*Beginner* How to CREATE AMAZING 3D Animations! - C4D + Octane Plugin Quickstart Guide

in today's video i'm going to show you how you can start creating 3d animations from scratch we're going to talk about my own personal workflow using cinema 4d and octane but of course you can take all the things i'm going to talk about in this video and do it all in blender which is free so all relevant links will be down below if you guys do enjoy slap like on the video if you are new here consider subscribing right here in front of you you see a project that i was just working on earlier in the day applying facial motion capture to these 3d characters this is actually for a nft project not my own project i was just commissioned to work for them where i'm converting these 2d avatars into 3d avatars with full facial motion capture so just goes to show some of these skills that i've been talking about in previous videos are becoming a lot more prevalent let's dive right into exactly what you need to know i'm gonna open the door and be very general and then it's up to you guys to fill in the blanks by researching on your own searching up different youtube videos etc so let's talk about the software that we are using here i prefer to use cinema 4d with octane like i mentioned at the beginning you see a lot of people using this octane render plug-in it's this little window on the right that's visualizing you see it used a lot in netflix shows in movies if you guys follow people like beeple on instagram who made like over 100 million dollars from nfts creating amazing works you guys should definitely follow him amount of money nft blah blah aside he makes cool stuff and he's good at what he does he uses cinema 4d octane hundreds of other talented creators we're using cinema 4d octane and in my opinion cinema 4d is very very easy to learn so again look into picking up a copy of c4d and the octane plug-in i'll leave links to those below don't want to pay for the octane subscription just use blender everything i'm going to talk about in here you can do in blender you could use something like unreal engine it really doesn't matter about the tool it's all just your preference just like in photoshop after effects premiere and all these hundreds of other videos it's exactly the same the tool doesn't matter it matters about how you go about doing things all right so we'll close blender again you can pick that up if you need to let's go ahead and create a new project here so we can start from scratch what i do to get started i open up the render settings by clicking this button and i start changing things around to my liking so 800 by 600 for our output is a little bit too small usually i'm working in like 1080 by 1080 1920 by 1080. whatever so we'll change that and choose your frame rates that's pretty much all we need from here whenever we click our renderer here i can select octane if you don't have octane but you are using c4d you're probably using physical or standard or another third-party plug-in like arnold or redshift those all show up here in this drop down so i'll put this to the octane render that i've already installed for my save we're going to do this all at the end so we'll do that later whenever we bring this into after effects that's fine for now we'll close this down you need to move around in this space choose these top right tools you move zoom rotate whatever so i'm going to fire up octane i just click on the octane tab and i click live viewer window and i can just snap this wherever i want click this to fire it up and now we can see and visualize what the render is going to look like so you can click here and just add in any of these primitives um just basic shapes basic figures etc you could do this in every single 3d software so let's just add in a figure step one what do we want to create this is your planning phase this is your gathering assets or creating asset space you want to be thinking about composition and if you don't know where to start i've created a bunch of videos talking all about where to find assets all about how to create 3d characters so i'm going to leave some of my most useful tutorials down below again this is your quick start guide so i'm going to link everything out there to give you a quick general overview you can use some of these free 3d models or pay for 3d models that people have already created sites like turbosquid cgtrader it's a very important step if you really want to take this to the next level to learn even the basics of 3d modeling i think blender is better for that under is just a great tool in general even if you're not creating your animations in it it's a good swiss army knife to have in the back pocket if you learn how to create 3d scans or if you learn how to do some basic modeling you're going to save a lot of money a and you're going to be able to build on your ideas much greater control over what you're putting in than if you're just using pre-made assets but for now i'm just going to find some free stuff so let's go and download this gundam robot if you look at the file formats here you'll see it is natively within blender another great reason that blender just you can transfer files in between your workflow also has colada 3d studio and obj so we're going to go ahead and download that completely new all this mumbo jumbo sounds pretty crazy to you in terms of the file names just know that fbx is very interchangeable obj is very interchangeable you want to start with those two fpx and obj unless it's a native project file for the software you're using now you can see if you just click on the arrow show in folder here is my 3d file so i can just drag this straight into cinema 4d and click ok if you don't want to drag it in what you can do is click file merge objects and search for that so what you're going to see here and this is pretty common whenever people are fully 3d modeling from scratch you just see there's tons of different parts and for some reason there's a giant cube i'm guessing this is like the environment that they had set up i'm just going to select that and click delete and here is our little gundam so instead of having all these different objects you can just select all of these so i'll just click scroll scroll scroll hold down shift select the bottom we're gonna click alt g and that's going to parent these all together so we'll name this gundam if you guys are coming from my premiere in after effects videos this is like nesting your clip so that you can just have one thing that you can click on and you can move it it moves everything so very important to know holding down alt and holding left