C4DSeattle - Drew Nelson - Octane Render Tips & Tricks

my name is Drew I'm a full-time motion designer at Amazon right now I also do freelance on the side I primarily work in cinema 4d and an octane and redshift so couple of different GPU renders and I kind of specialize in product imagery but I really enjoy the whole spectrum of motion graphics so today actually first is how many of you guys use cinema 4d and octane anybody okay so not a ton shoot yeah so some of the stuff I'm going into you might be a little technical but there's like a good range of just render engine and shader like theory I guess and like workflow stuff so that being said I guess I'll I'll show my reel so you can kind of get an idea so it's a little outdated but whatever I won't make excuses [Music] thank you so yeah you can see a lot of a lot of like abstract motion mograph style stuff in there I I really I really like shading and texturing and lighting when it comes to like kind of my my favorite things in motion graphics and so I maybe maybe you could tell I don't know but from from my real I think that I I kind of focus on I try to focus on a lot of those aspects and the pieces that I chose I like to show as much detail as possible in some of these like simple designs so I want to talk about you know kind of how I get some of these results so here's a here's a quick little scene I set up not so concerned with this scene in particular but I kind of want to talk about some so just like settings that I used to watch a bunch of tutorials and when I got into octane a couple years ago I try to like find all the information like what's the right way to do this stuff but there's knowing nobody really talks about it I just kind of just kind of like mess around for the past couple years and then finally a lot of stuff that worked really well for me and I've passed on knowledge on I've kind of compared notes with some my some of the people I work do freelance projects with and everybody kind of came to the same conclusions so I kinda wanna share some of those some of those useful tips first off I'm going into the octane render settings typically when I I started seeing I go straight into the path path tracing which is a different different way to like calculate global illumination again sorry this is like too technical so if you know octane you can see the samples are pretty low this is typically when I work at there's no reason to start up like the base diffuse and specular depths which are like 16 they don't do anything they're not gonna you think about the way that these work diffuse depth and specular depth is basically how many times can this light bounce around right the diffuse would be how many times is this light bounce around on these hard surfaces specular would be how many times in this light bounce around reflective or translucent transparent surfaces something like the GI clamp I usually keep it at 10 I don't again not sure this is technical adaptive sampling I don't know if any of you guys have dabbled with that it's super super good sometimes I can get scenes up to a hundred thousand samples not 512 hundred thousand and have them finished in like two minutes depending on a few tweak these settings really nicely you guys were really good results it's kind of a finicky thing but maybe that's for another talk and then going into the camera here in 308 they did something really great I don't know if you if you all are familiar typically and when you start octane and make a camera tag you get this crazy LUT on your on your work that would come out looking like this it's all orange and yellow and it's just just ugly you want it to be like white balanced and there is a workaround which people found pretty quickly you could actually feel familiar with like when your workflows you set it to linear switch a gamma 2 to 2 because this is everybody knows that right and yeah then you get like proper white balance and a good workflow so I I think this stuff is super useful and if you're not familiar with it definitely take note and and work off but also that thing yet that comes in at point three just get rid of it it's it's ugly at your hand vignette here's some here's some useful passes I really I use pretty much every project passes I'm talking about render passes typically over NEX ours but the XR is multi-layered when you work in the XR is usually you want to keep this tongue map type to linear I don't know why and the newest version you have to keep it on tongue map so some of the layers I use are the diffuse pass it's just the light hitting these color channels you'll see now the reflective pass it's kind of weird-looking in this one the refraction which I'm using a subsurface scatter a shader so that's why I'm getting this kind of result subsurface scattering you see what that path looks like shading normal which i think is super underrated it's really great I'll show you in a sec how you can use that I use this object ID sometimes not necessarily to isolate images very objects but to kind of add some variety with with different objects and then finally I don't use the typical object buffers because they're super slow in octane they're complete trash honestly so if you go down to the info paths you can set up an object layer color and then on your objects in your in your octane object tag you can strip select like a hundred percent red green or blue value and then isolate those and after-effects but really really really quickly I'll just kind of show you so i rendered that out earlier you can kind of see like what these passes look like reflection you know you can do it every one with that add some more some more