Feel free to check it out yourself here, where you can also see the sneak peek of it. Now I gotta get some some sleep, just came back from holding a live tutorial on the FH Salzburg. Exhausting, but fun!

There’s quite a bit I have planned for in 2010. First and foremost I’ll get busy on some new AEtuts+ video tutorials introducing Nuke to the After Effectors among you all and something I have in mind for quite a while now, working title: “The Art and Science of Rotoscoping”. (Everything’s “art” and “science” in visual effects, if you read the books.)

There’s a new series for flickr that I have in mind by the name of “Austrian Details”. There are so many things I encounter that are so typically Austrian in some way and that people from other places probably wonder about when they see it. When it launches I’ll tell you here.

I’ll also be holding Tutorials on the Salzburg University of Applies Sciences again, this year with a main focus on compositing, color grading and VFX.

In May the fmx/10 in Stuttgart will be held again and yours truly is looking forward to cover the whole event on this blog like the years before for those of you who can’t attend.

So I’m getting all educational it seems. And creative. I’ll try to post somewhere something creative I did every week. Since I’m an aggressively creative person that shouldn’t pose any problems to me.

Life’s incredible again! Stay productive and wise! Any single ladies out there, btw?

1. Locate your User directory of After Effects:
   • C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\After Effects\8.0
2. Now delete your preferences and workspaces. I don’t know what files exactly you have to delete, but be aware that your saved templates, workspaces and other user files will be reset. I know this hurts, but you want AE running again, don’t ya?
   • Adobe After Effects 8.0 Prefs.txt
   • Adobe After Effects 8.0 Shortcuts.txt
   • AfterFX8.ini
   • Workspaces.xml

That’s it. On the next start-up After Effects will create these files again with default settings. Good Luck!

EDIT: Of course I couldn’t finish this lengthy post in one lunch break so I posted it the next morning.

As some of you already know I am working as an intern at rise visual effects here in Berlin and spend my days working with Nuke, Combustion as well as Avid, the latter two being a major pain in my brains. Rise is currently doing the VFX for quite a number of international projects, putting me in the position to participate on some of them with minor shots. I keyed and comped ² for the German TV movie Die Patin some dull green screen shots, helped out with a replacement of an Oslo tram sign for the Norwegian movie Appelsinpiken as well as designed a fake UI for a screen replacement in the same movie. And after messing around with Avid on the company’s demo reel for two and a half weeks I was assigned to one shot for the upcoming Warner Bros movie Ninja Assassin.

The shot is equivalent to the movie’s title: Two fighters, one ninja and the protagonist (probably Rain, but it is hard to tell because of all the action going on) stand on wet asphalt in the middle of a street, their blades crossed. A car sends both of them flying into the air, Rain lands in front of the camera on a dark stunt patch whose fabric matches the tarmac not really perfect. And both stunt men are rigged with fat wires for their stunt, the camera panning along.

This shot from scene 98 is 136 frames long and one hell of a wire removal. Everything is moving and shifting, the overall lightness changes all the time depending on the headlights of the other cars and the wires move wildly behind and in front of the flying men. Seen from the compositor’s point of view: Hell. At least close to it.

On Friday I really started out with Combustion and felt quite lost at first. My co-worker Sascha introduced me to the Painting tool and I started painting like crazy and was certain to have that shot finished by Wednesday. On Monday I looked at it again and it just was awful. Jittering, double images, offsets and all the things you don’t want to see when you expect to see the background instead of the wire.

I couldn’t find a quick tutorial or at least a guideline on the web on how to start out with that kind of shots so I learned by trial and error. For any of you interested in a short guideline on how to pull off wire removals here’s what I suggest, thanks to Florian, Sascha and Jonathan for helping me find my way through to this. Hence I am not allowed to post any stills from the shot I will deal here only with basic concepts.

How to remove the wires

The Topmost Layer – Foreground

Take out your scissors, it’s roto time! The first step is nearly always to rotoscope the wires tightly but not too tight, you want to add about 3 or 5 pixels surplus on each side, in case you need to feather your mask later on. And probably you will. Pay special attention to the parts where the wire disappears behind the actors and make this really perfect that you won’t have to deal with partial removals in that areas later on.

