Gaffer: Basic Lookdev with Cycles [3/8] (Patreon)

Gaffer's default renderer is the well-known Cycles render engine, of Blender fame. To get started rendering our basic scene, first click the dropdown on the top left and pick Cycles. This will start a live Cycles render. We don't have any lights or materials yet, so let's add some.

Add a cyclesQuadLight, connect it to our MergeScenes node, and use the Viewport tools to position and resize it.

Now, materials! In the Graph Editor, add three cyclesPrincipledBsdf nodes. This is the Cycles "uber-shader," similar to Arnold's aiStandardSurface. Change their names to mat_cube, mat_sphere, and mat_plane.

Select each material in the Graph Editor and change the Base Color using the Node Editor. I used red on the cube, blue on the sphere and white on the plane. For a little extra spice, change the Metallic value on the plane to 1 and the Roughness to 0.1.

Next, add three ShaderAssignment nodes and connect the output of each material to the left input ports. Focus the last node in the tree so we're seeing everything in the viewport.

To assign the materials to our scene geometry, simply drag and drop a mesh from the Viewer onto the appropriate ShaderAssignment node. You can also drag and drop from the Hierarchy View.

Last but not least, to make sure that we're seeing the final quality render, set Shading and Lighting to Full by clicking the options button next to the renderer select dropdown:

The scene is too dark, so let's increase the light Intensity. Simply select the light and change the Intensity using the convenient Inspector that pops up on the right.

Congrats! We created a simple scene from scratch in Gaffer and learned a lot of important basic concepts.

Coming up in this tutorial series, we'll import USD geometry from disk, set up an advanced scene with textures, displacement, curves and multiple lights, and learn about cameras, render settings, saving images to disk, numeric bookmarks and using an image catalogue. 

Let's get get started by importing a chess set USD file in Part 4!