detail also if you don't use this plugin you should its the Video Copilot something or other anybody know anybody know what it's called a convoy yeah yeah yeah thanks consul yeah they just gave out an update it's so good it makes it makes working and after effects like like every other compositing software you don't have to like go and find the effect you want you just type it in yeah so like you can use reflective passes for like that's kind of a neat looking glow this is you can do the same kind of thing with this at some more detail basically these passes a lot for the most part you can just kind of like add more detail this pass like I was saying the shading normals is great if I shift the channels to like all be green you can see now I have I have this like I could use a sense of mad I could change it I could screen this overlay this you can do so much with it you get and you get these different the way normals work is is calculating light information from different directions right like I believe it's just front front to back left to right and top to bottom and so you're getting these different results for basically for free and you can use these or not I mean they're I think they're super useful so this was I was talking about with this object ID a lot of people are like you know I tried to key this it's gonna come out right like what's the point of this I really like it because I can I can use something like this where I I I make this black and white and then I want to add some variety and so I said that has a good track mat and I can it can now like kind of get we get a little bit more obvious and kind of get these like different results per object without having to go in and like render or make different materials so I'm like kind of offsetting the hue and saturation you get a little bit of variation really quick and easily so it's kind of cool and obviously this seems sort of thing you shift the channels and also you have a mat and you can use that too you don't do it like you want just can can't be super useful um so that kind of covers that yeah yeah [Music] so alright here's here's my object buffers suck and and these these layered colors don't because offic buffers every time you you render like an object buffer that's in octane at least it's like I want object buffer is 1 through 7 it finishes your frame and starts another render for that object buffer as opposed to this renders everything all at the same time which is yeah it's a huge waste of time so I if anything I would say you know render render 1 3 color matte and then switch your colors to like different objects if you need to just render that out because you're that way you're only giving two renders instead of like literally he would literally be six renders if you want wanted that many mess in object buffer for if that that made sense yeah definitely feel free to ask questions so 32-bit e^x ours yeah and then the way that you access them is this extractor yeah yeah so it just comes with after-effects now I don't know if it always did but yeah I just double-click it and then all sudden you get like this list of different channels so here one might actually you know want to fight so be really cool also you can say I want my object layer color and it gives me this then I'm going back into that and I want to shift on like my channels in here to all be I'll be read/write and all sudden BAM I get this as like a nice clean math that's all done just do this one effect which you know even though these are just image sequences they are sensor 32-bit and when you start stacking effects on top of them render times can get stupid liking and everybody knows After Effects is just like it's terrible when it comes to like previewing your your composites and stuff like that it's just very very slow so the fewer effects the better extractor can make that workflow a lot easier it also a couple other like process processes can unmold which is pretty good yeah yeah ok yeah so controller there in another way no that's that's the only way so you actually have to actually you have to put a octane tag on it and then straight up go into this object color object layer and you know you can mess with these as well to get different results with like an instance ID I believe is it's one of these just just try out these object colors mess around if you have it they're they're super good it's really nice if they also take the you know the depth of field and motion blur information into account so you can get some really nice masks you got I'm a big believer that doing your depth of field and motion blur in camera and especially something like octane a redshift is like the way to go as opposed to in post you don't have the control but it just looks so much better if you know exactly what you're going for so yeah let me move on this one which one is next say this one might be a little technical so there's this there's this node in octane called the random random color node and it's it's useful one of the really lame things about it is that it only works with instance objects so I mean right now I have these objects in a cloner right and if I turn off render instances you see they're not randomizing the color this is my shader right here and all I have is the random color node in there and this is the node it's just it's just a seed so you know I've messed around with it and I found some interesting ways to use it I kinda show some of those first off you know you can do this cool you got some variation so you don't like duplicate your object to make a bunch of materials you might say oh well you know you use a shader effect or something that