From the course: Motion Graphics

Five tips for more realistic renders in Cinema 4D

From the course: Motion Graphics

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Five tips for more realistic renders in Cinema 4D

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- [EJ] Welcome to Motion Graphics Weekly, where you up your mo graph knowledge, one week at a time. I'm EJ Hassenfratz, let's get our learn on. It's pretty hard to get a render to look good, when you don't know the 3D fundamentals and what makes objects look realistic. Now what we consider realistic or appealing to our eyes is all due to what we see in the natural world around us. So in this video I'm gonna be covering five simple tips to keep in mind to help make your renders look more realistic. Now, the first tip here is all about colors and materials in nature. Now if I look at my white material here, one thing to know about the natural world is nothing is completely 100% pure white, or 100% completely pitch black, okay? So if you have white or black materials in your scene, give it just a little bit of gray value. And this will also allow you, if I just brighten up this black color here, this will also allow you to have more flexibility when it comes ready to color correct and you have more leeways when you're doing color correction. And notice on my controller here, even bringing in a little bit of some value here allows you to see those details much more clearly. And similarly when your whites are completely blown out, and you just bring that back a little bit you add in a little bit more detail there as well. So on a similar vein, your lights in your scene. No light is 100% pure white either. So when you create a light, be sure you give it some kind of hue. There's natural hues like yellow that would be in sunlight, and there could be blue hues from the atmosphere from the sky, so play around. Even a subtle amount of hue goes a long way. Be sure to play with those hues with those lights as well. Now another thing to keep in mind is geometry. You can see all of my edges are super sharp, there's no rounding whatsoever, and this is not realistic. Even a knife at the microscopic level has some kind of rounded edge. So when you have an object, and I have a bunch of extrude objects here, make sure that you add some kind of tiny even more subtle kind of bevel to your objects. So right now I'm gonna add some fillet caps and up the subdivisions on those fillet caps as well. And you can even see all the nice little details we're catching now as that edge catches the light in our scene, and making our objects look more appealing, more interesting. Now speaking of reflections, let's go ahead and add some reflections to all of our materials. I'm just gonna chuck this on, and you're gonna see that reflections are all about the environment that your objects are in. Right now the only thing that's in our environment are a few lights. And this is where using something like an HDR image on a sky object is gonna come in handy. So you can see this is just a simple image in the luminance channel, and this will now be a element that this object can reflect. Now, you're gonna see that this reflection's really, really strong. So another thing that adds to realism is Fresnel, now Fresnel is the natural reflective falloff that happens in nature. Another thing to add to your reflections to give it a more imperfection is by loading up a simple noise shader in your texture field for your roughness. 3D is way too perfect, so whenever you get a chance add some noise to even the diffusion channel or even some of these roughness values in your reflection, and of course use your Fresnel falloff. Now the last tip I'm going to give you is, if I render this you're gonna see that our objects kind of look like they're floating. And they're missing one crucial detail, and that is ambient occlusion. If I go to my render effects, go to Ambient Occlusion, and render this again, we're gonna see that we added this nice ambient occlusion shading, our object no longer looks like it's floating, and realistic ambient self-shading occurs when an object's close to another object, okay. And this is what ambient occlusion is all about. It helps from objects looking like they're floating on the surface as well. So we added some really nice detail, so be sure to keep in mind these five tips to ensure that your renders look more realistic and interesting. So happy rendering and I'll see you next week. Don't want to wait until next week to learn something new? No problem. Here are other ways to feed your creative brain to keep you busy in the meantime. You can check out my other courses in the library, visit my website eyedesyn.com for more tutorials, subscribe to my YouTube channel to be alerted when I post a new video, join my Facebook page for daily mo graph inspiration, and keep up to date on all my latest mo graph creations on Instagram. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you here again next week.

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