The light spec becoming smaller the less spread it has, is realistic. This is since the less spread a light has, the smaller amount of the light's surface will hit a specific place on the object. Hope that makes sense.
Yeah, looking more into it I think it's mostly realistic. I do wonder about the shape of the light though. A long skinny area light with very little spread has a small circular reflection. I would think a strip box with deep grid would have a skinnier reflection, but still maintain the general shape of the softbox. I could be wrong though, as the angle of reflection is getting cut down. Not sure.
@@igobyzak i think that's correct too. It helps me make sense of it by visualising the area light as an array of for example 10x10 lines (rays) going straight out of it (0 spread). And if you start adding spread, each line will diverge into more lines forming a conical shape with the pointy end still on the area light surface. The higher the spread, the bigger the cones, meaning more cones (circles basically) will overlap, which finally means a bigger area of the light will be visible for a given place on the surface of the subject. And, regarding the "always-circular shape", when raising the cone size radius, it's natural that the shape becomes circular since only rays closest in proximity to the cone hitting directly at where the spec lands, will be visible. You can visualize this in c4d by cloning up an array of 100x100 circles, scale them up substantially, and then drag-select in the middle of one and see what shape your selected objects make. And spread does spread the rays in a conical shape, you can test this by making a square area light just above a flat ground and observing the shape of the light on the ground as you adjust the spread. It will look more round than like a blurred square. Another way of thinking of it, is that a 0 spread is the equivalent of a real-life grid that goes all the way from the light and all the way over to the subject hitting him in the face! This would make a specific spot on the subject's face only "see" the light coming from a single one of these "grid tunnels".
@@jangrashei1752 Yeah, I think with the spread all the way to 0 would be like a small tunnel from the light to the object. But I feel like the reflection goes to a perfect circle so fast! Like with medium/low spread, the reflection is a small dot. I'm not sure if I can post links in the comments here, but here is a link to a quick test I did in RS where I set a light with a low spread, rendered, then turned the spread all the way back up and modeled a quick box grid for the area light. I adjusted the depth of the grid to replicate the softness of the light falloff of the previous render. In this case, I can still see the general shape of the light in the reflection, just smaller and more narrow, which is what I would expect. Thoughts on this? drive.google.com/drive/folders/11vqvin-MQz7aI1Fi-d87PWFitv91fm-w?usp=sharing Also, the shadows with the modeled grid are more of what I would expect; softer in the length of the light.
@@igobyzak hmm interesting, and thanks for taking the time to do some tests. Do you have a picture of what the modelled grid looks like? I'd have to think some more and maybe try some things myself, but can't till Monday. I think it might have to do with the shape and size of the grid or how many tunnels there are, or it could of course be that you are right; that something is off.
@@jangrashei1752 That is such a great point, so I did some more tests and you are 100% correct! It had not occurred to me that the density and shape of the grid would contribute to the effect, and it turns out I had made a grid then scaled it length wise to better match the shape of my long area light. Well that made each "grid" tunnel a rectangle instead of a square and of course that helped to get the effect I was seeing in the link above. Remaking the grid to be a collection of perfect square "tunnels" results in what Redshift is giving us with the spread turned down. Thanks so so much for commenting on this and explaining! Super helpful!!
I love how carefully and thoughtfully you place all of these. Makes me realize how stupid my own approach to lighting is. I don't really know what the problem is when I'm lighting something other than that it has to be lit somehow. I get the sense that this is a topic someone could spend ages on and your experience and professionalism really shines through. Thanks for sharing your knowledge and for creating content for people like me who are fairly new to this. It's interesting to watch someone who knows what they're doing work. Very much appreciated
Thanks so much for watching! I rarely go this in depth for my personal renders but thought it would be nice to show a complete 180 from just using an HDRI.
This is the BEST product lighting tutorial I have ever seen. With a lot of great tips in C4D+Redshift on lighting in general that can be applied not only to product shots. Amazing!
Hi, agree with everyone else this tutorial is fantastic! Tremendously helpful tips I always use now, especially the light-as-camera trick for positioning. One thing I'd like to add is for the gobo light, instead of using a texture in an area light, putting a shader graph on a spot light gives easier control. With that, you can add a ramp btwn your texture & Light Color node to control its brightness or color, and control shadow softness (which gets disabled if using texture on area light). I'm not sure if it works for video input, though.
