Abstract Distortions in Octane and Cinema 4D

hey everybody what's up it's david aryev here for an excellent tutorial for mograph.com using cinema 4d and octane render today we're going to be creating abstract distortions and by that i mean placing spheres in front of the camera to create chromatic aberration as well as using tauruses with mirror surfaces to bend the fabric of space and time trippy brawl all right let's do this [Music] so here's some different examples of some looks we're going to be creating today some of these are reminiscent of imagery from interstellar with this warping of space and star maps in the background and others have a more swirly magic feel going on so hopefully you're seeing the wide range of looks we can get with this technique because to me this feels more like a robotic digital eyeball than the previous examples which felt more magical or ethereal i'd also like to give a quick shout out to beeple who doesn't need much of an introduction but i was working with him on some concert visuals recently and several of the project files he passed to me had these techniques going on so this is partly where i learned how to do some of this stuff now the other person i'd like to give a shout out to is my buddy mitch myers who released this planet pack a couple years ago and inside there's a project file called gargantua that looks like a black hole from interstellar and so this was a really good base for me to expand upon and try a bunch of different variations so thanks to both of these dudes you guys are awesome so to kick this off i've got this old scene that i made using the kit bash 3d industrial pack and i'm just going to use this to demo a very simple initial concept so if i take a sphere and drop this underneath my camera holding down shift i can then reset the psr and come over here to the coordinate and push it back on the z until we can see our sphere and let's come over to object here and up to segments and now i'm just going to drop in a new specular material and i'll take this material and drop it on the sphere and now if i jump into this material and go to our index here and drop this down close to one we'll start distorting the scene through the sphere then once we go into this dispersion tab we can up this dispersion coefficient by just a little bit and we'll start to get chromatic aberration especially around the outside of the sphere now we can also bake this down by hitting c and then play with squishing the sphere down on the z-axis until it's more of a disc so if we come to a side angle here i'll just duplicate this so we can move around this is what we're doing we're making more of a lens shape by squishing this down so i'll come back to my camera here and now we could also scale this up and out a little bit so that we're not seeing the edges of the sphere at this point we could go back to our dispersion coefficient and boost this even more and now we're really going to see some colors start to bleed into the edges the other option here is that we could actually scale this outwards so it's more of this kind of a shape that we're looking through and then we'll have to push it back because now we're inside the sphere so now we're getting much more intense curvature let's try dropping this index down lower to like 1.01 so now that we've stretched this out we're getting some very intense effects let's take our dispersion way back down so i'll let this refine for a second so this is probably way more exaggerated than what i would go with in the end but i want you to be able to see the effect here so this kind of technique could be used for some in-camera chromatic aberration as well as some unique distortion looks within any scene you want and now if we turn off this sphere in the viewport we can navigate around and find a different perspective let's try a little bit less extreme by squishing the sphere back down a bit and then bringing it closer to camera and let's squish it down even more and then take the index up and this is obviously pushing it too far as well but this is a great way to get some very custom distortion looks and imagine what this looks like as we're animating along when it's more of a flattened disc like this we get this stretching and chromatic distortion much more on the edges so that's a pretty cool look too here's another shot that i'm really liking and if you imagine this animated it could be some kind of weird creature vision whether it's a robot or some other kind of character with vision that's very different from humans and this isn't just the kind of stuff you can get with after effects optics compensation and some chromatic aberration in there because this is a more realistic simulation of what light does when it bends through a lens element all right so now we're going to take what we just learned and apply it to this more abstract space imagery we're going to start by recreating this look here okay so let's start with our space backdrop i'm just going to drop in an hdri environment right here and come in here and find this texture so actually just before i do this let's look here for star map and it used to be that you could come in here into google images and choose a size larger than some specific file size like 8k or 16k but unfortunately you can't do that anymore super annoying so weirdly a good place to do that now is being image search and if we come in here into bing image trending and we type in milky way galaxy and then come down here to image size and let's say at least 8 000 pixels by let's try 2000 pixels now we're getting some cool results so this one's pretty sweet and you can see this gives you all the resolution you'd really need to punch in and have this wrap all the way around your scene so really for flexibility you want above a 4k image and preferably an 8 or even 16k image and if we scroll down here we've got another one at 9600 by 4800 that's pretty cool looking quite a bit of resolution too but the image that i use the very most is not here so actually i need to type in star map and if we come over here it's a little bit faint but it's this 8k image here and this is from nasa and you can see this has tons of resolution and sharpness so it's a really versatile image now back when google images actually worked properly i found a star map that was 16k that same image so this one's got crazy good resolution and then i went and took this version and made it seamless so that we don't have to worry about tiling as much and i also gave it a cyan tint because that gives us a bit more flexibility with the color we can hue shift or choose to desaturate so it's just a bit easier working this way so i'll provide you the link to this in the description