Hello and welcome to this video tutorial on rendering realistic, stylish headphones in Blender Cycles!
In this tutorial you will be shown how to take a plain, grey model and turn it into a complete, stylish and realistic render using Blender 2.6 and the Cycles render engine.
What you’ll learn:
Jonathan Williamson will take your through the lighting, rendering and compositing for the final result, including: how to set up all of the material shaders for metal, plastic, rubber and the soft ear cushions, how to use node groups to make easily re-usable shaders, and how to use several different lights to get excellent illumination and tone in your image. Also, you will learn how to separate the objects into two different render layers for extra control and then combine them back together in the node Compositor; while making some color adjustments as well.
You are a master and gentleman….. thank you for all the work you put into this site….I have signed up for 3 months. Thank you for sharing!
Thanks Jonathan, looks like fun!!
No free source file, or I don’t see it?
It’s there if you’re a Citizen, just click “Download Source Files”
Is that a recent model or one from previous bundle? Looks familiar. Should look nice in a physics based renderer.
It’s an new version of my old exclusive tutorial on modeling the same headphones. I remodeled it though to be far more accurate and a lot higher quality
You do really well, but you have to start concentrating on the jaggies caused during rendering. I’ve noticed this in your renders, which is just not professional. I’d get fired for producing a product render like that. I’m not sure if this is a cycles thing or what, but other than that, your materials look nice.
I failed to do this in the actual tutorial tutorial but if you check the render on my Dribbble page the aliasing is much better: http://dribbble.com/carter2422
Cycles does not currently have much in the way of anti aliasing controls but it’s in development. For the Dribbble version I rendered at twice the size and then scaled down.
Cheers,
Jonathan
Since the majority of your jaggies occur after the sharpen filter, which is when it usually happens, you should mask out the those skinny metal pieces so that they don’t receive the full sharpen. This will help your render look as good as it should.
Awesome tutorial, as always!!
Very nice
Thank you very much Jonathan, nice tutorial!!
Jonathan, you have the best job in the world, and you deserve it Thank you.
Wonderful , i love the way you go further , just little bit more , here there etc , fantastic work ! well my question is that your blender GUI that yellow gray theme , will it be like this now on ?
nice looking, i gonna
watch diss right now.
thank you
Thanks for the tutorial, and here is the pronunciation.
Pronunciation : “Voronoi” as “Vo – ro – noi” with a short “o” sound, like the “o” in “or”, for the first two syllables. The third syllable is pronounced like the “noi” as in “noise”. The stress is on the third syllable.
from http://www.personal.kent.edu/~rmuhamma/Compgeometry/MyCG/CG-Applets/VoroDiagram/vorocli.htm
Look I love cycles I really do, truly I do but it is slow for for a lot of my work and I hope cycles doesn’t become an obsession here tutorial wise. Great Tut but I’m getting scared here that this is all I’m going to see for a while. Sorry to have my first downer comment here
. I feel bad now
Based on what I was reading about various market shares, Invidia is only present in about 1/3rd of computers, and about 2/3rds are AMD or Intel, the most being Intel(40%). Of course not all of those are guaranteed to work or not work with GPU based by Co., but I could easily see about 1/2 of all computers in use being incapable of GPU rendering, as is. Who knows if that % is true, or holds true for the Blender using Sample therein, but it seems likely. Maybe Blender will get us sorted before too much longer and we can celebrate too.
More and more, CPU based rendering is becoming obsolete. CPU’s are not made for rendering and you will absolutely get more bang for your buck out of a GPU versus a CPU. I think this may have been the first comment I have ever read about GPU rendering slowing anybody down, your CPU must be quite the chip! John Smith, I’m not sure what you are getting at..OpenCL?
-Ben
P.S. Thank you for the info Jonathan, helpful as always.