those those things don't necessarily get along with octane the best so sometimes they work most of the time they don't so if you're able to work with instance objects this can be really useful here's another sample of what you what you can do with it I again really simple took a just a texture about like a wood or something like that it looks a little weird but I just put this random color into the power of it so it's it's offsetting the power from 0 to 1 essentially that's all this random color no one is doing offsetting from 0 to 1 so it's giving a different giving power next one is I this is something that I found that I was like super psyched on actually you guys get one blue that's not too bad okay um so I found that if I take that that color information that random color information and I remap it with a gradient node to just be these hard black and white then I'm getting like this variation so with just one material and octane and yes you can use very easily with other render engines but with just one material and off here I'm able to get different textures on these objects right and then taking it a step further I'm able to take you know a different random color node with a different seed and and I'm adding that on top of this first result that we have getting some more color variations so again with just one one shader I'm getting you know a pretty good amount of variation in here and this doesn't look beautiful or anything but it's the fact that you're able to do this this quickly without having to make a new texture and duplicate your your object is is pretty convenient and then here's one more so this is taking it again just another step further where I I I do the same thing I mixed two two different textures actually the same texture just offset a little bit differently and I'll zoom in on this in a sec so you can see in detail and then I'm multiplying that with another another one just to give some more variation and what's what that's doing I'll plug it into the diffuse so you can see actually real quick I'll show you this it's probably not gonna work because octane problems there's this button you can you can use which pretty much every modern render engine has locked in just got it recently is called solo node solo it and it's not working of course but sometimes it does work and it's great and then you unsolo not by right-clicking on that note in saying I'm solo maybe you can now actually you didn't used to be able to you used to have to click in here it drove me crazy for the longest time I had to like restart my cinema so many times yeah so what I want to show you is what this is actually doing so it's like kind of hard to see but what I'm doing is I'm offsetting this different texture and putting it into the bump so I'm getting these these very bumps and these very roughnesses and varied position of the texture and there's only two variations of actually I guess there's technically four variations of all these but just doing that gives you a much more random result than if you just had like one shader and then I'm doing the same thing with this the the color Channel right or the specular rather since this is a reflective material and then I'm able to get a bunch of variation with one shader just pretty pretty handy can really come in handy when you're like you have a short deadline and you need a like your render just looks too uniform and you can kind of get away with this source stuff that's cool maybe maybe it's useful next I want to talk about dirt the dirt their shaders sweet what it is basically is just an occlusion pass if you all are familiar with that it's just ambient occlusion just kind of in in like a real-time way so the base the base dirt shader comes in look in you see this far left one yeah as far left one kind of comes in looking like this nothing too interesting I'm just remapping it with a gradient for some reason I don't know why and there's like two different kinds of normals there's the standard when it comes in as and you can invert it and you get like this different results so that's what this second one is right is just the same sort of thing just with the invert inverted normals here on this one this is a really useful technique I use it all the time I think pretty much every semaphore the octane redshift artist uses this on everything just because it gives a little bit of variation not necessarily to this extent I kind of exaggerated it but what this does is it kind of gives you some nice roughing edges without having to go in and you know paint it yourself and and do all this this higher-end texture work this is a very cheap and modifiable that's a word a way to do it so all I did was I took that that dirt I kind of remapped it a little bit with this gradient so essentially this time using these gradients quite often as like as like a levels right and I'm putting that straight into the power so without without this you'll see I just get this right and then by it by itself we get this but when I put that into the power I get this nice result I think I've read mapped it again just to give it a little bit harder edges yeah I inverted it so that's kind of cool and then one of the topics I really like I'm gonna keep covering is like layering up your nodes whoops I I like to just build my nodes out like pretty deep and you can get complicated but if you like if you keep it organized and once you get used to it it'll make sense just try messing around with all this is is two different versions of that same dirt but then I multiplied them yeah just multiply them together and remapped it so just try different stuff try adding it try I wish they're