click to be able to rotate here so that's some of the basics of gathering your assets so i'm actually going to skip ahead here and we're going to talk about my octane render settings because in my opinion not having your render settings set up correctly could really hinder your progress in terms of your computer lagging things having all these fireflies and grain are just looking uh genuinely ugly once you do apply them or super long render times i know whenever i first started out i didn't have things set up right i had too many samples i had this and that it was taking me like days just to put out a 30 second animation so let's talk about that and let me show you some useful workarounds here so whenever you click on your settings button here here's what this is going to look like in this drop down you can change between different lighting types most people stick to either direct lighting or path tracing in my opinion path tracing looks a lot better but if you are getting substantial lag you could try bumping down to direct lighting so let's switch over to path tracing now if there's one thing to take away from this video if you're new and you're working in c4d octane it would be this if you're creating an animation please don't have an insane amount of samples it's going to take an extreme amount of time for your computer to process all these you can export your scene to render farms to speed them up but you really don't need this many samples it's just overkill for an animation if you're doing something like a still image maybe you can have a large amount of samples or even bump down to like 1060 but for me i keep it like under 500 samples unless i'm doing something with a lot of reflections or scattering fog whatever pretty intensive then i'll bump up the samples but for the most part i even do a lot of animations at just around 150 samples earlier whenever i was showing you um this performance here this 150 samples right here and i think that's pretty good quality so if you actually want to enjoy the process of this keep it low samples and we're gonna have a workaround for that diffuse depth specular depth and scatter depth if you guys put these all down to zero gradually start to bump them up you can see really how everything's affecting they default pretty high up so if you guys again are getting some lag don't be afraid to bump these down and just gradually raise them up until you're satisfied with the quality here i mean this is three diffused two specular and it looks exactly the same as how it was before once we add in our lights and our different materials we're probably going to need to bump this up more to account for that so going down here caustics blur if you need to you can add a tiny bit of this that'll just speed up the render times if you ever want to compare what you're doing in the settings here with how fast it's taking to render you can right click on the live viewer and click store render buffer and then you're gonna have this a to b comparison that you can use as a slider here and you can change things around so say for example i change this to zero this is what the stored render buffer had and this is the changes you made so if you need like a super high depth comparison you can always use that to turn this off just go to compare turn off the a b comparison so back to our settings gi clamp i like keeping that between something like eight and ten i see a lot of people using ten i've been using eight i think it really just depends on the gpu you are using um but keeping it around again eight and ten should give you a little boost through the speed i'm using a rtx 2080. now alpha channel and keep environment if you want to render with a transparent background which is pretty important for a lot of renders check on your alpha channel keep environment i usually have that turned off ai light now this is something that can help a lot if you're having lights that are reacting with tricky surfaces or even if you have a lot of fog or vdb volumes and you're trying to have the light go through checking on ai lights can help with that a lot and other than that if you need to you can turn up coherent ratio if you need a little bit more speed as well something like 0.3 here's the difference on that make sure you don't bump it up too much or you may get some of these artifacts it sort of just makes the shadows a little bit more clumpy but again it gives you a bit more speed and then static noise check that on if there are parts of your scene that are noisier than others it'll sort of make it more evened out and also check on adaptive sampling this allows you to set a threshold for noise those are my render settings now whenever you have a complex scene you have 150 samples it may look a little bit grainy the way to combat that is by using the ai denoiser and this is an amazing tool which is in cinema 4d octane to be able to use that you need to have a c4d camera to add your lights or your camera you just go to objects and you can add different sorts of lights and you can add your camera so click octane camera the way the octane camera works you're going to see this little activation switch next to your camera tag whenever you click onto that activation switch this is your camera view so if you want to place your camera in a specific place uh you check that on and we can just put this where the cam where you want the camera to look so like that if i check off the little switch here you can now see our camera uh physically in our scene if we animate that you can see the path of the camera and so on and so forth so that's very important you don't want to be moving around in your camera view and just kind of and mess up the position of your camera you always want to have this checked on or off so you have your camera set if you click on this octane camera tag here there's a lot of amazing things you can do just within that so and you can see a little bit better what this looks like so in your octane camera tag you can add motion blur you can change the values of the lens if you want to add realistic bokeh and if you want to add depth of field you can do that all within here if you just change off the auto focus change around the depth change around the aperture you can see you can see how we're getting that realistic depth of field effect all within cinema 4d that's why i say think like a cinematographer it's all exactly the same stuff composition lighting whenever you create materials they're using the exact same properties as those materials in real life and even your camera settings here it all mimics real life cinematography so i can take my