 Hi, hi, Mike working. Ooh, nice. Hi. Hello My name is Paul and I'm gonna talk with this song called lights home PC action, which is about Essentially how to make the most out of cycles and how I use cycles in my personal projects and how personal projects in cycles ended up landing amongst others and The job which is cool So that's me. Hi. I am Paul. I am 23 and from Barcelona and as you can tell from my humble background as an amateur 2d artist, I am an artist and and I Really like art never thought I could do a career on that but then I did a donut and My life changed because I immediately fell in love with 3d and I decided to study that and Pursue that career and now I have a job at Disney, which is cool So yeah, today I'm gonna tell a story that again starts with a donut. I Started learning 3d Lofted and I just wanted to do everything and I did tons of projects I did a plant tried. This is a video. It should be playing elevator music Second money a row Nice so there's tons of them perhaps some of them we can skip That's unfortunate Well, basically, that's a route. I did a plant. I tried vfx. That's me as a teenager tried sculpting I did a short film about a cookie with suicidal thoughts another plant Fell in love with puppets tried to do a short film with them, but failed. I Did another plant because I'm obsessed Generally, I did I did lots of lots of things. It's not going to the next slide. Damn it So yeah, basically I Was a generalist and I loved doing projects for fun a project that seemed Meaningless and I decided to study 3d animation which I did and when I went to school I found that everything was based around Fitting on a pipeline about doing every speciality in every software that's Industry standard for that task which bucked me a bit. I decided to just keep doing I mean doing uni stuff Of course Maya and Arnold and everything but doing projects By the side in blender But there comes a point in every artist's life when somebody perhaps a friend family member Comes to you and they say like You know your your your art is really cool, but what What what job are you gonna do? To which I respond of course, it feels amazing to Can you have a job as an artist and it turns out you can and I thought my best chances would be to I loved the the aspect of crafting images and guiding people through color and visual language So I decided I would be a lighting artist in animation But what do lighting artists do essentially we do pretty renders and rendering for Those amongst you who don't know Is the process where you know 3d animation lives in a 3d scene and Lighting artists place 3d lights that cast 3d light rays Within that that go to a virtual 3d camera that produces an image actually is the other way around it's technical It's boring unless you're here But actually there's the part of making them pretty There's for example, this is a scene with same models same poses Same textures same everything but one could argue one is prettier than the other or at least they evoke different things And that's another conversation which is color perspective contrast And That that really really appealed to me I was an artist after all And sorry for keeping it basic. It's just a family and friends are watching and I think it's you know my chance to Explain what is that thing that I do for a living? So yeah, uh, that was great, uh felt amazing. I was doing what I loved you can do a job It's great, but then there can problems That's that's a shot, uh, which I led for a school project done in every industry standard software for every speciality That's took in our schools basically Maya and Arnold pipeline an hour and a half to render And that could be fine if you didn't take into account that this was a shot of 80 frames Which is Roughly three seconds by frame six you reached a full-time day of job Which doesn't sound fair we could only afford that because we had a render farm Which is lots of computers rendering in parallel, but that doesn't sound fair. Do you need an infrastructure? to uh To access a job that allows you to work on an infrastructure. That doesn't seem fair There has to be another way around. I was angry because I wanted to render my stuff on my computer I wanted to do Something that appeals to me and I was angry. There has to be another way to get a job as a lighting Artist and by that time a friend of mine an animator. His name is bell. He's very talented He uh came to me with an animation. He said I wanted to look beautiful Can you do that can can it be done and I was like, yes, it can be done. I can't do it I will uh, I don't know how But I will and then he so showed me the animation he had That's another video that should be playing And it should be playing without audio That's because it's copyrighted We don't we don't want any issues to the channel um as you can tell by the lack of props by Making it beautiful. He didn't only mean Doing lights, but he meant shaders and objects and Virtually everything So that's the animation It's really cool, but my first reaction was fear I mean, it's 340 frames It's moving cameras. No shortcuts possible So I don't know I would need tremendous infrastructure a render engine that's Extremely beautiful yet very fast that lives within a software where I can do shaders objects um Every kind of arrangement possible Where would I find that? Uh, of course, I wouldn't be here And and first reaction was amazing cycles Extremely fast with the gpu and everything Great felt the interactivity in it the noisier I could go faster that means more creative iterations, which means a prettier result But it went shortly followed by frustration because I came from arnold and arnold has lots of Phoenix features where you can tweak Every aspect of a