so now i'm going to just jump into this image texture here and load in my hdri scroll down to star map blue seamless okay and it comes in looking like this let's put an octane camera tag on here and turn on the camera imager and bring down the gamma a bit and right now i'm on about a 45 mil lens which is fine we could widen out if we want to but instead of widening out i'm actually going to scale this texture down so if we jump into our image texture here and hit uv transform i can just take this scale down and now as we're looking around the texture is tiling and repeating but we're not really noticing it as much if i brought in the original here and let's boost the exposure so you can see this and i rotate around you'll notice these seams and we've got a lot of this weird distortion towards the edges that i painted out so let's go back and i think this is a bit too cyan and saturated so we can do is we can come down here to plug-ins c40 octane and put in a color correction and then let's just take the saturation down a little bit and we can shift the hue a little more towards blue and we can even play with taking out even more saturation we can also boost the brightness if we want these stars to pop out a bit more and then again tweak with the gamma so we could have a look like this with very bright stars and more contrasty that's actually probably way too extreme and then we could scale this down even further so that's kind of a neat look right there a little bit more contrasty but i actually think i liked it a bit better with lower gamma and less brightness maybe 1.5 so that's looking pretty nice all right so now that we've got our star background all set up let's drop in something that's going to be our emissive object so again let's just start with a sphere this whole tutorial is just spheres and toruses and let's choose icosahedron so that we get more of an even distribution to the polygons versus before when we have standard it's pinching towards the top so icosahedron and then let's up the segments something like 100 for starters and here i'm just going to drop in a displacer so let's hold down shift and add our displacer and let's pause our live viewer here so we can see what's going on and now let's come down and add a noise here and let's go back to this mode so we can see what's going on obviously need way more segments let's just crank this all the way to a thousand and let's try a different noise type like luca could work so that's way too small so let's crank the global scale let's try hama that could work that's kind of cool but let's keep going um i think i was having success with stupel before so maybe let's try a smaller scale here so that looks pretty cool to me i'm just looking for some kind of abstract texture and now we want this to be animating so let's take our animation speed up here and if we right click and say animate then we can see how fast this is going looks like it's going way too fast so let's try something like 0.25 so that's more like it and if we play back here we'll see that it's moving the viewport's pretty slow because we've got so many segments but that's all right now let's unpause our render and let's drop in a blackbody emission material so just regular octane diffuse material drop it onto the sphere and then let's come into our node editor here and we don't need any diffuse so let's turn that down to black and come to a mission and drop in a black body emission now let's add some post effects so we can actually see some kind of glow going on let's add a bit of bloom here and let's bring up the cut off a little bit and this is actually too intense probably on the bloom let's try surface brightness so that gives us a bit more bloom and then we can reduce this overall amount okay so how do we make this more interesting right now we've just got a white blob and that's no good so really we want a way to limit where this blackbody mission is happening so it's not over the whole sphere and we're actually seeing the details in our object here so let's come down and drop in a dirt node and then we'll put that into the texture slot and if we right-click in solo we can see what's going on we're not really seeing much in the way of the dirt texture so let's ramp this up to 10 and then play around with some of these settings so let's take the radius up there we go and let's take this blackbody emission down a lot so that could be cool we could also invert the normal and get something like that and if we crank our details past one we'll start to see something happening that's kind of crunching it in a bit maybe our noise and our displacer needs some more octaves let's boost this up to 15 or so there we go now we're seeing a lot more detail now we could also take this dirt texture and pipe it into the opacity here and now we're seeing through it so this just knocks out all the black and now we've got more of a cloudy look and in this case maybe we want to take our object here and boost the height of our displacement up so we get more kind of spikes and more of a crazy look here i think we can improve the color by adding in a gaussian spectrum to the distribution and then by taking the wavelength down and the width down so the width is basically the saturation when we're all the way out here it's going to be desaturated and when we come down here it's going to be much more saturated so that's getting us some much more intense colors and then if we come into our camera imager here we can just boost the saturate to white slider and get some white in these hotter areas we could also mess with the dirt radius if we bring this down we get even more detail okay so this is our first element maybe we make another one and scale it down so we're basically creating spheres within spheres here and on this inner shell we can change the type of displacement to some kind of different noise let's try electric that's kind of neat and let's duplicate our material here and put another copy in there and then let's reload our scene because it kind of went away there we go and now we can modify this material without affecting the other one so let's jump into our mission here and let's actually go back to our node editor get active material and then in our dirt node here we can maybe take down the radius to five to beef it up a bit and maybe take our details back down to three and here in our displacer maybe we boost this out even more let's try 30. okay so these two elements together look like this we could even maybe colorize this one a bit differently let's go back to our active material and just change the wavelength of our gaussian spectrum here so maybe this one's a bit more greenish and we could even scale it