focus picker here this little f selector just click like that to change my field of view pretty cool i'm just doing that in of itself and make your renders look a lot more photorealistic so whenever you're trying to get that realism look make sure you're always playing with your camera tag camera imager you always want to enable that that's how we can turn on our holy ai denoiser here so remember how i was talking about those low samples let me just put the thin lens back on autofocus for now see how we have this grain in here maybe a little bit hard because we don't have light let's just go to objects lights add in a daylight and with this daylight we're going to talk about lighting soon but you can actually rotate it rotate the sun to get different reflections let's even bump down these samples even more bump it down to like 10 samples that's like nothing right so you have all this grain but you're gonna have lightning fast renders it's almost like real time um rendering here but you can see how fast that green bar is shooting up get rid of all this grain you can use your camera imagers ai denoiser so you go to camera imager open up ai denoiser here and you just enable it and look at the difference here again this is ten samples whenever i started out i had like a thousand ten thousand samples this is with ten samples and you can get something that looks this clean just using the power of artificial intelligence and you can click this little d main tab here to see that here's the noise here's what it looks like normally with grain and here is with our ai denoiser so an extremely useful tool just turning that on again you can also do this with vdb cloud volumes which i have done in the past and you can even use this little blend slider sometimes it's nice not to be taking away all that grain sometimes a little bit of grain and noise makes things look a little bit more realistic you can use this little blend slider to bring some of that noise back in so that is the key to your lightning fast renders using the ai denoiser and low samples and i like to stay around like 150 that usually works for me and then i'll use this and again we're going to skip a little bit whenever you do use that ai denoiser you always want to go in your render into your render settings click on the octane render tab so again put this to octane render right here on the octane little tab here you want to click on use denoise beauty pass that'll make sure when it renders it'll use that ai denoiser we're going to talk about lighting and we're going to come back to the camera a little bit let's talk about materials first because creating these different materials you see this is just gray that's the look and feel of your renders we can't just be walking around with these still claymation 3d models so we're going to click create and the cool thing about cinema 4d octane instead of having to use the standard materials you have this own little octane tab and you can create different octane materials so you have your blend you have your normal material mix and portal usually you're just going to be working with a normal material or maybe even a mix but we'll toss in a normal material here and again this is all in different parts so just understanding the relationship of what these objects mean these are the materials here you can even see if i hover over chrome gray white we were loading in the defaults but we just loaded it in obj and these little triangles these orange triangles here these are polygon selection tags what that ultimately means if we select the chest here and we click over to instead of just showing this object this model mode click over to show like vertexes or uh polygons here's what this object is ultimately made out of in terms of like the faces again i'm not going to dive too far into it you guys want to look into 3d modeling to understand this but if i was to select this part and find that wherever it's highlighted this is my chest and we can click to show the faces and click these select polygons to select the different parts that are highlighted and selected here so if you want to apply a material to a specific thing there's two different ways what we can do is we can just let me just make this a different color before we dive into that make it black just toss that on the chest and it's going to apply and it's going to apply that material to every part of that object but if you want to apply things to specific areas again if you have those polygon selection tags which are very useful in doing this or even if you don't have those tags you can just go to this face view and you can even just grab your selector tool and say i want to apply a certain color only to this little part of the chest right here you can select these faces we can create another material or i'll just duplicate that make this green you can right click on that material and you can click apply with those faces selected so that's how you can apply a material to a specific part of your 3d model instead of the entire thing or alternatively you can though you can use those selection tags and check out what those are selecting these middle parts here apply that so there you go different ways to start adding the materials onto your object now let's talk about the different types of materials that you can create so let's open up this octane tag in your c4d materials your material type you have a bunch of different options you have your diffuse your glossy specular metallic tune and universal so these are all the different types of materials if you want something shiny you can go with like a glossy preset and you see automatically you have these reflections built in here and it looks a lot more like a reflective plastic as opposed to just diffuse you also have your specular and this is used a lot for things like glass very see-through you can take your roughness and bump that up to make it more like clouded glass then you have metallic which is pretty self-explanatory um this is your metal and if you want to change that around again that's your roughness you go to roughness bump that up a little bit and you'll have a bit of metal now all these different channels here these are the different attributes for the material and remember how i kept saying that these materials mimic the properties of real life materials things like this ior you can look up the ior for specific types of metals and you can add in that exact value it'll make it look more like that metal that's one real world example that's a more advanced example but just to give you a quick rundown on what any of these mean your diffuse channel here or if