We would be as happy as everyone else if we had GPU rendering on our machines. We do not however. Open CL may NEVER work for many older video cards since it may take longer to program it than it takes for current machines to wear out. Manufacturers have been using surpluses of old cards in NEW machines because they work fine for most things.(OpenCL 1.0, ect.) Laptop users like me are forced to buy new machines with specific cards to get the speed that makes Cycles fun and awesome. My machine probably has as much as two years of life left. It doesn’t feel fair at all to us- kinda like being born a Serf in the Blender Kingdom.lol Manga was suggesting that it may be too early for full conversion in instruction, and I was speculating on the actual number of people who are in the same situation, regardless of how many are making themselves heard via comments and such. Learning Cycles is temporarily only academic at this point for a number of us since it is currently too slow for practical use on our machines. And every time we speak up, someone like yourself jumps on us with a typical “Don’t rain on my parade!” which makes us more unlikely to speak up. Do you understand now? Actually, if we really are only a very small minority, I would fully support a full switchover to Cycles. A survey might be informative. Sorry to use so much space but your display of, uh, incomprehension and insensitivity, provoked it. Peace —P.S And as a matter of fact I can’t wait to watch this tutorial because it looks like it may be just what I was looking for to help solidify my Cycles understanding so I still appreciate it very much anyway Blender Cookie! It’ll come in handy one day! lol Thanks for the great tuts guys!
Well said John. I too am running a machine with an AMD Graphics Card, ATI Mobility Radion HD 5850. And it is completely useless in regard to cycles. In many cases you will get more power from an AMD chip than a Nividia chip (price wise). I would like to see Voodoc trying to render with their CPU because the had an AMD chip, It is quite frustrating. I have an 8 core i7 in my machine so it isn’t too bad, but I would prefer to use my GPU.
1: so I don’t put as much strain on my CPU.
2: because my GPU is quite powerful and I want to be able to use the power that I paid for.
The good news is that OpenCL support is currently in production. Only clay renders are supported at this point in time. But having a reasonably new AMD card and some patience will mean that you can use your GPU to render sometime in the (hopefully) near future.
The alternative is going out and buying a Nividia card.
i had to come back and say, killer lesson
from Beginning to End. Thank you for posting
diss.
Great tutorial, Jonathan! Will you provide a modeling tutorial on how to create this headphone model in blender as well?:-)
Just a tip: Instead of switching out of rendered view and back to update the rendered scene, just click the “pause rendering” button twice and it will update your scene.
Wow… nice render *-*
Awesome! Good to see more Cycles tutorials!
Hi, this is slightly off topic but I can’t find anywhere else to email Mr. Williamson. Mr. Williamson, I heard on a internet radio interview that you were soon going to do a workshop on being able to model anything in Blender. Can you give an update on when this will happen?
Hi Blade,
I am still working on the workshop, my hope is to unveil it within the next month or two
-Jonathan
Jonathan Williamson, I have always loved your talent with blender. I often times get artist block when using blender but these tutorials give me something fun and cool to do in blender.
Thank you so much! I hope to see some of your renderings in the gallery soon
-jonathan
Nice one Jonathan! Some nice tips in here. That Mid Light really made all the difference in the world! It’s so very easy to get distracted in the technicalities while trying to relearn materials and forget how important good lighting is. Thanks for giving me a better idea of how to use the Fresnel node more effectively and, of course, I really appreciate any tips on using procedurals successfully and efficiently. Thanks Jonathan!
It really is amazing what a little extra lighting can do to a scene. I’m thrilled you found it helpful!
-Jonathan
Hey Jonathan, did you mean this video? That completely changed my view on lights. He uses C4D, but all concepts can be used in blender.
http://vimeo.com/38180924
That’s the one! Excellent video, well worth watching.
-Jonathan
Thanks for the link!
I wish more single video tutorials included the starting blend file as well, so I can follow along more easily from the beginning. Thanks!
Love this tutorial… but when you got into layers and render layers, and unlinking…. I got lost. That part seemed rush, all else.. perfect!