up a bit all right and let's create one last central element let's turn all these off duplicate one of these guys and let's scale this down even more and let's remember to duplicate our material here so let's duplicate this out one more time and replace it and come back to our node editor and make sure to hit get active material so we know for a fact that we're on this one and in this case rather than the dirt node driving the opacity in the emission let's delete this and let's use a different node this time let's use a falloff this is basically a fresnel and if we pipe this into the texture slot here let's reload so we can see what's happening there we go so now we're seeing it on the edges of the object here let's boost the power okay and now we just want to pipe this into the opacity as well and now we've got another material that's on the edges and is still emissive but not the same as the dirt material we can also mess with the skew factor here if we want to see more or less of this so that kind of makes it fade away a bit so when we combine all these things we're kind of getting a giant mess i think this is actually a little bit too detailed and before i had something a bit nicer going on so let's remember to shift the hue of this as well so we get something a bit unique so now it feels a little bit better there's still too much detail so maybe we can actually take these displacers here uh these two let's let's name this this is our outer sphere outer shell and this is our middle and this is our inner all right so with the displacer let's go here into shading and maybe we do take down our octaves back down to 10. let's do the same with this one another thing we could do to make this less overwhelming in terms of the detail is maybe take the outer layer here and go to our active material and then take our dirt and we could try boosting the radius even more so that just kind of erodes it a bit and feels a little bit nicer let's try the same thing with the middle shell get active material go to our dirt let's boost this to 15. maybe that's too far let's try 12. okay cool and then with this inner shell maybe let's try to boost the displacement height even more so it feels a little bit more like the energy is getting sucked in the middle here but all this is subject to change until we get it inside of our glass spheres and mirror toruses this doesn't look that cool until it gets distorted and reflected all right so let's drop in a sphere and let's add a bunch more segments and we'll just scale it up and hit two and right click to widen out the camera lens so give ourselves some more room okay now let's add a specular material and drop that on the sphere and if you remember from earlier we want to take the index down to something like 1.01 or 1.02 you can start to see this stretching happening and now let's see what happens when we add in our dispersion just a little bit so we're already getting these cool rainbow streaks now we can also make this sphere editable and maybe squash it down see what happens and bring it forward in front of our object here and maybe let's scale this up even more and widen out even more and now let's raise our index some more so now we're getting some cool folding of space and you can see the weird properties that happen when we start squashing and stretching the sphere right now we've got this kind of effect going on we can bring this thing closer to the camera or further away so we get different effects by doing that you can see with a higher index we get swirls around the outside here so i'm kind of digging that vibe right there now again with the dispersion let's add a bit more so we get even more intense rainbow streaks and we could probably boost our background that's too much so something like that is bringing this out a bit more okay so this is our first lens element and now let's drop in a taurus object and let's set this to z plus and bring this out front expand this a bit and then we'll add in a bunch more ring segments so it smooths out and let's drop in a glossy material let's take the diffuse down to black and then our index all the way down to one so we've got a perfect mirror reflection and then we'll drop this on the torus and scale up our taurus here and now you should see we're getting these interesting distortions and rings in space now let's just duplicate this torus and scoot it back and maybe let's scale it down here and bring it in front of our lens element so now we're getting some cool secondary rings and let's group these shells here so that we can play with scaling this up and down and we'll just call this displacers let's try one more lens element here let's pull this in front and maybe we'll stretch this one out rather than flattening it and now we're getting some pretty crazy looking stuff let's widen out our lens again and then we can go into our camera imager here i'd like to change the color and add in a custom lut let's try out vision x here in the osiris pack it's a little bit too flat let's try vision six so that's just saturating things a bit more and separating the colors maybe let's try vision four so that's kind of neat maybe a half strength i'm going to try raising the gamma to just get a bit more detail and then maybe we'll add in some highlight compressions so we reel in those highlights towards the center a bit more and again this is just a process of experimentation we get vastly different looks depending on the lens elements we use and these tauruses we can also fly the camera in closer or further to get very different looks now i feel like this one is a little bit offset and feels a little asymmetric which i'm not liking as much so let's go into this inner shell and just change the height of this displacer maybe down to 20 and see what happens if we blow it way out of proportion like this we get something pretty cool too and we could try a different noise type this is feeling a little bit more symmetrical to me so i like that let's see what happens if we change this color here get active material and we can mess around with the wavelength and instead of a gaussian spectrum we could also just pipe in an actual rgb spectrum here and this gives us a bit more color to play with we could go for something like a deep purple a little bit less saturated or maybe a magenta but i think i'm digging this look here let's take down the saturation a bit more so we're getting a bit more white in here towards the brightest areas now we could also play with the overall color balance here with the white point so if we wanted to take it away from cyan overall we could dial in a bit of cyan and if we go too far this is going to turn really red so we don't really want that but