the way to just like changes to add I wonder what happens if I subtract these from one another instead of multiplying them and they're you know it's just working like a blending mode I'm getting this result if I invert these kind of cool these are different no more so as results swapping these yeah so I mean there's there's some cool stuff you can get that you might not expect just by messing around the same way you wouldn't Photoshop you're messing around with blending modes and being like oh wow I realize overlay was gonna work this well here you know like when your color burn for some as useful now mm-hmm so yeah so this is really useful definitely mess around with with dirt I don't know why they called there but shoot it's sweet I want to talk about lights a little bit also so I do a lot of especially now and like my freelance work I do a lot of of device lighting and it's it's tedious and it's kind of boring but it can it can be fun there's a little bug going on so I'm going to resend it one of the best parts about octane is his bugs and crashes I'm actually really surprised to be having crashed that's sweet so yeah so here's a little I thought I had a shade for the most recent freelance product they did and I just like just straight up rib you know the the same kind of lighting techniques they did for the iPhone past generation and something I keep finding myself doing is rather than you know a lot of times you might when you're lighting a device you might want to like go in and use an HDR of a like an actual studio light like a softbox feeling that I'm finding I'm finding that I'm really enjoying just the straight-up cinema gradients like going in and disable some lights real quick so I can get my point across a little better here all right so now we're just working with this this top layer right and what I have in here right now is just like a radial gradient or circular gradient you can see if I'm from shifting these I'm able to control the shape of my light really really nicely so right now you know I'll just reverse this again you know I can do this I can I can animate these if I want to I can animate the actual lights Rebekah's percent so let me see was yeah so I want to say yeah turning these on you okay yeah so this is what my kid this is what my lighting setup looks like right now a big black box around all this because these are just flags like I tend to do that a lot I wanted I wanted to make a point octane doesn't use light linking which if you're familiar with just regular cinema4d and not octane if you in some of 40 lighting if you're like hey I want this light to hit this object and no other objects achtung doesn't do that it's a it's a unbiased render engine which essentially means that you put light in the scene that light's gonna be seen by everything and it's gonna calculate the light how how it is so which is which is kind of cool because that's how the real world works right so in the real world if you're lighting a phone you know I'm sure you mostly you've probably seen this like you got the the grip once said with a little piece of foam core like held up held together with a popsicle stick and other dudes like holdin his hat in front of one light and then there's like like screens and flags everywhere and just to get like this one little reflection and like this one little gradient on it which is awesome and you kind of use that same I can use that same mentality so like for this rig in particular I'm I'm not using like a big studio set up I'm I'm closing in the piece that I use this on or if I can pull it up no I can't actually then line the piece I use this on we have like a big set behind the phone and it's all colorful and has its own lighting setup and I don't want that lighting to influence the phone whatsoever because this spot is about what's going on along the phone it's a like a you I you I spot just to show off the UI like this app and so I want the phone to look consistent I want to be able to animate it I wanted to to not you know behave strange to these these rogue lights so yeah I just sort of put flags all around it and the reason oh geez the reason I'm not using like a box is because I want to actually you know at times be able to animate this flag up here and animate you know another flag elsewhere yeah so really the lighting setup is it's pretty simple it's two lights on top left side right side and bottom yeah I'm just I'm just using a black plane I think might be purple right now and then I I put another gradient in the Alpha channel just to like kind of give it some some feather and see I you can see it's really really simple lighting setup but I was I was trying to break down the a lot of times I'll actually do this all I'll look at like oh wow this new iphone lighting is awesome how did how is this done and I'll just try to build it or you know the Google the Google home stuff is like super super beautiful how is that done so that's another thing about octane there's one kind of light it's an area light so it's just a straight-up area light you don't have anything no but that's you know I you can kind of mimic spotlights just by making like a spotlight it is making your area like really really small maybe giving it a little bit of like like a feather and a gradient kind of like this same sort of thing but then just making them like super small because like it is in the real world the smaller light is gonna give you like a harder shadow and yeah so octane is super limited when it comes to this kind of stuff I've been messing around with redshift a lot lately and this is why I'm I'm just knocking on octane constantly right now redshift