The Bottommost Layer – Solids

If your shot is like mine and provides you with a couple of frames where the wires are shot against a (more or less) uniform solid (such as the sky) you can put a layer with the original footage below the layer with the cut out wires. Now nudge the original so that the solid color will look through where the holes of your wires are. It is advisable to do this for each wire separately so you don’t have to make any compromises. Also don’t compromise with the areas where you have background features because we will make a clean plate of those parts.

In the Middle – Clean Plates

For any background that has features you will need to draw a clean plate from your original material now. That means to use the clone stamp (or it’s equivalent, depending on your tool of choice) and to paint out any of the actors and wires for one frame. Attention: This is no photograph where it doesn’t matter what portion of the background you use to paint out a wire! Hence it is an animation you have to paint exactly the obscured background. You do this by setting your clone source to a frame later or earlier in your sequence when the part you want to paint over is not covered by any foreground elements. If the actors are moving quite a lot it should be done in no time, but usually you have to use half a dozen or more source frames to clone one. If the actors are very static and there is no way to get a clean view on the background behind them you have to fabricate some background yourself. Make sure it is always your background that’s showing then, otherwise the features will flicker.

Place this clean background under your rotoed layer and on top of your sky-nudge-layers after you cut out the sky from your clean plate as well.

If the camera is moving too (like in my case) then track your background clean plate to the camera movement. The combustion tracker works really well but is not perfect. So you might want to nudge your plate in position manually from time to time.

And here’s the tedious task: You need a clear plate of the background whenever it has changed. In my case the camera was moving wildly and while it still was the same background after 100 frames, it was seen from a slight different angle and very different lighting conditions so I had to account for those circumstances as well.

The Colors Change!

I was not very lucky with my shot and the brightness and color values kept changing all the time so even my clean plate and nudged background did not always match the foreground. The only way I saw fit was to have an animated color correction in every layer but the original one. So I raised and lowered gamma values somewhere far beyond the decimal place frame by frame until it looked right.

That’s it?

In fact: No. Until now I was only writing about the background. But what about wires in front of your actors? In my case one of them has wrapped the wire even around his torso so he could be lifted even higher in the shot.

If your actors aren’t moving much but the wire is, you should be fine by painting it out frame by frame but be very careful and alert about any changes of lighting and motion and do it like the folks at Disney: After every paint stroke view it in motion with the frames before and after. In fact it is possible to pull it off in Photoshop (you will love CS3 Extended for importing image sequences and being able to use the healing brush in case you can’t use or don’t want to use one of Combustion’s greatest features: tracking paint strokes over time to certain features).

If there’s a lot of action going on any most of it will be lost in motion blur it becomes a little easier for you, the same way it becomes harder when there’s not much motion in the picture and a constant wire removal in the same place to do. The only way to pull this off I see is to make a small clean plate of the area in question and employ a four-corner pin or warping or that kind of stuff on top of it. It will be a lot of nudging and fine-tuning but in the end it will be much smoother than fidgety paint strokes.

Quality Assurance

Just as you think you’re done, it gets ugly: To ensure the quality of your work crank up brightness and contrast of your viewer and view our work whether it really matches the background and prepare yourself mentally to be busy for another couple of hours. Some masks won’t fit all too well, some colors are a little off and some things you expected to be in the blacks aren’t that black at all.

Phew, that was more than I expected…!

But you said something about a….

Yes, I mentioned learning about “an inconvenient truth” in the beginning, right?
As of one hour ago I was positive to be finished by Friday with the whole shot, already having done a great deal of the work. Only some minor painting and corner pinning would’ve been necessary. Shortly before taking my lunch break Florian, my supervisor asked me to look into the scene’s references folder. “There are only five frames in it” I replied puzzled. “That’s right! Those are the frames that will be in the current edit. So render what you got with additional four frames before and after and you’re done on this!”.