just a little bit and then we can also jump in here and mess with the background color so tweak the hue or add a bit more saturation though i was kind of happier before we could add in more contrast here and then raise the brightness again but again i think i was liking it better before maybe let's just try a bit more brightness and i think the issue is that we've widened out so much that we're not really seeing individual stars because we're at this 10 millimeter lens which is a little bit too extreme so maybe we could actually zoom in quite a bit until we're at something a little more reasonable like 40 and then let's just back the camera off and of course now we're getting something completely crazy and different that i'm not liking at all so let's undo that and i just crashed but that's okay i just want to point out here that when we move the camera closer and further we get dramatically different looks so that's one z depth there and then we keep pulling back and now we're getting this insanity so just animating this value here you get some very unexpected results and we could even do this one more time and duplicate another sphere here and bring this closer and immediately we're getting something pretty wild so maybe this is too much diffraction going on let's create a duplicate of this material and swap it up here so we can play around with different levels of the index so this is yet another parameter you could be animating here let's take the dispersion down and this sphere maybe we could flatten a bit more but i think this is getting a little too crazy so let's go back and delete this maybe we add in another taurus and pull this one up front scale it down and just kind of close this in and it feels like we've gotten off center so let's just check everything here our camera just needs to be re-centered here so if you right-click these two arrows will go back to zero and now we're getting a much more pleasing composition now nothing says that these tauruses have to be mirror tauruses either you could try adding in this chromatic material here as well and this is really just about playing until we find something that we like so there's a lot of creativity and unexpected stuff going on here which i find really fun all right let's cut this off for the time being one thing i'm not liking about the background is that we can't see any individual stars at this point because we're on such a wide lens i think we're all the way at a 10 millimeter lens which is super super wide so let's go in here and basically scale up the background let's push this even further you don't want to go too far because these central elements are kind of punching in on the background and even though it's a 16k image it's punching in so much that we're seeing pixelation so let's bring this back down and let's group this whole scene real quick and turn it off so we can just take a look at the background scale it up a bit more and i think we can get away with a bit more brightness so let's just boost the brightness to four and change the gamma until we're just seeing something more like that and maybe we can actually unlock this aspect ratio and stretch it out a bit that looks a bit nicer to me let's turn this back on and i think that's helping quite a bit let's go back to our camera imager here and see if we can add in a bit more contrast or play with this lut so i think i like it when the lut is cranked all the way i feel like some of these colors are getting a bit too saturated so if we dial this down a touch feels a little bit more sophisticated to me i think we could play with the gamma as well maybe gamma down and exposure up and then more highlight compression so that's introduced more contrast i may have pushed it a bit too far so let's go back just a little bit all right so i'm into that look let's uh scale this down to see our full scene here because we're actually cropped in a bit so let me widen this out and then bring this up to 0.8 or so this is getting a bit weird in here i'm seeing some artifacts on the edges and that might be due to not having enough segments in this taurus so let's come in here and find the culprit and one question is is this taurus even doing anything here yeah that's definitely doing something so we'll leave that guy okay but this one could definitely use let's up the pipe segments maybe that's the issue yeah that fixed it so if we hit n b we can go back and see that these pipe segments are along this axis and it just didn't have enough before it was just causing this reflection to get pretty geometric looking so we just want to have an even number of segments on both parameters so let's do the same with this one just to be safe and up the number of pipe segments here as well okay so this isn't identical to the scene that i showed you previously but it's pretty cool in its own right and it's along the same lines now that we're here i'm going to go about animating this guy and in this case i just want some ambient slow moving visuals i don't need it to move really quickly so i don't really need any key frames i can do this whole thing with vibrate tags so the first thing we can animate is the actual camera the thing is that i want to add keyframes to the position because when we add vibrate tags when the animation loops around it can stack on the previous values and we can get really far off the original coordinates so just adding some static keyframes prevents the vibrate tag from doing that so let's right click and go to cinema 4d tags and then vibrate and let's enable position and let's set the frequency down to something like 0.2 and we don't want it to be on the x we want it to be on the z so let's go let's try 200 for starters and i'm going to pause this so that we can see what's happening and our scene is pretty slow because of these displacers so let's just turn these off for the time being so even that might be a bit too fast let's go down at point one i think that could work and now let's turn off these outer spheres and toruses just so we can see what's going on and i think temporarily to speed things up we can take these segments down to 100 so now we're actually seeing some animation and then let's create another camera here just zoomed in so we can see what's going on so these will be evolving in terms of their animation but i'd also like them to be rotating so let's just start with the inner shell here so this one's the one that's more blown out in terms of its displacement height let's pop on a c4d vibrate tag here and let's just enable rotation and we'll just go 360 by 360 by 360 and let's do a speed of 0.1 for starters so even that's too fast let's try 0.03 i think that works pretty well let's go to