Hey, can you maybe give some more insights or a link to a tutorial? Would be awesome, can't get it to work unfortunately and can't really find something about this technique. Thanks in advance, Mitch
I've unknowingly watched and absolutely loved all your tutorials without knowing it was from the same person as they were hasty last minute searches. This tutorial really had me, so while subscribing I was like damn, I've watched almost all your stuff, makes so much sense that such quality content came from the same source. I have tried reading books and watched so many tutorials on lighting but none reveal the thought process that could go behind it. Best tutorial, so much respect.
Great tutorial Zak. I see now that I've been too conservative with how many lights I've been using. I like how you get in and tweak all the tiny details with tonnes of little lights. The reason that the shader graph adjusted both the lights at 1:23 is that the shader graph is stored in a material. That same material is applied to both of the lights.
Ive watched 30 minutes and I had to pause it to tell you that youre amazing , its like youre passing your artistic eyes to us which is very difficult to do in a tutorial, everyone can learn something cool about Cinema 4D but making the right choices to make it look pretty is a journey that can take a lot of effort , analyzing why you're moving or scaling the lights is pure gold, thanks again. Would love to see a tutorial of lighting laptops or speakers in a a dark interior scene in the future.
Wow this is outstanding tutorial, I watched only 10 minutes now, but want to appreciate your work on this video. It's awesome, thanks man I think this is my first time when I actually see how to configure lighting.
Thank you for this amazing Tutorial! You could use a "Protection" Tag, so you won't move your light by accident. Saves a lot of nerves. And if you did not know already CTRL + SHIFT + Z is just for undoing camera steps.
Thank you for all this insight into lighting. Certainly makes me rethink how I do my own. Very inspiring and much appreciated from us still starting out and learning
Wonderful tutorial！Helps me understand the basic but most important lighting principles! Now I know the reason why every light shuold be put in that place.
You are really the Bob Ross of CG Lighting. Helped lighting my little project. Love the amount of control Redshifts giving you. Do you mind if I link you when I post it on Instagram? :)
Firstly, thank you for sharing this valuable learning resource; it's a treasure for beginners! I'm considering using this in animation, but I'm unsure how the light interactions and object and camera movements may differ. I suspect the workflow would change considerably. Could you perhaps create a tutorial on this? Or do you have other resources you'd recommend? Thank you once again for sharing, and I appreciate any advice on this topic in advance!
That's amazing! Thank you very much! It's helped me a lot :) Currently I'm using an Arnold Render, but these technics is also works, I think, in any render engine. Peace.
Thanks so much! I'm not too familiar with Octane, but I think most things here can be translated over. I think the light linking is a bit different in Octane as I think it uses light groups for including and excluding lights from objects.
Amazing tutorial! Thank you for giving such an in-depth look into your whole lighting process. I've been looking for (animated) light gobo maps for a while and I didn't really find anything convincing. Any directions on good resource pages where to get something similar you use in this video at 02:50?
Thanks so much! Yeah not too many resources out there that I've found so I just recorded my own on my cell phone. I just cranked the contrast in After Effects so I had areas of pure black and pure white.
Hi! Great work-through. And greater commentary. Very helpful. Do you ever utilize "normalize intensity" on area lights? I find that when trying to emulate large soft boxes, the results are a bit more expected.
Regarding the foil overexposure, wouldn't a smaller IOR do the trick too, since a lower value thins out the reflected light but doesn't affect roughness?
Yeah definitely. That's the nice thing about working in 3D is we can change anything and everything. I really tried to focus on only lighting here though and tried to keep it tied to the way one would go about lighting a setup like this in the real world.
Thanks for watching! Yeah, it's a long one. I think at the time of the recording I was using a 1080ti and a 2080ti, but I did speed up the video where I could to keep the length of the tutorial down.
I thought it was recommended not to use so many lights, that way the render would be super heavy. Is it ok to do it like this? is it the only way to use these amount of lights?
Yeah, I think it's always a balancing act between realism and render time. Lots of high resolution textures, high resolution meshes, displacement, lots of lights, etc all add render time but also add to the realism of the render. We just have to find what works best for the project.
Do I have this right that there is no solo light option in redshift!? Seeing you manually activate and de-active lights just to solo is making me wonder...
@@igobyzak puzzled by the lack of this basic but essential feature. Would love to see something equivalent to Arnold's light manager - super handy tool..
You did a great job at lighting the products but I feel that the background could have been a little brighter and less interesting. Also the composition is not so great, I would have put the small flat object in front of the tubes. All in all, great job, maybe a bit of overkill on the detail work and less attention to the overall image in my opinion.