light and I don't know if you can tell by now, but I'm a nerd also And and these things I love so these are a thing five topics Which I thought weren't possible in cycles and I found workarounds or solutions for which I want to spread around so problem number one textures in lights most of you know That in cycles you can put textures in spotlights so they behave kind of like projectors but Most people don't know And how would you approach this where the texture is In the light and it shows up in specular reflections So it turns out you can as for another video, which I will talk over While they look That was possible with workarounds before but now it's there's an elegant solution in 4.0 Where essentially there's this button where you can use notes for lights, which I love This perhaps is going to be slow. I am Okay So yeah, there's there's an area light. It's flat. It's a boring reflection And then you can plug in a texture coordinates. So you get UV coordinates and from that you can of course UV coordinates exactly There's you can put an image texture I have in this case an image of some window just Around casually and now you can have A nice reflection. I'm compensating a bit for the exposure here and Yep It's Works. So, yeah, that's something I discovered. No one. It's nice a problem number two another trying to go a bit fast and Yeah, uh, you you could think that that's useless, but I use it all the time on eyes because eyes are like big shiny balls in animated characters And that's where you can fake And design how the eyes look here and I'm faking a torch where there is none So problem number two lights decays So I'm gonna run you through an example of a shortened doing with another talented animator. His name is fran These are also uh videos should be playing. I I'm gonna skip that actually can we skip the video? Yeah, why not? It's a it's a shot, uh, that This is a camera traveling Uh, and following these two characters and I painted somart. I wanted to make these characters go into an eerie kind of Go deeper into a temple and I wanted to Evoke with a light that they are going from a safe place to a tenor And So I start I start by lighting That's that's very rough. That's general brushstrokes Uh, but I'm blocking in the key light which comes from screen left and I generally liked it And then I flip to the end of the shot And now it doesn't work because this light coming from screen left now is bleeding too much in screen right So I'm getting too much light on screen right I need to make lights Decay faster so that it gets darker faster Ta-da, that's that's my favorite note. I place it in a in a single slide because I love it Uh, you you can have all info about light rays everything that that cycles does to access it in the Light shader. We have the ray length and if we use it in a video, uh You can use it to drive anything here. I'm in this video, which we should be oh, yeah, we're seeing No, we're not Sorry here So, yeah, essentially what you can do is to Use this information to create masks to show where the light should be affecting and where it shouldn't Essentially, it gives me a value of how long the ray has traveled in blender units When hitting a surface So you can do masks with that and you can see as I slide this number the light starts to reveal from the light source into the back of the seat Which is I didn't know that was possible Uh And there's another video with we we can skip. It's easy to imagine how you can turn that into a tool where you can do Gradients and have it be a bit more user friendly. But using this technique, uh, which can we go to the next Slide And sorry Here, um, that's yeah, that was before and that is After so see how not only it gets generally darker, but in screen left. It doesn't get that much darker It's just getting darker on screen, right That's the kind of Finneke things we we we nerds love Uh, so yeah, and that gets me again closer to the art. So that's great Problem number three so we can give you all like components. I'm gonna run through this one because it's, um really nerdy but, um, that's a light and blender internally splits it into diffuse rays, which are the ones that Reflect like in a matte manner the shiny ones Uh, the ones that has gone have gone through glass or the material of that sort And the ones that have bounced more than once when hitting the camera the indirect ones and It turns out that again, we can separate them, uh, which is cool, uh between I don't know we have glossy shadow and uh Diffuse transparent transmission all those kind of things and I did a tool, uh, which We could show in a video, um Where essentially with sliders, which is something I missed from Arnold you can Elevator music again, you can essentially increase or decrease certain, uh components of a light For every individual light. So perhaps making a certain light bounce more on the indirect So it feels more room Or perhaps making it more shiny. So perhaps you need less, uh less value overall to explain shape And those are very very very fine, uh tweaks, which I don't generally use but It's cool to for it to be possible because when you need it, you need it next, uh, so that's original and tweaked you can see I'm Interesting a bit more of it's extremely subtle a bit more of indirect I don't know. Let's go to the next one slow volumetrics. We We I think we all can relate to that volumetrics for those who don't know Are these effects where light scatters through an atmosphere? And it's very important composition compositionally use usually because You can see we have a dark house here with a dark environment And we are only separating the house from the environment because of a conveniently placed volumetric behind it and We usually