is yeah it's the future it's you can lightly Hank it's it's really really fast like at work we have probably one of the stupidest octane render farms these are all these are all GPU nodes so these are all for 1080 T eyes and I can hook up to his as I want it's great it's a lot a lot of power but I could get like almost the same performance with just one computer using redshift it's it's actually dumb but yeah you know so it's kind of like the render engine race right now in our industry and we'll see who comes out ahead it's probably gonna be Arnold yeah so so they did Barry I definitely I would definitely say use this surface brightness yeah tool and actually this brings me to a really interesting point when I'm making you seen because so there's there's a couple points that I wanted to touch on with that I used to do that a lot because the octane lights they just kind of sucked and they're they've gotten a lot better actually because I can find it lights so yeah when I go to lights these are my options targeted area light airy light daylight and IES light which is just like they're all basically an area light except for the daylight so let's say I'd made this area light um it's gonna render it open quick eye first thing I do is I just I'm like screw this black body I switch up the texture I don't mess with it and keep surface practice on usually turn this like five I don't know why oh and I turn off visibility and sometimes shadow visibility but yeah let's turn off now so let me make this shader real quick just gonna make a glossy shader like kinda like a Chrome or something and then maybe I'm out of hgri real quick a lot of times when I'm when I'm lighting stuff I'll use HTR eyes pretty much mostly this one which I took at a it was like some some business buy my work was opening up and I just like it show and I just like capture this HRI and I use it all the time it's super all right but it's great yeah it has a lot of interesting reflections so I turn this down a little bit so you can kind of see what I'm talking about so I got this I got this area light it's casting a neat neat let's say for whatever reason luce something let's say for whatever reason I wanted to have another area light behind it to like add a nice thin taller taller reflection like this but this one is where's my first one this one is like a really low value and the one behind it I want to like be additive and not you can see it in here it's actually like it's blocking that light right so you can see like this this line is a consistent it's like this one is is acting like a flag or a screen or something like that something you can do now which is why I really like the default so octane lights is this opacity thing that they added I make sure the Remo selected just grab that turn it down and now I get this nice additive but I'm not losing the light or the reflection at all also now you have the ability to impact the diffuse and the specularity differently so I can I can say I only want it to be a specular light and you can see it's it's it's losing some value because it's not actually casting the fuse channel it's only only the spec or the opposite where now it's just getting hit with the diffuse which can sounds like it's not super useful but it can be some things you see I'm cranking this up and nothing's happening but yeah it's kind of kind of like the main thing I wanted to touch on with lights is that don't be afraid to like sculpt them and the best way to sculpt them in my experience right now is is to take gradients you know mess around with them like this we turn this roughness down so you can really like get some really interesting results oh and also that oh that opacity you can see in this reflection my my texture is coming through black if you turn that opacity down your octane tide it gets rid of that so like adds adds an alpha to it which is super nice you didn't use to be able to do that then you can you know if you wanted to you could go in here and cool I crafted my light the way I wanted it this is the this is the shape I want but now I want to give it some more detail I can I can actually use the octane nodes not an actual node system but I can go to here so to multiply go in here I'm gonna go kind of quick so what I'm essentially doing is I'm adding an image texture to multiply like an actual texture over it so this is an HDR texture but look at the idea so now I'm actually getting some more variation which can look really nice in your reflections it's some little nuances to get some more detail so you can see there it's like just a little bit more more detail than standard right which can look can look really interesting because you know the real world isn't perfect obviously so when you have these like pure perfect lights unless you're Apple it's like it's kind of kind of questioned so yeah it's kind of a neat little thing right layers like like I mentioned my my whole mentality is like layered up just go for it try something new maybe it'll look right maybe it'll look really bad so here's a little thing I just messed with I came I was like all right we're never used in in the news version of octane they added an uber shader which is essentially the ability to have one shader with a bunch of inputs into it with a bunch of other shaders added to it before we used to have to use these things called mixed materials which you would make one shader mix it and if you wanted to add another layer to it you have to mix it again mix it again you end up with like five materials to do just this and it's slow and it if you like copied it to a new file some nuts sometimes the other materials wouldn't come