you're in universal the albedo channel here this is more of just like the base color i'm gonna give it to you in layman's terms instead of like instead of complex definitions it's not very reflective it doesn't have a lot of shine i think it's better to learn that type of stuff just by looking up tutorials for creating different materials like if you want to make something gold look up a c40 octane gold tutorial a news flash is pretty easy you just make something metallic add some roughness and then change the color of the specular and that's really the basics but there you go you can just look up tutorials for whatever material it is you're trying to create if you're not really trying to look up a bunch of tutorials i think it's pretty cool just rocking with these glossy materials i usually like these ones just kind of gives you your color but it also has that reflective property so it'll react a lot better with your lights if you're just kind of dragging and dropping stuff like i am now again i would recommend sticking with the glossy or a cooler type of look and if you want to add on top of that you can go to something like polyhaben.com they have a lot of materials there's also quicksole bridge i think is owned by epic and unreal engine where they can give you all these different normal maps these bump maps these roughness specular maps and you can just straight plug that in you can just straight click this button and c40 octane image texture and load in those maps so say i want scratched metal qixel textures and here's a bunch that i've downloaded from there imperfections damages here's a little preview of what it looks like and here's the map open it up and now i have scratches on my gold medal so again a quick very very basic understanding of what these materials are how you can change the look of them and it all comes down to again changing sliders and this and that to get the look you want that is a very very basic understanding of it and again keep in mind the way that these materials look it's very dependent on the lighting so if i was to go in here and just completely destroy this daylight look at how different the metal looks it's because there's nothing reflecting off of the material you need something in there even like a basic even if it's just like a basic daylight to really give it the realistic touch so you can see the difference there if zero lighting this is supposed to be a metallic texture and with lighting very very important all right guys so bridging off of what we talked about with the material we're going to talk a little bit more about environments and the reflectance of that if i just take this cube and you see i move it to the light it just looks like a blank spongebob looking block of cheese but if we move it down here where it's not reflecting as much of the light you can see you can see some of those scratches things like that so it just shows the importance of your lighting of your environment and if i was to take my daylight let's zoom in on our robot that we've just been kind of dropping some stuff on here if i take my daylight this is a little trick this options here and you uncheck check camera what that allows you to do is pop off of your camera so again check that off make sure you're doing this correctly so it doesn't mess anything up now you can just move things around and be free in here while having this view locked so say i want to move things around in the background but i want to do that so that i can get a better look on my robots i can now really do that while having this locked here so for example i can take my octane daylight go to my rotation tool and i can rotate the sun and i can look at my close-up of my robot while i rotate my sun so it's a very useful little trick for if you want to get your lighting down specifically if you want to look at those shadows now you can actually change what this background looks like and that is by adding an hdri environment so for now we're going to delete the daylight we're going to go back to basic mode objects and we're going to add an hdri environment and everything's going to go black i'm going to go to objects and we're going to add a area light so like this and this is just the most basic form of dark void and adding in lighting you can click on the light tag up in the top right and you can change around the power of the light you can add in a targeted area light so lights octane targeted we already have that selected lights octane targeted and you can do the same thing click on the target tag and all it's saying is target object we want that to be this so we put it there now whenever we move this light you see how it's going to rotate around our targeted object so whichever way we change it it's always going to be pointing at that object and then another thing we can do is instead of having this black void click on our octane sky better yet our environment tag here you see how it's black because we just have this normal image texture and this is a big part of things we talked about that earlier with the materials where i added in a noise if you want something to have a certain pattern you need to load in an image texture if i want to change this from glossy black to to a poster wrap of my face going to diffuse you see this little texture click the arrow c40 octane image texture and then you can just load in by clicking these three dots any image that you have on your computer and you can't really see from here because it's all stretched so we talked about that uv transform that projection button like those and then what we can do is just open that and if you want to you can do this in the node editor just personal preference but we can take this uv transform and just scale it down pretty sure that's following the mesh uvs which again we won't talk about that that's why it's all small but let's set it to um box and there you go now i'm the newest sponsor of gundams we can do the same exact thing for our environment we can just load in an image texture specifically instead of just an image texture we want a 360 degree image so that we have lighting from all sides this is called an hdri environment so we'll click into that image texture and you'll see filename dot a filename.hdr again i mentioned that polyhaven site site where you can get those texture maps models you can also get your hdris so here's where you need a little bit more imagining what do you want your scene to look like how do you want the light to reflect you can pick something like this riverbank download that for free here in our environment let's click and the three dots we can load in our