need volumetrics And but the problem here is that cycles perhaps does them too well Because unlike Arnold that uses a cheaper Less realistic approximation of that it works of the volumetrics cycles Really makes the light bounce around and it can hit hard on your render times You may think I don't own a fog machine to support the claim that cycles is more realistic. You may also be wrong So that's with no volumetrics. I might even hear a bit of volumetrics You can see how the Fire blows a bit more how generally the the background is more tight together But that really hits on the on the performance of the render So that's what I do and brace yourselves all you this is a video Sorry for making you work. Thanks for the work you do This is a video and brace yourselves all you nerds and purists Of how things should look because this is perhaps the dirtiest thing I will show today I'm not getting undressed. Um, so it's uh, uh-huh. So, yeah, I'm Putting a cube and I'm plugging an emission shader to a volume That's something they don't sprite right which just gives you a shiny cube which with a gradient texture You can have a glowy thing there in 3d space which Does a trait for composition and and this is a comparison Back to the slides. Thank you This is a comparison for that's with the scattering Technique which is a realistic one and that's with emissive volumes And I'm not trying to perfectly match but you can see you can get volumetric effects from either This is again with emission and I'm here a comparison because the render times aren't that different if you render all together But if you create a layer that's called volumetric and you hide And and you put everything on hold out, but the volume Then the scatter it gives you a kind of noise. It's very hard to Clean or denoise and the emission Eight samples done two seconds As fast as your as your computer takes So that's cool. And some of you may say but volumetric shadows You're not okay. Well, you could you could do that with shaders, but uh, but yeah, generally in Films that are not suspicious of having low budgets When you're using volumetrics per composition, you don't generally need that much of a finessing so it can be done and Problem number five and last one. I'm having a video here blockers There's no easy way like in in Arnold you can Select an area of your scene and make it darker or make it shine more Um, which in cycles we don't have that that's supposed to be a video sorry and Here we don't have it and I was once on a on a blender today chat and it was like pablo I know pablo is a lighter pablo. How do you handle Blockers in the studio and he gave me the dirty solution, which I was very much not pleased But I ended up using it and it kind of is useful and Since in reality, we don't really have The concept of blockers. It ends up feeling very natural. Are we seeing a video? There's no video Okay, well, there's no video Essentially I place objects hide them from everything but the shadow And and just place them there and play with the opacity to to just There's an animation next. Ah, that makes sense And this is a video. My god. I'm sorry You came here for quality That's that's what you get I'm a chirpy So Yeah, that's what I already explained. I The the ball is has the same value than the background. We wanted to separate if the ball were a character That's the note that I would get So I spawn a random plane I give it a material that has some gradient on the opacity and with a color ramp I can I can tweak the opacity so to make it darker I wanted to push it to the you don't notice it but A before and after would reveal like a serious change like I'm getting better read Which is which is cool. That's useful to have. Here's some example Back to those lights Where I use it Every time I have a sun or a directional light I'm using some kind of blocker to shape it because this is looking very flat This is a bit of a nicer Composition is that perfect? No, it isn't I could always ask for more rendering features But it gets the job done and it did and back to the example of the Animation that I was asked to Light I could finish it So that's a video which I would like to play again. No audio, please We would get in trouble Just a heads up This was rendered entirely on my computer. I have a 3080 And I could render this at 4k in about seven minutes per frame And that's it so my my It's not perfect, but um, my point is it can be done by yourself With your computer, uh, which is nuts Uh Then I was finishing my degree in animation by then and I was putting my reel together my demo reel together Which that was the main piece of it And I wanted to spray around I want people to to to see it to for them to hire me eventually So I did a video on youtube. I called it how I rendered a disney Style animation in blender like disney blender clickbait. That's what youtubers do, right? Um And little did I know that Uh, roughly a bit under a year after their series on Unbelievable events and applying with that very same reel. I got a job disney that's me working good So, I don't know. I I myself I've broken some of my convictions that Professional stuff has to be done with industry standard software, which is something we all nerds here Hate to hear and I did that process myself, which I wanted to share So thank you very much for coming. These are some, uh Some general, uh shout outs. I wanted to do Fran who's looking for a job and bell who are both animators that whose works are featured here and Uh, this is a team that did my uh The project for my university and that's me if you want to Talk me anywhere else or find me in the conference for youtube channel. I respond everywhere So that's it. Thank you very much for coming See you around