our next shell here middle shell and we can turn off the inner one since we're not even seeing that anymore cool let's just duplicate this vibrate tag and change the seed and again with these let's go to our coordinates and lock down the rotation values okay this one's not rotating fast enough so let's go 0.1 too fast 0.05 still maybe too fast maybe we're actually good at 0.03 let's change the seed i think that's pretty good let's duplicate this again change the seed again check out our outer shell i think this should work fine let's remember to set these back up to a thousand segments and then turn them all off let's turn these guys back on we don't need this taurus anymore because we decided not to use it and we're also in our super zoomed in camera so let's pop back here and we basically want to reuse this vibrate tag from the camera so let's pop that onto our spheres and tauruses here and let's also remember to lock down our coordinates here so that nothing's getting out of control and now it looks as if all the animation is stopped that's because we're on the same random seed as all the rest of these guys so what we can do is we can actually select all of these right now and go to our seed and type in num and that is going to pull the object's index and use that as the seed so we'll get unique seeds for all of these so now you can see this has a seed of zero one two three and this one should be four so now if we play back well that's not going to be good so let's take the value of this down to something like let's try 100 [Music] we could even do maybe 50 and then do a higher frequency for these and i think this is actually too much for the camera as well so let's go back to 100 and see how that does maybe even 50. it's hard to predict exactly how this is going to look it still feels a bit fast to me so i'm just going to try 0.1 for all these instead this feels like it's going to be a lot smoother so let's start rendering this again and that's pretty interesting without any of the inner displacers this is what we're getting and so we can just kind of pop to different frames and check out what various slices of our animation is going to look like so at certain times we get more of these chromatic rings than others and this should be cool maybe we actually do see what it looks like when we go to a much larger value on our camera and i'm noticing this stretching here again with the torus so let's make sure our object is set to enough pipe segments here and enough ring segments let's just go 500 500 and same thing here don't want to take any chances there and the last thing that i'd like to do is come into our octane sky here and all the way into the transform tab and we can just really subtly keyframe the rotation or rather x transformation of this hdri in the background and that's going to allow this all to move a lot more so let's go back to frame 0 add in a keyframe to transform it on the x go to the end and let's just pull this across and there you can see the background moving so we want to do this just a little bit and let's go animation show track and make sure that this is linear i don't want any easing on that all right and for starters i think i can get away with just like 100 samples to test this out and make sure that our camera animation or the animation of these tauruses isn't too extreme so let's go here into our settings and just type in 100 for the samples and as usual i'm in path tracing with gi clamp set to one so i'll just set this going and i'll get back to you all right so i've let this render for about 11 minutes but there are already some things i'd like to change i feel like it's very cool to see these stars warping so much but i also think they're a bit distracting and could be toned down in terms of the brightness and i feel like the rotation is a bit too fast and distracting the middle here i'm also not liking this hard ring that we're getting here in the center and i think that's from the taurus and the sphere elements clipping together so i think we could separate those out a bit more i also feel like later in the animation these streaks get a bit more obvious so i'd like to play around with the start position of the camera so that we can see those streaks from the very beginning if we actually jump out of the camera here we can take a look at our scene and this is what everything looks like we've got all these elements in front of our displacer objects and if i turn off this torus here you can see these elements here are intersecting so let's separate these out a bit more maybe move this one a bit back and we need to remove the keyframes and then add them again and so let's then move this one a bit closer and same thing here if i hold down control and shift and paint downwards then i can lose all those keyframes at once and then put them back by just painting downwards and maybe we move this taurus a bit more in the middle here so it's less likely to intersect and then same thing again now let's turn off these displacers so we can see how much these elements are moving so that should work okay these don't ever actually touch and then this outer torus here is intersecting a bit with this inner one but i don't know if that's the issue let's go back to our main camera and see and we need to back off this camera here because we're inside our objects so let's go right about here right let's see what this looks like and let's turn these guys back on and of course now we've got something completely different so let's scale up this torus here so that's more what we're looking for let's also play around with the z distance we're getting some really neat rainbow effects here i'd like to see if we can enhance this in here so let's turn this sphere off for now and let's scale this sphere up so that enhances that a bit more and if we boost the dispersion now we're getting some pretty cool colors when we bring back the torus and maybe we actually bring this a bit forwards so it's not clipping the other torus and so that when we move closer and further we get more of that parallax shift between the two taurus objects and again i'd like to bring the brightness of this down let's try 2.5 and then maybe gamma up a little bit oh and we forgot to turn on this other sphere so that's completely changing everything but maybe we don't need that guy let's uh mess around with shifting this thing forward and back a bit more that's cool let's flatten it down a bit more let's turn it off for the time being so we can focus on this first because maybe we crank the dispersion too high this is another thing you can animate if you want to is actually the width of the torus to create some other stretching and distortion all right this