over it was it was a headache but this is you know I I never even used this until today and it was it was just that intuitive that I'm able to like create this cool little like bronze thing I make the model I just downloaded some skin I don't really have like a goal but when I was making this and then they have a goal I just kind of like goofed off so I think it might be fun to like try to do that same kind of thing real quick and just show you like what that process is like and how the way I think about adding layers up to to get like an interesting result like this and you know this doesn't look necessarily photo real or anything like that but it has a cool look to it you can see added like a dust layer to just the top part even these crevasses there's some like rust or grime and there's randomly just like pieces of jade sticking out I don't know why but yeah so I'm gonna I'm going to try to make something like that again so first I think yeah it's the blend material not a goober shader it's a blend material oh another cool thing if you haven't experienced this and octane is you can actually I believe it's control control click and we'll pull up if you do it in your viewport it'll pull up the material that you control clicked so right now I'm just control clicking between the background and this this dude and you can see I can actually just drop it into the viewport as well onto this object this this other shader let's see if it comes up and did and if I control click that it doesn't come up but it should there it is and then on that note real quick there's also a really nice way to to get depth of field and octane through the camera tag we go saying I really enjoy it in depth the field and octane as opposed in post and it's as simple as control control middle control middle click to set your focus and and then go into this slider and it's not like if you're working a real world scale it'll get pretty close it's like the f-stop that you want and everything I'm not working real world scale right now so I have to like crank my aperture up to till like 10 centimeters which is an f-stop of point 2 5 which you know give me that lens yeah so if I can just crank this up I get these ridiculous results but you know you get this cool like miniature look it's it's pretty sweet instantly like compared to the other thing real quick compare there's this tool in the actual viewer called compare really useful I didn't use it for a very long time for some reason you can just store your render buffer on that note as well you can right click and say show in picture viewer so you don't have to render anything out and you just get your image sent right to the picture viewer super useful so I'm now comparing a to B which is the exact same thing if I go into this other camera which is the same focal length just no depth of field you can see I'm getting like this nice little exaggerated depth field which has some nice realism just with very little effort I'll see the daily kids I Instagram abusing this and you know you know the drill yeah same as clicking the F so yeah on that note there's a is this button this an F button for focus and you click it and turn this off you click it and you can just click around but you have to remember to turn it off which is kind of annoying but like if you just control middle click you get the same result turn this off to trauma don't click you get the same result without having to like turn it on so it's just kind of useful another thing that's super useful is this little lock key so you hit the lock then you're locked into like it'll be like the regular resolution the resolution of your output a lot of times I'll just work this way and you know I want to see it on this side so it renders really quick it's way easier than like scaling your window if you have your window and another you have like your your live view or in another window or something like that it's this is pretty handy yeah what else is useful this little guy in a like render region yes you guys probably understand this you already know that so where was it all right getting back to getting back to learn stuff but let's lay this stuff up all right so I kind of want to make something similar texture wise I'm thinking we start off so I'm in this new this new tool the blend shader we're just going to do will do for materials and I'm just gonna straight up add these materials right away I usually go in and add the material it's kind of weird I wish that there was a way to like solo it better maybe there is I'm just not familiar with it so essentially what I just did is I made these four materials they all live in one shader inside of there I'm able to mix between them with these amounts right so really quick and dirty just to show you let me call the image put it into the amount and I'll use just some grayscale image they have on hand and I'm gonna change the diffuse so you can see the difference and now I'm already getting just like some variation me this new system this new blend shader system has also comes with a new shader to new shaders the tune and the metallic I'm gonna mess around with metallic because I did that earlier today and it was it's pretty cool it's a lot like Kelly V ray I kind of like standard render you can change between these different modes you can also change your be RDF model which I know that means but I know that ggx is something that I'd used in redshift and in a in Arnold so I'm going to use that I think it's just the way that like the refraction is the reflections are calculated so from their high cool got this base base just like chrome because I I'm thinking right how how would