Five frames. The five frames of the car hitting the two guys. That’s a little more than a fifth of a second! I was hoping to be done with the shot by Friday, still I don’t feel satisfied with the shot anymore.

The idea was quite simple: I wanted a gray or asphalt colored shirt with a white DMC logo on it because working in Maya on a DeLorean time machine for so long leaves its marks, especially on somebody who as is easy to manipulate as me.

If you try to find that shirt via Google you will spend a while until you end up at the DMC website where you can buy it for $18.95 plus $49.42 (ahhh!) international shipping fee. Seventy frickin’ bucks for a quite simple shirt is waaay too much! “I can make one myself for less!” I said to myself. And that’s how I started.

Yesterday I had a brief chat with my colleague Dansch Übleis who is famous not only for his Maya skills (especially workarounds and cheap time-saving fakes) but also for his hands-on creativity such as, but not limited to, printing t-shirts. Because I wasn’t eager for silk-screening and the hassle with it he suggested printing the logo onto a cheap ink-jet transparency, cutting out the shape with a paper knife, sticking it with tape on the shirt and filling it with Marabu brand window colors. “It’s as easy as that!” he said and I believed him.

Shortly after I was on my way to a shop of the Libro stationery chain to get my assets. Along with 20 floppy disks (don’t blame me — I just enjoy writing on my ancient ThinkPad from 1996), two DVDs, 1000 sheets of paper, a white ball pen and Final Fantasy XII I bought what I needed for my custom DMC logo shirt: A small can of Marabu fun&fancy window color (white) for 3.69 € and a pack of 20 sheets 3M ink-jet transparencies for 17.99 €.

At home I fired up Illustrator and quickly drew the shape of the DMC logo, accompanied by a line of type reading “De Lorean Motor Cars Ltd” and printed everything in gray onto one of the transparencies. Cutting out the shapes (especially the relatively small line of type) took me half an hour before I was ready. Before taping the stencil onto the shirt, an asphalt colored American Apparel 50/50 model, I applied a lot of paper-glue on the backside of the stencil so the thin bridges would stick to the fabric later that no color would spill where it shouldn’t. I applied plenty of the window color with a soft-foam form until the shirt was majorly soaked — I put it on the radiator so it could dry.

A couple of hours later the color had dried in and was anything but opaque nor white. I was a little disappointed about the outcome and pondered for a while how I could save the shirt. Luckily I still had a fresh can of white textile color so I decided to give it a try and stamped the new color over the pale window color with the foam-form again. This time it looked way better. Again I let it dry.

Another couple of hours later the textile color was opaque and dry and I was eager to see the result. I removed the tape from the stencil but it stuck to the shirt like crazy thanks to the thick color. I literally had to tear my transparency off the shirt which left my stencil’s filigree parts somewhat damaged; hence I won’t be able to reuse it if I ever want to. Bummer.

But apart from the slight off-centered orientation (I still have troubles aligning things with the naked eye since kindergarten) it looked really neat and much better than I had anticipated: No color bleeding, only silk-screen-like crisp edges and a thick and well-textured color. I don’t know if that’s the effect of the window-color base or not, the only thing I know is that I was happy making something myself and saving money with it too. In total the print (without the shirt) cost me as little as about two Euros — I spend more money on coffee everyday! I hope it will stay looking that good after the first washing because I cant iron it in.

I guess I will be trying out some more unique t-shirt prints soon. But at first I have to finish my work: Shading the DeLorean time machine in Maya photo-realistically. Maybe the next print will be a DeLorean too…

The worst part is having the textures and the Phong-shading look right. Somewhat. And also tough is getting the proper model setup, with physical calculation meshes and that stuff. And getting the VTF and VMT scripts right. Phew!

In fact it is total horror the first time. And it’s not much better the second time. The third time you know what mistakes you make. The fourth time you finally understand what’s really going on. The fifth time you get a hang of it. The sixth time you want to try something new. Then: proceed to the beginning of this paragraph.

Maya to Source

In case you are interested and have a good understanding of the German language, I suggest that you download my video tutorial on how to get a Maya model from Maya into the source engine within forty minutes — with installing all the necessary plugins too.

