do changes, hit save, and you quite quickly got your list of different change views in here. So I hit render a second ago. But you can then quite easily flip back and forth and see what you're doing. Often, at this stage, I've got the idea of the stage, what the client wants, usually a few bouncing back and forth. "Are we going in the right direction? What do you think of this?" And that's when the client goes, "Yeah, we're liking that. All right, but I've been on this website and I've seen this great bit of furniture. I want this in it." And it's like, oh crap. They've got to go and model some random furniture. He's found an image online that he wants to get in for the job. And yeah, it changes all the time. They through, I want this perspects, this time I want this type of chair, I want this. And it's... Google images is great. You can just search the same image, you'll find out the dimensions because you very rarely get dimension on stuff. What I do is I kind of show you what I end up doing for that kind of stuff. Let's go and just build something quickly. So often on that one here, I'll just create a quick scene here, which is, which at the moment has got an Iray object in. At the moment, it looks weird, because what I'm doing with Iray is you've got your standard sky object as I showed a second ago. You also can throw an HDR in it. So light it from an image, which is what this is in the background. Just a bit of a blurry HDI, which for the settings here of the environment object. All it is is I've gone into here and changed it to an image based one rather than the sky. And all that's done is give me an option to find an image. It doesn't have to be an HDI, but HDI gives you the better dynamical range and stuff, and gives you a bit more nicer lighting. So I've put that on there for the moment, just so when I'm working on a model, I can see what it's coming out like. So let's just go and quickly throw, let's build a lectern. They always have lecterns in conferences. So let's just throw this together quickly. So use my things again. A centimeter, okay, let's just throw some dimensions on here. Sorry, can't remember which one's which. Let's put that at 35, and 55. So I added a nice little base to my lectern. Let's put it so it's not in the floor, bring it up. See, I'm instantly here getting some feedback on the thing. Yeah, there's no textures to it yet, but it gives me a good starting point. And let's jump into a little bit of modeling. I'm not going to too much modeling because the great thing about C4D, there's so much to it. I've been using it for eight years so far, and I'm still learning new stuff. Okay, I'm making it editable now by pressing a button over here, so it's not the fixed object anymore. Just hitting C on the keyboard, which makes it polygons. Just selecting some of the surfaces. Let's check the settings. Yeah, it's fine. Okay, a second there, let's just do a... pressing I, just to give me... extruding it in. And just a bit of dimensioning to... then D so to extrude out. Got a nice little lectern, so they're usually about a meter high, because I'm standing one in front now. So let's throw one in... no, that's not a meter, that's 10 centimeters. That's better. So there you go. We've straight off now got our beginning of our lectern there. And it's great. I can see what it's really going to look like, the form of it straight off. So I can compare it to that image the client sent me that he likes so it's quite nice. But to do that straight off, let's just do another I again and put a little top to it. Add a bit or rotation, because they're never flat. And there we go. So we've quite quickly start throwing some modeling into it. Another thing I've always done with my visuals, you never get sharp corners. There's no such thing in real life as a true sharp corner. Yeah, it may look sharp on the end of these sort of things, but there's always some beveling. And you always to add a little bit of beveling just give that little bit of light catching off to make the thing more realistic. And this is where I've always found a great tool. It's called the bevel tool. And all it is is a nondestructive deformer. I can just throw it onto an object, which straight off starts adding a bit more beveling to the object really. And you can dial in the settings of what you're doing with it, how minor it is. This one I'm going to make it quite small to be honest. A half centimeter in this. Not have it quite to flat like it is there. But we can just make it a bit more rounded. There you go. So we've now got a little bit nicer rounded edge. If we just hit that as well, so gives you straight off, we've now got a nice edge to our lectern that the client wanted really. And at this point, depending on materials, I've already preloaded some materials in here. What's nice about Iray is it's speed at rendering things like perspects or acrylic, especially frosted stuff. So usually, you use some frosted, and it adds loads of render time to your renders and stuff. I think that bit to it. So Iray, quite quick, let's throw that on. And instantly, there you go, you can see through it. I've got frosted acrylic really. It's giving me a nice sort of effect to it. You can still if I swing this, it's blurry behind, adding a bit of depth to it really. Really, and it's instant rendering really here. This is just locally, so I can do this quite nice and easy. And it's nice you can see through it, and it's just really easy to do it. If I jump into, as I said, what I made earlier. If we close that one for a second and open up a bit more finished one here. So if we just close that. Let it refresh. The