From the course: OctaneRender for Cinema 4D Essential Training

Add lights and an environment

From the course: OctaneRender for Cinema 4D Essential Training

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Add lights and an environment

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- [Instructor] To render an image, you need an object, a camera, a light, and a material, and we're going to light this scene using area lights. So first, let's remove the default environment color. And we do that by coming over to settings and in the settings tab, the environment tab, come over to the environment color, and we'll bring this all the way down to black. We have our Live Viewer updating here, and you can see we can't see anything. We've removed one of the key elements needed to render an image, light. So Octane uses area lights, and we can either create a C4D light, change its type to area. You can see now that's starting to work. And to bring it into the Octane system you'd add an Octane Light Tag, or if we delete that, we can simply come over to objects and use the Octane arealight or targeted arealight from the Octane dialogue. So I'll just use an arealight for now. And you can see that we still can't see anything. Now if I back out of this camera, let's just see what we've got here. That's all very, very dark. But what we can see if we just come round, you can see this is the light and it's very, very bright and it's very, very large. And that's because of the scale of our scene. So what we want to do is kind of back this out a bit and, of course, we're gonna start to change the power of this light and the scale of it, as well. So let's just start to reduce it down and you can see how we're getting this instant feedback in the Live Viewer and it's really, really cool how fast and flexible this is. So what I'd like to do is start to position this a bit more, make a bit more sense of it and let me come around here. And you can see that because we've got this kind of shape visible in the Live Viewer, it can be a bit distracting. So what you can do is come over to your light tag here, the Octane light tag, invisibility, just uncheck camera visibility and now that goes away. That means if we come back round, our camera is sort of directly behind this light, we can see through it. So I'm going to just key in some values that I have for the position and the rotation. And as I'm doing this, we'll see the changes in the Live Viewer. Now, it's angled a bit more towards the sunglasses. If we zoom in, it's way too bright, everything is blown out. And it's still a bit too large. Let's just figure out this size first. Now, you do that either by manipulating the handles like we've been doing here, you can see these orange dots and we can also come into the details attributes. So if we just change this to something like something like so, that's helped this out a lot. Still too powerful. This is all blown out here. So we can fix that by coming over to the Octane light tag in the light settings tab, we can just bring down this power by quite a lot, something like five. And let's change the temperature. We can bring this up. And we see that's cooled of the light. If we bring it down to the other direction, it warms up the light. Okay. So to save time, I've got ahead and created some more lights and some environment objects. Let's just name this light key and we'll bring it into the hierarchy. And because the visibility of the lighting now is off, now we've lost all our lighting. So let's just enable the lighting that we have here. Okay, and we can look through the camera. Now if you want to, you can leave all these lights disabled and create your own so by all means, do that if you prefer. But you can see how these lights are picking up the highlights of the sunglasses, really describing the form and having the instant feedback in the Live Viewer, it makes setting up lights in Octane really fast. The environment objects that we have here, these two sky objects are simply just to add a bit more ambient light to the scene. So the top one, we can move to the tag, this serves as the primary environment. So that's that ambient light that I mentioned. And the second one just kind of fills in the visible environment, fills in the back plane. And we'll get into these in our chapter on lighting. So Octane lights are simply C40 area lights with an Octane tag applied. You can get instant feedback in the Live Viewer to make setting up lights both fast and fun. Next, we'll look at how we can render this image to the Picture Viewer.

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