You can download the video (DivX, 52 megabytes) by clicking this link. Hope it helps you a little!

On Tuesday I paid Foto Mayrhofer another visit and did some bulk shopping in photo equipment: Lisa bought some photo paper for her project in staged photography, I got myself two Ilfosol S developer packs, a wire release for my dear Mamiya RB 67 and -most importantly and most urgently- a Manfrotto tripod. Model #055CLB to be precise. And, boy, it wasn’t cheap but a bulky medium format camera does need a good tripod.

And finally I was able to shoot long time exposures with the Mamiya which I always anticipated because of the lovely large format of 6 x 7 cm.

A guide to Mamiya RB 67 long time exposures

It wasn’t easy finding out about the T setting on the lens. Long time ago I learned that it stands for tempus and is another kind of the B, the (Flash)Bulb setting. I even remembered that instead of holding the trigger down, tempus requires the trigger on the wire release to be pushed once to open the shutter, and then again to close the shutter. Not so with the Mamiya RB 67. So I decided to write this short guide, mainly for myself before I forget about it again.

1. Change the independent mirror release knob on the lens with the wire release socket from the red letter • N to the orange letter • M.
2. Now set the shutter to the desired speed, in this case to T.
3. Remove the slide from the magazine
4. Push the trigger. Because the Mamiya RB 67 doesn’t have a Mirror Up button, you have to do it this way. The shutter will remain closed.
5. When you feel ready push the trigger on the cable release
6. Count the exposure time
7. When finished pull the shutter cocking lever to close the shutter and to cock the mirror spring again
8. Put the dark slide back in place
9. Wind the lever on the film magazine

Sometimes a scanned negative looks just like the one in the picture: Although there’s an area, like the snow, that should have a coherent tone, it’s sometimes darker and sometimes brighter – there’s even vignetting on the right side. In the darkroom this means to dodge and burn until you get away with it but this takes usually a lot of time. But in Photoshop everything’s a little easier.

1. So lets open the image we want to correct.
2. Now choose Layer > Duplicate Layer and hit Enter or just drag in the layers-panel the background layer onto the icon with the new sheet, the 2nd icon from the right.

   

3. Now with the focus on the new layer choose Filters > Noise > Dust & Scratches. Here you enter a very high value for radius and a 0 for tolerance. We want our motif to disappear completely so only a blurry gray with the incorrect levels remains. Then hit OK.

   

4. Now hit the shortcut Ctrl+I or go to Image > Adjustments > Invert to turn the blurry layer into a negative.
5. In the layers-panel keep the focus on the blurry layer and change its blending mode from Normalto Overlay.

   

6. That’s it – your image should have improved apparently. Notice the soft and realistic contrast in the picture.

How it works

The pixels of a layer set to Overlay change the layer(s) below in the following way: The RGB-value of pixels brighter than #7f7f7f (that’s exactly 50% gray) is added to the pixels of the layer(s) underneath, RGB-values darker than #7f7f7f are subtracted from the lower layers’ pixels.

Sounds a bit confusing but in our example it means that our blurry negative softly compensates the wrong tones in the original. A downside may be the resulting lower contrast, but usually that’s what we want to achieve in these cases.

Software used:

• 3D Studio MAX 6 (“3dsmax”)
• Brazil r/s V1.2.21 Plugin (“Brazil”)

Recommended Skills

• This tutorial is very basic and mainly for beginners starting with 3dsmax. So don’t worry.
• You should only know how to create new objects in 3dsmax and have Brazil properly installed, which shouldve been the toughest part however

The Goal

• Creating a realistic looking gold texture within 3dsmax.
• Gaining basic knowledge about the Material Editor and Brazil’s rendering settings
• Optimizing the rendering process

Let’s do it!