thing that you will find with Iray, and I think a lot of GPU based rendering engines, when you first open your scene, there's a little bit of lag. And that's just it loading the geometry into your graphics cards. Once it's in there, it's fast and really responsive, and moves around very quickly. It's the first little opening, wait a second or two. And again, the heavier scene you've got, that will increase a bit. But once you're in it, you can see here it's quite quick. It's refreshing very quickly. This is just me using basically the lectern I built, some of the default figures you get within C4D, the studio version. I have retextured him slightly, but all I've done is use the maps that come with it and just tweak them so they work nicely within MDL materials really, to get that really realistic feel to it. And again, you can see here the perspects is working great. You can see the guy through it, but he's really frosted. Quite nice and easily and the speed flow is really good. Back to my workflow, at this point, I've always done it to where I've pulled objects out, built them separately, and put them back into the scene. A lot of that probably comes from when I didn't have so much power, when I've had to have one machine that's using the traditional render, and to be able to do that without just turning everything off, it gives me the power to quickly look at a scene, do rendering. In Iray, probably I don't need to do that so much, but it's just my workflow, and it's habit more than anything else I guess. But if we just grab this guy here, we can now go take him, and very quickly go and throw him back in our scene. So we've got a scene here. Let's just go and put him back in, shall we? And we can now throw our guy in. What I'm doing is control C-ing, control V, copy and pasting from one thing and opening another scene and pasting back in. Let's just go and find the guy. Oh, he's back behind the set at the moment. So let's just grab him, move him over here. I know roughly where he needs to be so he quite a bit more like there. And again, I know he is at the moment in the stage, but I know the height of the stage is 18 inches so I can go and throw his height in and go. Another thing that's great with C4D, you can type maths into these. So I'll just go +18 inches, and it will deal with the math for me. Straight off it puts him up there. So that kind of thing, and most things are great in C4D; that versatility. If we jump back to this view here now, hit our live rendering. Again, little bit of a lag, which is just grabbing all the information, putting into the graphics cards, shouldn't be too long. There you go. And now we've got our guy in here. You can see on this scene, I've also already put some of my lighting in. A lot of lighting for events has to be quite theatrical. If you've been to the shows here, you'll see some amazing lighting rigs and setups. It's not too complicated, it's just the key thing about not lighting someone and putting it from the front, if you light someone from the front, generally, they look quite flat. There's not much, physically much depth. And that's in real life, not just in 3D world. So we usually follow a lot of theatrical sort of principles when trying to light someone on stage. So here I've got simple three point lighting rig on someone. So two lights from the side. That's giving him a bit of depth and things like that. And I've got a bit more intense light right behind him just to give that surround to him. So if we zoom in on him a bit, just move around a bit, you can see now you get a nice little light behind him, showing off a bit, but you've got it different from each side. If we actually look at the lights, I generally will... It's always good not to try and keep the defaults. Nothing is pure white. Like I was saying about the beveling in the corners, it's the same with lighting. Always just try and tweak them a little bit, just to give you that more realistic. On this, I generally would put one light to be slightly warmer, one light to be slightly colder. Just helps with that kind of lighting of the person, give them... And again, try not to use green lights on people. It makes them look very ill, which nobody want at the end of the day. So with this set, there is lots of green light in it, just because it was branding of the company. But the lighting on the guy is quite warm and cold, bit of very white light behind him. So yeah, if the angle of the light's quite good, if you keep your lights at about 45 degree angle, it's generally it's a nice angle. It's not too tight. It's not too high. Gives them quite nice thing, not too much shadowing underneath and things. And to be honest, if you add a light, a default targeted light, it's a nice angle to start with. So if you keep those ratios, it's very simple just to throw them in and light your scene. As I was saying earlier, quite often at this point, I put my set in. I built my set up, put my furniture on it, bounced it to the client. "Oh, they're great, yeah." As I said earlier, a client's got no vision. They work with multimillion projects. I do a lot of corporate banking stuff, and they just don't... Numbers-wise, they're amazing at. But when they get to physically be able to visualize something in 3D, they just can't see it. So they want to see what it looks like in the room. And once I've got picky clients, it's more they like to see exactly what they're going to get. I've had it before where I've had to make sure the labels on the bottles are right on the tables. So I've done 3D visuals where they've got water bottles on the table, and they got the right label on it with the