riverbank now we have this 360 degree reflectance of the riverbank when i say reflectance i mean how the light is reflecting off of our materials you obviously don't want all this stuff in the background but what you want to do here is either in your settings just check on alpha channel so that that's invisible but you still have the reflectance i want to talk a little bit about animation because if it's just still images here it might get a little boring let's just first animate our octane camera so we'll click onto the camera and i'm going to set our starting position we're going to do this animation just by using keyframes and if you guys have used premiere or after effects you're going to know exactly what keyframes are very simple so to set a keyframe see these buttons down here you can click that to set a keyframe or you can go to your camera you can go to the coordinates these are all the positioning coordinates for our camera what we're going to do is keyframe it just panning in but we can just keyframe all of our position and we'll keyframe this just for good measure at our starting point zero you see that little blue square let's go 30 frames and we're just going to zoom into our robot and always make sure here see how these turn yellow that means that we've made a movement but we haven't activated the keyframe so change those yellows into reds and now we've created a second keyframe you see we have a box there and a box there we have a little keyframe animation of a camera zooming in that's the most simple form of creating some sort of a movement again if we pop off our camera now we can see what we did with the keyframes just play that's what we did now there's a whole rabbit hole you guys can go down rigging your characters so that you can move certain body parts so that you can move certain parts again there's like different schools of 3d that you can go down there's like the 3d modeling 3d rigging you know et cetera et cetera whenever you see these big gaming studios or movie studios it's just groups of people hundreds of people each in those different divisions so one group works on the modeling one group works on the physics one group works on the animation they all combine that power into one end result that just really shows the scale of what you can do with 3d and how many different things there are that you can go down whenever you're just making your own little animations you kind of just have to be jack of all trades two things i want to mention before we just render out the simple animation of us literally just zooming into our robot we're going to bring that into after effects but i do want to mention two videos i made one is on animating your 3d characters using mixamo which is a free software and that is an extremely useful tool which i've used for many different projects it's a giant library of different motion capture which you can apply to your 3d characters i'm going to leave my tutorial for that and i'm going to leave a tutorial for my top 10 favorite plugins for c4d it's pretty outdated at this point but they're still pretty useful things if you're looking into like creating forests creating different liquids or creating different particles i still use those i still use a lot of the stuff from there forester realflow and x particles being the respective ones but i recommend you look into those two videos they'll definitely help you in terms of designing of course there's other things like mograph using cloners using this again using your characters for rigging simulating particles blah blah blah there's a lot of different things just start small enjoy the process have fun with it let's talk about how we can take this little animation which we've created and bring this easily into adobe after effects go up to your render settings and we already checked on use denoise beauty pass for our render here you can choose which frames you want to output so our animation is only 30 frames so we'll just make it go from 0 to 30. we already set this at the beginning then we just go to save check on alpha channel because here you'll see we have this checkered transparent background so you want that checked if is fine and click these dots and just find a spot to save it that's all you have to do it is very very easy so you always want to make a folder and name this robot render click into that folder and just add like a file name and then click render always make sure you're in your camera view whenever you do render or else you're going to be rendering something different this number this is the render time this is ultimately what you want to keep low that's why using that ai denoiser with low samples is going to save you a lot of time and make that render speed a lot faster alright guys so let's finish up by bringing in our test render animation into after effects just click new project here and also before we do this i should mention you don't need after effects to do this you can import image sequences in pretty much any video editor i'm just using after effects here as an example because it is nice for post adjustments so we go to import multiple files you navigate to the folder that you saved prior to rendering so right here you select the first frame and you click import as footage and import then we click ok then we click done and there you go we now have our footage directly in after effects and also remember how we rendered out with a transparent background we can right click and i'll just add a solid color here to show that's this is all transparent so you can put anything behind if you render it out as transparent and at this point you can do things like like adding your own glow adding different color correction etc etc if you need to know what to do with after effects click on my channel and browse through the over 500 videos we've made talking about after effects adobe premiere and so on so forth thank you so much for watching thank you so much for supporting and i'll see you [Music] bye

Channel: Max Novak

Views: 12,991

Keywords: beginner, guide, how to, 3d, tutorial, cinema4d, c4d, octane, beeple, eyedesyn, greyscale gorilla, max novak, plugin, best, free, preset, pack, animation, daz, character, redshift, music video, quickstart, fattu, tutorials, nft, create, characters, humans, faces, blender, facegen, blenderguru, pwnisher, metahuman, facebuilder, addon, reallusion, character creator, cc3, iclone, mocap, adobe, premiere, after effects, how to make an nft, sculpt, zbrush, projection mapping, transition, animations, vfx

Id: Ad12ES50Y_o

Length: 30min 13sec (1813 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 28 2021