1. Start up 3dsmax and set the rendering engine to Brazil if it isn’t your default engine. If you already know how to do this you can continue with 7
2. Open the render settings clicking this icon on the upper left or hit F10.
3. Now scroll down to where one bar reads “Current Renderers” (“Renderer zuweisen”) and click it, so it expands. Scroll down until you can see the three assigned renderers for “Production”, “Material Editor” and “ActiveShade”. If all read “Default Scanline Renderer” you have to set the Production rendering to Brazil.
4. Assuming you’ve properly installed Brazil click on the dots next to “Production:” and highlight “Brazil r/s V1.2.21” in the pop-up selection box and hit OK.
5. Notice that now also the Material Editor’s renderer is set to Brazil, which is bad becase Brazil doesn’t support it. So we have to change it back to the “Default Scanline Renderer”.
6. Hit the yellow button depicting a closed lock just right of the “Material Editor”. The icon should now show turn grey and view an open lock – the renderer should change to “Default Scanline Renderer”. Check the picture below to see if you’ve done it the right way. Don’t mind the German descriptions.



7. Close the Render Settings by clicking on it’s X-button in the very upper right.
8. Now open the material editor via hitting M on your keyboard. If every slot reads “not supported” its rendering is set to Brazil. In that case continue at 1).



9. Click the “Standard” (1) button and select “Brazil Chrome” (2) and hit “OK” (3). Now we’ve got a pretty neat chrome material but not at all golden. Note that a reflecting metal doesn’t have a color itself, it rather filters the reflected environment in a characteristic way – so forget all of the “Gold Diffuse Textures” you found on the web. Gold only reflects the yellow and orange light of the spectrum.
10. Rename the material from “01 – Default” to “Gold” or similar.
11. Below, click the white rectangle right of “Filter” and a color-picker palette should pop-up. Select a warm yellow tone. I used the following settings: Red 255, Green 207, Blue 23. Click “Close”.



12. The “Glossy Reflection Control” section. First of all, what does it mean? Glossy reflection control determines how diffuse the reflection on the material is. It takes a lot longer but looks more realistic if turned on.



I rendered the above samples on a 2GHz Intel Pentium M with 1GB of RAM in highest quality with Global Illumination (GI) turned on. The little stopwatches indicate the rendering time in minutes.

For the gold-material I chose to keep the initial glossiness value of 80. If you want it blurrier, decrease it, if you want it crisper, increase it up to 100. In terms of rendering performance the glossiness value doesn’t really matter. Only if it is below 40 it slows everything down a little.

Also important for the rendering time is the sample rate. Initially it is set to 10 which guarantees a pretty smooth surface but takes quite long too. I chose a value of 4 this time, but it depends: If the golden object is very close to the camera, I would boost it up to 10 or even 13. If it was only in the background, a value of 2 or even 1 would be sufficient.

Below there are four enlarged examples of the cube’s reflection with different sampling rates of the glossy reflection control. Note that the value in the stopwatches indicates the time it took to render the whole image, not only the enlarged cutout. Glossiness Level was 50 in all four examples.



Please note: The graininess is also dependent on Brazil’s Image sampling rate and last but not least the Global Illumination Shade rate. For a detailed walkthrough see addendum A.
13. Still in the Material Editor scroll down to the group called “Highlight Parameters”. This is where we define what the highlight of our material looks like.
14. Click on the rectangle left of “Specular Col.” and pick the same warm yellow tone as above, maybe a little more yellow. I used the following settings: Red: 255, Blue: 236, Green: 23
15. Below there’s the value “80” next to “Level”. This will define how bright the highlight will be. I exaggerated it a bit and set it to 200, so the material will reflect a very bright light white instead of the orange we’ve defined for the specular color, just because it is so intense.
16. Now click the long gray button reading “none” right of “Glossiness”. The “Material/Map Browser” will pop up another time. Select “Speckles” (“Flecken”) and hit “OK”. Why so? I want the gold to look a little like car paint and with the speckles we simulate the encapsulated metal particles underneath a perfectly smooth surface.

The following settings kept me busy for days until they looked right, so you just have to trust me if you want it to look like my texture; or play around with the settings a little yourself.