Yes, this part of me is difficult, but thanks to the explanation of Jonathan I’m starting to understand it.
“Select layer to render, and a scene tab, select which ones to see.” explanation that truly helped me. Thanks for that.
Hi I’m running Blender 2.62 (32 bit) and I get a load error, and crash, when I try to load your headphones blend file. Other files (with cycles) run OK. Sorry if I am being a bit thick. Can anyone help?
this is awesome. just what I needed, more insight to cycles. thanks
for some reason the tutorial doesn’t go forward than 12:02. It just stops there.
I have Snow Leopard with Xcode installed. I can enable OpenCL from computing devices in user preferences. I can choose my Radeon graphics card and get about double speed depending on complexity of scene. After doing this and opening the headphones doc I get that unsupported Cuda version message.
This tutorial encouraged me to re-do an old model in cycles. It turned out pretty good! Thanks!
http://jarv69.deviantart.com/art/Blendex-HD666-Headphones-293296662
Nice! Glad you liked it
-Jonathan
Hi Jonathan,
Great tutorial. Nice material settings. You can recording the display when cycles working? WOW powerfull PC. I have a litte tip for you.
cycles you do not restart if you deselektierst lights. Selektiere mesh irrgendein – press ctrl edit for that and just press ctrl again to leave it. Cycles will automaticly update your setting.
greeting neubi3d
a way to reset your render in cycles view port render (not actual render)is to quickly move any object in your scene and it should reset, I found(also if you cancel the grab). otherwise
thanks i needed the light setup information and basic node information.
fantastic render nice model subject
Hi!
Thanks for your great tutorials!
Does somebody know, why the Viewport “rendered” still have black pixels?
In this tutorial the sample looks much more better without this black pixels.
Ok, here it is. A question:
The scene is simple. Two objects, one is in front of another lit by hdri and one emmission source. I make two render layers with each object in them and pass apart the direct, indirect and color for diffuse and glossy.
Render that all out. And there’s no alpha channel in the passes. It is in the beauty pass, but not in the passes! But there’s an alpha channel separated in the render node.
Furthermore, when i render out into exr and then load it back into input node for compositing. It doesn’t have the alpha channel even in the separated pass, only in the beauty one.
You didn’t fall into that in tutor, cause you used the beaty pass only.
So how do i get alpha in passes?
Transparency is on, of course
so…I have a really dumb question. After composting everything, how is the final composite exported? I have watched many tutorials and none cover this simple step, nor have I been able to figure it out on my own. When I render after composting, it only outputs the scene render, without the composting info. I have it outputted to the composite node.
any tips would be appreciated
Hi Eric,
Once you have added all your composite nodes, you can see the final result via the UV/Image Editor while viewing the “Render Result” image. This always shows the result of your render and if your RenderLayer goes through compositing nodes and is attached to the Output node then it will show that rendered image with the compositing applied. From here you can simply press F3 to save or go to Image > Save Image As.
I hope that helps!
-Jonathan
Hi Jonathan, you rock so much with your splendid tutorials. Thank you for many gr8 tips! I think cycles is owesome engin, and I love the compositing 2.5 blender capability. Yet, I have a question. I am used to light my scene first on a blank clay-render before I start to put materials. Have no idea how to do that in blender easily. Can u give me a tip? thanx
Yep, just create a new material and leave it at the default settings.
-Alex
Hi there, thanks for the support! I think some of these tutorials ought to help you get started with lighting in Cycles: http://cgcookie.com/blender?s=intro%20cycles
in the view port mine doesn’t have render in it.
file:///C:/Users/ShaggybOY007/Desktop/help.PNG
in the view port mine doesn’t have render in it. please answer
file:///C:/Users/ShaggybOY007/Desktop/help.PNG
Hi Shawn,
You’ll need to upload your help.PNG image to the web so I can see it. Currently you’re pointing to your local hard drive, which I don’t have access to. I suggest using http://pasteall.org/pic and then replying to this comment with the link to the image.