right branding on. Some of them really want that really fine detail. So often it's come back, put in the room, change this. The amount of iterations you end up going through is a lot. So at this stage, it would be go and through into room, go away, build the room. I did a job last year which was a conference, so this sort of thing. It was only for 28 people, but it was a million pounds, so it was a one half million pound conference for a few days. So some ridiculous figures when you start hearing the speeches, back and things like that. The kind of money that bounces around in some of the corporate banking sides of things is ridiculous. What I'll do now is let's go and see it more in the room. If we jump to the final model, it's not rendering now, so the moment the live render's just paused for a second. You're going to kind of get the idea of, I've now built the room, put my stuff and the screens in there, there's some staging sets on and stuff. And with this, your scene is going to get heavier and heavier, like in most things that, and there will be an impact in time and stuff. There are a lot of little tricks you can do, especially when you keep working with these files. And as they get heavier and heavier, as geometry just working in C4D, there is limits to it. I think there's key factors, like if you can keep your object down to below about 10,000, you're doing quite good. You generally will be quite responsive. When you get above that, you might notice some impact on it, more than the poly count, it's the object count. But what you can do, is I use all the time is the layer system. I'll build up with colors on here really. I've added layers to things so I can...very much like layers in Photoshop. I can turn things on and off quite quickly, not have to worry about going to find them in my hierarchy of where they are. I've got them set up on certain layers. I can go, "Here's my scene. I'm quite happy with that." I don't want any of my furniture on for the moment. Let's just lose it." I'm going through and just literally lose my furniture. Okay, turn it off there. But it's quite quick and easy just to lose the furniture, so I can come back to it later. The furniture going to be the same. And at the end of the day is, we're not supplying the furniture, so we're not making money from it. So I'm not too fussed about it. We supply more the lighting and sound, so it's very quick and easy to be able to do things like that, just turn things off. Let me just do this as well. You don't have to do it that way. You can do it within the traditional way and just use the ordinary turn things off. It does the same thing, it just is a lot easier to control a lot of separate things. What I'm going to show you briefly, is now I'll start live render, give it a second. You can now see I generally quite try and structure my thing quite well. I've got my cameras from before I've put in angles and stuff so I can go back. Quite often the client will come back and say, "Yeah, but this guy's spending 100,000 pounds with us. What's his seat going to look like? We want to see a view from his angle. So he's going to get this view when he's at his conference." So they know they're catering for the clients. Even this side here, you can see I've got it loaded in here. And it's responsive enough to hopefully, it's thinking about it. Let's just lose some of this stuff, shall we? Again, I started using this on a lot lower spec machine. So the tactics that you've learned through other renderings-wise, you can do the same thing here. Let's just turn the furniture off. Let's just lose a few bits and pieces. Let's go, it's getting quite, it's loading. It's still loading stuff up and it's lighting. Let me just lose my set. Sorry, I'm just going to quickly just do a little bit of tweaking to things. So we've got room now. Hopefully it should be a bit more responsive. So this is where it's great. When your client comes in and goes, "We're really happy. We want to do these tweaks with you." And at this stage, yeah, it's still refreshing stuff and loading things, but with the clients sitting beside you, I can almost do a live walkthrough of what they're going to get. So I can say, "Oh yeah, we'll do something over here. We'll do that kind of stuff there. And oh yeah, behind the set, we've got a walkway so we'll show you." We'll go through off in that kind of angle so they get a good idea of what room is going to be there. But yeah, they can quite quickly start seeing what their event's going to look like in pretty much real time. It gives them that kind of feedback, even down to detailing and things, and it's refreshed live. At work, I use more than one screen, so I can go off and have that screen in front of the client, and me working on here, showing them around and things. That is great, especially when deadlines and events can be very short. It gives us that feedback really quickly. And again, at this point, I've now put it into the room so my environment light is kind of useless. There is no sky that you can see from there. There's no point throwing an HDR in because it's a sealed room. I'm not going to get that feedback from it. So but it's bad to the MDL materials, I know that they're going to be consistent through it. I know I can do into this now where the lighting is going to totally change, but I've not have to worry about those materials not matching and not working on it. So it gives me that kind of feedback straight off, which is great. It's those tips about better at your workflow, and I said pulling things out. You don't always need to pull things out to model separately, but it just gives you that