17. Under the “Speckle Parameters” set the size from 0.1 to 2. Pretty big speckles you might think, but we aren’t finished yet.
18. Click the gray map button reading “None” next to “Color #2”.
19. Again the “Material/Map Browser” pops up where we select “Speckles” – again.
20. Here keep the size of 0.1 but change the color of “Color #2” by clicking on the white rectangle to open the color picker dialog box.
21. Here change the value of “Value” from 256 to 188, or enter 188 for Red, Green and Blue.

Now what did we do that for? We balanced the amount of the speckles so that it still looks natural. I played a long time with it so I know what I am talking about. To get a better understanding of what we just did save your work so far and try playing around with different gray tones for “Color #1” and “Color #2”.

>Important to understand is that in 3dsmax there are hierarchies in the material editor. In our case the base material is “Brazil Chrome”. On the first level below there is the fist “Speckles”-map for the glossiness of the “Brazil Chrome”-material. And even below, on sub-level two, there is the “Speckles”-map of “Color #2” of the “Speckles”-map for the glossiness of the “Brazil Chrome”-material. Sounds complicating, but once you are used to it it’s very practical because there is no limit in sub-levels.

If you want you can interlink thousands of maps into thousands of sub-layers.



To get up one hierarchy hit the “Go to parent” (“Gehe zu übergeordnetem Objekt”) button which can be found far right on the toolbar below the swatches (the spheres with the textures). The picture below describes the hierarchy a little.



22. Now hit the “Go to parent” button until it gets gray which means there is no more level above and see if your settings match those below:
23. 

24. That’s it! You only have to assign the material to an object in your scene. You do this by dragging and dropping it from the swatch in the Material Editor to the object.
25. Adjust the render settings (see addendum A!) and hit F9 to render.



Maybe your scene looks a little like mine on the picture to the left and now you wonder why everything is so dark and not really golden. Because, just as mentioned above, gold only looks like gold when there’s enough to reflect. And in a scene with just one spotlight there ain’t much. You can either build a huge scene around it or already have, or you can mock up a softbox-setup like in a photographer’s studio. I photographed a lot reflective objects and it is pretty hard to make it look like metal.

But especially when you need to render just a golden logo you don’t have the time to model a complete softbox setup. That’s why we create a nice reflection just for the gold material in five minutes or less.
26. In the “Top” viewport create a sphere or geosphere big enough that your scene including lights and cameras fits easily in. This will be our environment. Of course, you could do this in the “Environment” dialog, but then it wouldn’t be so easily controllable.



27. Now back to the Material Editor. Select a gray sphere from the swatches and rename it to “Environment”.
28. Click the rectangles next to “Diffuse” and “Specular” and make them both completely black by entering 0 in for “Value” in the color picker.
29. Also set the “Specular Level” and the “Glossiness” to 0, just to make sure.
30. But set the value for “Self Illumination” to 75. You can increase or decrease this value later, when you think the environmental reflection is too weak or too strong.
31. EDIT: Be sure to click the “2-Sided” tickbox unless your sphere will have no inside and hence will leave background and reflections black. Thanks for that, jintriag!
32. Now click the little grey square just right of “Diffuse” to open the “Map/Material Browser”. Now select “Gradient Ramp” (“Verlaufsart”) and hit “OK”.
33. Now you can see a smooth ramp from black to white. You can add a color by clicking somewhere into the gradient and a green key appears on the lower side. Double click the green key and the color picker pops up where you can set the color for the key’s position.

To delete a key click it and drag it left or right outside the gradient ramp. It will turn red and the mouse cursor will change to an upside down arrow with a trash bin. Release the mouse button and the key is deleted.

You can also click into the gradient and drag the mouse. This way allows you to pick up an value and drag it around inside the ramp.

It’s pretty easy so you won’t have to play around for long until you’ve figured out how it works.

34. When you feel familiar with it, try to make the gradient look like mine on the picture below:



35. Above, in the “Coordinates” section, make sure the “W” angle is set to 90 degrees, like in my picture. It’s pink for better conspicuity.