is pretty cool here let's turn our other sphere on which kind of punches everything in i like this secondary stretching here and the more you squish this sphere the more enhanced that becomes and maybe what we need to do is actually boost the blackbody mission in the center here you can see that starts to bring out the rings a lot more though it's looking very noisy because we're still at just 100 samples so let's boost this so we can see what this is going to look like i think it's too much here so let's bring this back down but maybe just boost it a little bit up to something like 10. we could also play with scaling some of these let's try scaling the outer shell and then maybe bring this back down so it's a bit more subtle and then this displacer could also come up in terms of the size so let's see what happens there maybe back down to a thousand and then let's experiment with this middle shell here and bring the brightness of this up and scale this one up it's looking pretty cool let's bring the brightness a bit down so we're still getting the most intensity at the center i think i went a bit too far on this outer shell so let's try scaling that back in and then boosting the brightness again get active material that's starting to look nice let's go back to this inner shell and get active material and then boost the brightness of this one let's try boosting the exposure overall a little bit and then again let's scrub to different areas of the timeline to see what's going on it's looking pretty cool to me overall though maybe i want to raise the saturation back up to one so that we emphasize this rainbowiness in the center a bit more and as we scale this all the way down to zero now we've just got a flat disc but this is actually stretching things out even more and really enhancing this chromatic aberration going on we can also maybe downplay these outer streaks by using some vignetting and then the final thing i wanted to do is actually reduce the speed of this rotation so let's go animation show track and we could just take this and cut it in half by bringing this keyframe up or even less than half maybe somewhere around there all right i'm going to set this to about 300 samples and fire this off again all right so this is how this one's looking it's got some cool elements going on but this feels a bit too slow to me and i don't like that you can really clearly see this central element i want it to be a little bit more mysterious so after a bit of experimentation i was able to get here which is closer to the original look that i showed you guys so let me dive in and show you how i got here okay so first off i actually do want to bring back that rotation of the background i took it way too far down so let's go animation show track and then we can just take this downwards here and i actually want to remove my vibrate tag from the camera because i found that distracting and with this disc here we've flattened it all the way down so i can't really bring it back so i'm just going to delete this and then duplicate this previous disc here and bring it forward now the main thing i want to change is this outer shell here i'm going to hide these discs for the time being and i'm just going to crank up this displacement to something like 100 and then i'll scale this up even more now with these discs and toruses back on you can see we're getting more of that starburst type look but it's a bit too extreme so we can do is we can go to this texture here and come into our node editor get active material and then come into our dirt node here and i'm going to crank this up to something like 35 so that kind of thins it out a bit and makes it less overwhelming to look at now before i forget i need to delete the keyframes on this foreground sphere and then replace them so that it doesn't jump back to its original position now let's also see if we can get something a bit more interesting with this central element here let's crank up the displacer on this one too let's try a hundred and let's remove these so we can see what's going on and even remove the outer shell and the middle shell maybe something like that well that might be a little bit too intense maybe 100 was actually pretty good and with the middle shell maybe we boost this up as well to 100 and just kind of scale it up and without the outer shell this is how we're looking we're getting this cool starburst here and the outer shell is just filling it out but it's nice to have multiple elements because each of these is going to rotate independently and you can even change the speeds of these if you wanted to all right so each time i attempt this i get a completely different look but that's kind of the fun of it is that every time you experiment you get something slightly different so i'm going to go render this out and then i'll get back to you okay so this is definitely looking cool but i'm not getting enough rotation from this outer shell or even maybe the middle shell so i'm going to crank these values up a bit and re-render so let's just try point one on all three of these and see what happens cool so here's the final render i love this rainbow craziness we're getting on this one the only thing i'm maybe not super happy with is this inner shell here which i think could use a bit of refinement but that's okay i'm gonna move on i think you guys get the idea so here on out i'm just going to break down some of these scenes for you because it's all the same techniques that i've already gone through but just minor differences in the type of objects we're using in the color and other various material settings so we're going to break down this shot here so just to remind you this shot looks like this and i'm going to come up here to options and untick check camera so that we can take a look at this scene from the side here so one of the main things that's different is that we've got this cylinder that's refractive so if we turn this off here you can see just how much the scene changes so it's just a cylinder with no caps and it's got this glass material on it with the index set to 1.6 and a dispersion coefficient now this is actually animated so if i right click and go to animation show track we can look and it's just kind of oscillating slowly over the course of the scene with these keyframes i've got it set to functions track after offset repeat after which allows this animation to continue and all that's doing if we come to one of these keyframes for instance and i crank up the dispersion it's almost as if it zooms in it kind of creates this breathing effect that i find really cool so that's another really great parameter to animate when you're making these now if we hide this cylinder