space, and that clarity of you haven't got a huge hierarchy of stuff in your browser here to go through and find those bits of that furniture. You're working on that one single piece. And that's what I'd really say is a big tip. If you separate things out and organizing things makes it far easier. You've got things like the solo buttons, and you can select things and solo stuff off and things, so you're only work on that object. I've just always done it with separate files and then throwing them in afterwards. Another key thing I've been using more and more recently, especially with R17, is a take system. I'm not going to go into too much detail, but if you're not on R17, have a look at the take system if you do get it. For iterations, and with one file rather than hundreds, really is very powerful tool. So what are we going to move onto now? Let's have a look at... At this point, I've still got enough... You can see now here as I've left it longer, it's refined and refined. And it's getting quite a crystal look to it. Let's just jump back on the image I've done, go through some of the stuff. So you can see here I've put the tables in, I've rendered it. It's quite nice. It's perspects lighting through it, nice little table to it. What I'll do now is show you some other things I'm sure you'll like. Like how to create volumetric lighting. When I first got Iray, I couldn't do volumetric lighting. I found little way around to do it, give that kind of effect. A lot of my work has this big impactful lights to it. So what I'll do I'm going to jump into this scene here and give you an idea of what you can do. Let's just jump to this one. So the one I showed you earlier, it was actually an award ceremony we were working on. It's dragging the lighting on that. Let's just see what I've got set up here. Okay, so again, it's nice and fairly responsive. I can move things around. What I've done here is I've created a light. There's a few ways you can do volumetric light. I found two ways. One you can use subsurface scattering. So pretty much put a huge box over the whole room and add subsurface scattering to it. And as long as you're inside it, all your lighting that room will end up with giving out some of that depending on how bright it is, whether you'll notice it as much. And that's good, but you don't always want all your lights to show off this kind of effect. Like I've got lighting on this here, and if I did that, the lights that hit this would also be seen. And my moving lights back here would show up and it would get a bit too busy. So what I did was I found a cheaty way around it really. I believe they're working on it right now to a bit of added stuff, but what I ended up doing was...you can see here. I've got a moving light rig I built that's just pointing up towards a thing at the moment. If I quickly prop that in now, there's nice volumetric light on it. And again the way I've achieved this isn't by putting it in a box. All I've done is cheated really. I created a cone, put a cone where the light was, and added then the subsurface scattering over to that. As long as the material is very simple, it's just got purely subsurface scattering, nothing else, it doesn't show up. It just shows me that's nice lighting really, so I'll lose the cone for second do you don't see it. But yeah, it's as simple as that. It's very quick and easy to be able to move these things on. I might see more of a bit of environment on so you can see more things. Even there, you can see, there's my light. I can quite quickly zoom on it. It's not picked up the gobo for the moment. But it's quite easy to do. You get that nice quasi-effect. So for the events or lights, you can still do it. You don't have to go, "Oh, I've lost all that kind of stuff." I know my time's getting on. So let me just go back to that scene I was in a second ago. What else I'll show you, a lot of people like to see is like a depth of field, DOF, which is very quick as well. It's instant as well. It's very simple to set up. As I said with Iray, there's not a huge amount of settings. It's, out of the box, quite quick. All you do is, what I've done is I've created a camera here. I've renamed it so I can remember myself which one it was. And all that is is a camera over here. Okay, so I've got my camera here. I'm going to stick my environment objects on. Okay, let me just, so we can see it a bit easier, let's just throw in another environment object. It just gives it a bit more general light. And all of them, within my camera itself, let's go back to it. I've added another little tag, a little Iray tag, which is just a camera tag. And it's as simple as right clicking and going into Iray tags, and there are two tags. The object one is more to with you want set up certain passes to exclude or include things. You can use the object tag for that. The camera tag is more to do with when you want to look at a bit more depth of field, that kind of stuff. And so I've added one of those. And again, simple settings. There's not a huge amount. It's depth of field, yep, use the camera stuff. Simple as that. So currently, if I go back into my camera itself in C4D, I given it a focus point of a null I've created. A simple null here, which if we look on the top view, just sits currently back here. It's not that clear actually from that angle. Currently sits back here on the middle of my logo. So I can move it around a bit more. I've got a bit of control in my depth of field, so actually I can say, "I want my depth to be on my presenter rather than anything else." Let's move over here. And if I zoom in a bit here, so my presenter now should have a bi