Original subtitles

Once you open the demo file you will see a bunch of minerals arranged on

the table and that's how it should look, but first let's jump over to

preferences and make sure that within the system settings we have our GPU visible.

we can tell that my render device which is NVIDIA the GPU got recognized, there are different options

available for accelerating raytracing such as CUDA and OptiX with OptiX being available on

Nvidia gpus only and being the fastest option that I know, then if you own one of the AMD

graphics cards you'll be able to choose the HiP instead, but I'll stick to OptiX though currently.

okay throughout the tutorial we're going to use Cycles render engine to keep things

slightly more streamlined and realistic right out of the box, so within the render engine drop

down menu I'm selecting Cycles and making sure that the device is set to GPU compute.

gpus render much, *much* faster in Cycles than the CPUs generally. what I usually like to do

when dealing with lighting is create two windows, one for the final render view which will use the

rendered mode of the viewport and the second one at the top for the material preview. here

we got our camera through which we will see our final shot, our render, now the render icons are

located at the top of the user interface of the viewport, there we can change it from the default

shading mode to the material preview one and to the random mode which is right over there.

it'll enable the Cycles pathtracing rendering mode in this particular window and we will use it

throughout the tutorial, so let's keep it turned on. depending on the video card it can be rather

slow or pretty fast but let's keep it in the rendered mode for now. and the top one will be

our material preview mode to make sense of our scene, it will use some random hdri included by

default with Blender, but no matter the hdri environment chosen though the point of this

viewport is to be our secondary monitor with the lights and the UI elements on all the time.

that is our working environment decoupled from the Cycles rendered view if that makes sense.

if you don't want to use a generic hdri there, you can switch on the scene world and scene lights

which will make it look fairly similar to the rendered mode, but I will disable all these options,

I need this hdri to just have enough information to see things clearly, because you know our bottom

view will be constrained to the to what the camera sees, it will be fairly slow and stuff like that...

okay going over to the environment settings we can tell that the only light source our scene

has is this abstract gray environment. we can play with the exposure of this default Blender

environment, but actually what I'll do is reduce it all the way down to zero to start from scratch,

our cinematic method implies that we start from scratch anyway. okay so Blender cursor can serve

as the spawning point for the... for any kind of objects, so when I press Shift A and add the area

light. it gets spawned just on top of 3d cursor. I can click and drag to make it larger or smaller

um... if we press T to open the left tool shelf and select the... the transform gizmo, you can

actually use the handles of this gizmo to move, rotate, scale up and down our light source

but usually I like to do it in a slightly different way utilizing Blender hotkeys.

so G is to move the objects around, uh... the movement can be constrained to X, Y and Z axes by utilizing

the X, Y and Z Keys. the same with rotations, R to rotate, X Y and Z afterwards to constrain it to

certain axis and finally the S shortcut scales the object. not a whole lot of things to remember :) G to move

or grab, R to rotate, S to scale, it's good to remember these three. these shortcuts quickly

become second nature for moving objects in this case light sources around. and when it comes to

adjusting the light source settings, as a quick refresher we have this green light bulb icon

within the Blender user interface and there we can access all these settings like the color, the power

the shape of the light source, the size, whatever else, everything can be adjusted from there.

changing the size from... from that menu is practically the same as scaling the object

so it's interchangeable in this sense. and whatever you're gonna, do don't

you dare unticking the cast Shadows button in Cycles :) Shadows are important, uhu :)

throughout the videos you will see me accessing the objects in either of these windows, sometimes

in the rendered view, sometimes in the material preview. you will also notice me toggling off

the visibility of the UI elements with this button in the rendered view. sometimes the

user interface can get in the way, especially when there is a lot going on in the viewport,

so shutting the noisy UI elements up really helps to focus on what matters. what else do we have here?

as for the camera we have one here in the camera01 outliner collection

we can press 0 on the numpad to jump into the camera view or Ctrl 0 to make any camera

the active one, a nice little hack in Cycles to juice slightly more performance out of it is to

press Ctrl B and draw the rectangle around the viewport or rather around the camera view

or actually around a portion of the camera view even. that would constrain the render

region around that particular portion of the viewport and within the view output properties

you can see the render region checkbox that can be turned on and off and basically that... that is it.

again we can switch between the the random modes using these icons or we can press Z to bring

up this pie menu, whatever feels more comfortable to you I guess. so I think that should be it for

the basic Blender setup and for the settings that may come in handy throughout the tutorial... uh once

again the render engine has been set to Cycles, the device to GPU compute to avoid any confusion

as for the light paths there is no real need to adjust it... well maybe I'll limit the diffuse, glossy

and transmission bounces a little bit to speed up the viewport and this is it! I also have a personal

superstition about increasing the indirect light clamping just in case to not lose the precious

rays generated by Cycles, more about that later, I will show some comparisons and stuff like that. now

I'll just say that this is it for the boring part the Cycles is set up, the shortcuts are mentioned,

nothing stops us from diving deep into setting up lighting, so that is what we will do in a moment.

and by the way, if you have any questions about setting up the .blend file or accessing the project

files, feel free to reach out to us or to other students of this particular course in our Discord!

and now onto the exciting part, setting up the key light or the main light.