there's also this big sphere here and without that say we're showing only the cylinder you can see it gets a little bit overwhelming in terms of the number of rings that are being repeated here so the sphere helps kind of dampen that all down both have the same texture now if i lose both of these this is what we've got and this is just a reflection from this big torus here so let's turn off this mirror taurus so we can take a look at the rest of the scene and by the way we're still doing the same thing with vibrate tags it's just frequency of 0.2 100 centimeters on the z-axis i think that's true with most of these here so for this we've got several displacement objects and they're not actually all inside each other we've got two groups so here i've got this outer close and if i turn this off you can see there's a bit of a smoother shell inside it but because these are all semi-transparent you're able to see these guys in the back through this one and again these just have various noise shaders this one has an electric noise this one's got stupel and these others are all stupid as well this one has two displacers on it so this one's a much larger scale that creates larger displacements at 1438 and this one's smaller at 255. i'm going to turn all these objects back on the last thing i'd like to point out in this scene is that if i give myself a bit more room here i've got some pretty strong white point adjustments on so if i take this down and i need to actually turn back on check camera for this to read so if i take this down to white you'll see we'll get the color back and this is actually really pretty in its own right and if i bring back the saturation i don't like it as much when it gets super saturated but there's something really nice about this it could maybe use a bit more exposure and a bit less gamma to give it a bit more contrast but that's a pretty cool look too but when i was initially doing the scene i wanted a very monochromatic look so i just kind of crank this white point all the way in this direction because if you remember we get the color opposite of whatever we choose here so if i chose something more like purple we would end up with green so i'm actually tempted to re-render with this new color and i think i'll go ahead and do that all right so this last project file has a bit more complexity but the underlying principles are all the same as what we've already seen let's just start from one element and gradually build the scene back up so let me turn off all these others here and i'll bring the sky back which i've keyframed in the x direction here over the course of the shot and now let's start with these blue streaks which is a new element that we haven't taken a look at yet so if i jump into this material here let me hit get active material and scooch this over so we can see it a bit better it's just a black body emission with a blue rgb spectrum in there which is causing it to emit light and without this opacity map here it's just going to be blown out so let me put this back in opacity and i'll include this texture in the project file but it's just this dot streak texture here and if i zoom in here there's just some nice little details going on but overall pretty simple now the tricky thing here is if i were to drop in a disk like you'd be tempted to do and let's just orient this so it's facing in the z direction and scale it down and then you would bring up the inner radius to something like that if we took the same texture and popped it onto this disc this is what we'd get so let me widen out here so you can see and i'll reduce the black body emission as well so this isn't mapping correctly even though it's set to uv mode by default so rather than going in and uv unwrapping this disk what we can do is we can just drop in a torus and i'll just set this to plus z scale it way down and let's just line it up so it's similar to what we had before so here's this taurus we'll scale it out and then up and we could just give it a bunch more segments here now if i use this texture on the torus it's got the uv layout that i'm looking for already that follows the radius of this disk shape and then the next step would be just coming in here and squishing it down so let's hit c to make it editable and then just scale it down to zero on the z axis holding down shift so we hit that zero point and now we can go in and mess with the scale of the texture so actually let's just hit get active material here and go to our transform and play around with the scale until we lose those brighter spots and keep these details instead and you can see at certain points we get a bit of a hard line so we want to kind of avoid that by just scaling it until we don't really see that anymore so 2 seems to be a good value for that another way you could do the same trick is by grabbing a sphere scaling it down and changing it to a hemisphere and then we would want to rotate it 90 degrees on this x-axis here hit c to make it editable and then delete a couple rows of polys and then similarly we would grab this scale it into zero and then we could take these edge loops here and scale them in and then put it in a subdivision surface so in this way we'd get just a single strip of polys versus the taurus which is actually two strips of polys not that it really makes a difference so i'm just going to go with the taurus and i've just reverted my scene here because something got out of whack with the camera as well as the vibrate tag that was missing off of this so if we look at the vibrate tag right now it's clearly not rotating in the right axis but no matter what axis i select it goes out of whack and this is another good example of why we put in this keyframe because now when we go back to zero here it returns back to its original position whereas if i didn't do this and i deleted these static keyframes and i set some kind of value on here it never returns to its default position even if we delete the vibrate tag so that can be a pretty annoying issue though really we just have to reset it here so that's why i drop in the static keyframes so let's just lose this vibrate tag for a second and see what's going on now if i rotate on any of these axes it's not the effect we're looking for so let's reset all this here and we want 90 degrees on this axis what we can do is we can freeze this rotation and now on this heading axis we're getting radial rotation so that's what we're looking for so let's re-add our keyframes drop a vibrate tag back on here enable rotation 0.2 and let's do 300 on this heading so now we're going to see this rotate radially and it's going to be subtle but we'll notice it with these little streaks that they're moving around the