36. Great! Now apply your material to the big sphere in your scene, again by dragging the swatch onto the grid of the sphere in a viewport. But we only want to affect our reflection and nothing else.
37. Close the Material Editor by clicking on the X button in its very upper right.
38. Right click on the sphere in one of the viewports and select “Properties”. What pops up now may seem rather complicated but we only care about the tickboxes in the group “Rendering Control” (“Rendersteuerung”)
39. Untick every tickbox in the group “Rendering Control” except “Renderable” and “Visible to Reflection/Refraction”
40. Click OK – You’re done!
41. Click into your “Perspective” viewport and hit F9 to render your scene – now with proper reflections on your gold material.

Thank you very much!

Addendum A

We will only focus on the adjustments that matter for the output quality of the gold material.

1. Hit F10 to open the “Render Scene” dialog box
2. Click on the tab “Renderer”
3. Now you can see a long list of sections with tags such as “Brazil: General Options”, “Brazil: Render Pass Control”, “Brazil: Image Sampling” and so forth.
4. Click on the Tag “Brazil: Image Sampling” to expand that section. Most important for us are the “Min Samples” and the “Max Samples” values.

These values define how many samples per pixel are calculated during rendering. If it is below 0 then only a fraction will be rendered which results in a very rough but faster output. The min value set the minimum of samples per pixels; the max value defines the maximum of computed samples, e.g. for hard contrasts or edges.

There are three presets already set in Brazil, and accessible via the Buttons “P1”, “P2” and “P3”. The worst image quality offers “P1” with the fastest rendering. The line “Min [-8 x -8] Max [1 x 1]” tells that one rendering sample serves 8 pixels, utmost 1 pixel.

For a better looking preview hit “P2”. Beware that although it looks pretty nice the “Min Samples” value is below 1 and results, especially in animations, in flickering details.

“P3” offers with “Min [2 x 2] Max [4 x 4]” production quality which we want to achieve, but also takes very long to render.

Why more than one sample per pixel I hear you asking. The answer is simple: Quality. The more samples you got for a pixel the closer you can estimate its color. Edges will be very pixelated and either one color, or the other. This is also called “aliasing”. The more samples per pixels you got, the better the renderer can choose in order to make edges smoother (=”Anti-aliasing” or “oversampling”). For a detailed description of anti-aliasing visit this Wikipedia site.

Of course, you can change the min/max values after selecting a preset to your needs. Especially when you’re rendering high quality stills, you might even boost the “P3” settings up to Min [4 x 4] Max [8 x 8].

5. Click “P3” and close the “Brazil: Image Sampling” section via clicking on its label again.
6. Scroll to the section labeled “Brazil: Luma Server” and expand it, yes, by clicking on its label.

In this section everything concerning lighting is controlled, from direct to indirect lighting, caustics, even global illumination (GI) and sub-surface scattering. Don’t worry, we are only interested in a very view settings.<

7. Enable the indirect illumination by ticking the box “Enable” just under “Indirect Illumination”.

Indirect Illumination adds a great deal to a scene’s realism. It simulates the light not only emitted from direct scene lights but also the bounced light from other objects.

Indirect Illumination example: A spotlight on a red wall in a room would result in the whole room being lit by the bounced soft red light from the wall. Without GI you would only see the spotlight on the wall, the other side of the room would be completely unlit. More on Global Illumination on this Wikipedia site.

Of course, indirect illumination slows down the whole rendering, but you can define just like with the Image Sampling Rate how you like to sample the GI.

8. In the group “Global Illumination” you can set the min/max sampling rates for the indirect illumination only. For a fast preview the values “min -4” and “max 0” are okay, but you can expect a little splotchy results, which look like a very compressed JPEG. For a better preview or even production I’d say staying below 0 saves you time, I suggest “min -2” and “max 0”. Everything above 0 is pure luxury but looks stunning.

There’s also a tickbox for locking the sampling rate to the image sampling rate, which is quite practical for previews.

Before rendering your final, you should test a lot the performance with a very small resolution. Don’t waste a lot of time rendering details, nobody will see.

I hope this tutorial was useful to you. If you have anything to add or to comment on just do it – write me a reply below!