circumference okay so next we've got an emissive taurus here so pretty simple this one's just moving a little bit on the z position and then we've got an inner mirror taurus here so same deal just moving a little bit on z and now we've got some glass inner and outer hemispheres so if i jump out of the camera this is what these are looking like and if i look into the dispersion it's not keyframed the index is really really low and these guys aren't even moving so that's the scene so far now i've also got these grebel rings so let's turn everything else off and take a look at these so here's the inner one and here's the outer one let's come back a bit so we can actually see the outer one there we go so this is the same technique as i showed you before making a torus and flattening it down if we look at the material here let's hit get active material i'm actually using one of beeples renders here if we edit this you can see this is the render and it's just for color this is actually a technique that i picked up from him when he shared some project files with me on a project we were working on together but obviously you can use any photo or render you want this one just has a nice rainbowy set of colors here so if i transform this around you can see that it's repeating in here and it's just set to the default uv projection like before if we were to get rid of this opacity here and drop down the emission you can see this is how it's mapping if we transformed it down it's mapping radially versus if we selected box this would be preserving more of the image which is not exactly what we want so that's why i've got it set to uv and then this is the opacity texture that's doing most of the work so again it's just another beeple texture this one's the supergreeb texture which i've used a bunch of times before and it's just transformed down and stretched out a bit let's get rid of this spare node here and here i'm just multiplying it with a noise so this noise is very stretched out as well if i squash it down even more you can see it's cutting lines through this image so if i solo this you should be able to see more what's going on so it's just a stretched out purlin noise that's breaking this up a little bit more these grebel rings are given a bit more love with the keyframing so if i turn this to local axis you should be able to see there are just these quick keyframes going on and if i come into my f curve this is what the keyframes are looking like so to get that effect i'm just taking all these keyframes here and pulling them out on the left side so if i hold down control and shift i can grab just one side of the bezier handle and also constrain the axis so if i pull this out far enough then we get this much more poppy animation that starts fast and then eases so this kind of animation is definitely helping that digital eye robotic feel going on similar thing with the camera though it's not quite as harsh we could pull all these out and then we would get a similar effect with the camera which is maybe even better it's a little bit more robotic and i dig that in this instance all right so let's bring back some of these elements that we've already seen and the blue streaks and let's fire this render back off now next are these inner and outer glass toruses if i untick check camera and zoom out here let's look at this inner glass torus so that's just in here and if we scrub you can see all these elements are interpenetrating which is fine in this case that actually creates a really interesting aperture that sometimes appears and disappears and again a very low index and this is the same dispersion coefficient and then our outer glass torus here is a much bigger one and the keyframes on here aren't really doing anything it's more actually the vibrate tag i think these are just a holdover from a previous project so you can see as these things kind of intersect in different ways we highlight certain elements over others so a lot of it's very random and unpredictable but it creates a really cool result and then the final thing going on is i've got a couple lights back here so you can see them over here they're really long strips and that's what's creating these rainbow edges here and these also have a vibrate tag on them the null is controlling these two and this vibrate tag is just rotating on the banking so that these guys kind of spin around and that causes the lights to kind of play across the surface as we go through the animation and the last thing that's slightly unique about this scene is that i've got a slight roughness texture going on that's grunging up this glass so it's just this image no real reason in particular to choose this over any other image and that's dialed way down and it's just creating a slight grunge on the surface of this glass if this were dialed up it would be grunging up the whole scene way too much alright that's it for this scene you can download it and mess around with it to your heart's content and let's just take a look at the final render one more time hopefully it's clear that there's a ton of versatility in these techniques and that should give you the creative freedom to go ahead and make this thing your own i also hope that you picked up a whole bunch of techniques for both cinema 4d and octane render along the way alright well i'll catch you all next time bye bye now [Music] i'm gonna start this whole thing off with three bold words houdini is easy i am here to tell you that you are in the right place [Music] stay tuned do some particle simulations some fluid simulations just all the simulations let's just run this again for all of you who are like me who love computers and graphics and animation you got this an introduction to houdini for motion designers and cinema 4d artists looking to expand their skills my apologies for the lame recording i'm making this up as i go you really do need to know what this stuff is to do the cool things sooner or later your brain is going to start making connections you came you conquered you saw congratulations for making it this far why didn't i know this existed cheers i'm proud of you i'm a little bit emotional now i'm not gonna lie stop being afraid of houdini [Applause] without further ado let's let the learning begin [Music] you

Channel: Mograph

Views: 11,365

Rating: 4.9947228 out of 5

Keywords: Render, Mograph, Mograph.com, Cinema4D, Maxon, Learn, workflow, learn, how to, tools, settings, displacement, david ariew, octane, octane jesus, octane render, c4d, otoy, distortions, abstract, space, look, black hole, warp, interstellar, distort, lens, effect, render

Id: ENoyceHFESI

Length: 62min 25sec (3745 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 26 2021