this object be built it's just like just got out of the mold brand-new chrome with like a little bit of roughness to it right cool and then from there I want to add some I want to build up this material I'm gonna add some detail into some of the crevices so I'm gonna pull out that dirt node that we were talking about let me get all dirty and you see this is this is doing something I'm just kind of playing with sliders is it useful maybe I'm gonna I'm gonna invert it and I don't I don't really use invert note that much but I am going to use gradient because it's super good it's again it's just the levels go in and invert it right click invert cool so now I'm getting some nice crevices and um so the places the dirt goes to it's based on the curvature it's based on it's based on the normals in normal direction of belief so yeah the curve the curvature it's it's not quite like an occlusion or cavity if y'all are familiar with those two maps but it's a little different again other engines have different ways of doing it with a little bit more control the way you end up getting control and how to keep out of like I mean if you like this thing really nicely is using gradients and in other ways of manipulating the the raw dirt node so this is kind of cool I don't really I don't really know how to feel about the red I'm gonna roughing it up I'm gonna change the red to like a kind of brown and okay that's kind of neat from there I'm going to reattach one of these I'm gonna use this amount to apply this another image ahead actually will see some noise heck it all all right so we got a noise I'm gonna move quickly and just kind of what I do I just I just turn up the contrast to give it some nice obvious variation that modes fine Carolee tell what color it is right now so I'm gonna make it something obvious so now I can see like where this noise is living right and I'm gonna add this transform node kind of scale it down a little bit then bring like gama up to give some more variation and that's kind of cool looks a little weird but we're not trying to get anything perfect so from here I'm gonna want to try out a different kind of shader you this is what's really cool about this is like typically when you're using these when you would use the mixed materials in the past a lot of this is a lot slower and takes a lot more time to calculate then this one just blend material I'm finding this all out of them like that the same speed is you guys I did just mess with it today so I just changes to a specular material which is like a translucent trans material and I'm gonna add this thing called the scattering medium which is the way to add subsurface scattering into into your shaders one of the one of the two ways this is the preferred way there's just more more control and what I'm doing is I'm plugging in some color nodes to to manipulate the color let's see blue and okay so I'm getting that same kind of result I had before now hey I feel like the silvers a little overwhelming because I can't really see I want to I want to show you how I'd like the dust I can't really see it so I'm just gonna go in and change that real quick going to change my spec to like brown gold is battlin century cool that's that's something so now now I want to add some dust to like this top like the top of the the object and there's there's a really cool way of doing that with this thing called try planar mapping so just straight up I'm just gonna just pull out this try planar try playing our node and what's cool about this is when you're working in 3d applications there's different ways to get textures on to an object the main way is this thing called UV mapping which mode it's like motion designers like shiver in like fear when that's mentioned I don't mind it because I worked in I worked on game assets for a couple years so like I don't mind it doing it as soon was terrible don't recommend that but there's also other ways there's ways like this thing called box mapping which is essentially taking your object projecting the image from all different sides top bottom left and forward back and putting that same image on each side that's fine then you're left with these these seams though which can be sometimes to be very obvious and just make your object look super fake the singing try planar is I don't know how new it is it's near that you know the engines I use but essentially taking that box mapping box mapping technique and just blending the edges together that's great that's super cool there's also kind of real quick to show you what I mean by that so if I take a very obvious texture like this wood and I tie it to this guy let's go home alright I set this to a single texture let me see now I'm getting this texture all over the object if oh I'm sorry I forgot to add the projection node Octane's octan is a little tedious with like clarifying how like each image works it wants you to be like alright this image you know it sets up this projection also what kind of what kind of images it as it normal as an alpha image is it a float image float would be like black to white how do you want to wrapped all the way around do you want it like mirrored which is cool but it's also kind of can be annoying so there's what I'm doing now as I'm using this try planar mode to see it compared to like a box might just look the same with this object but the idea is that I'm trying to find a seam I think right here you get right here you can see a little bit of a seam and so like this grain doesn't match up with this granite perfectly what I can do with this try planar mode as I can kind of feather that using this blend angle just like a Fong angle and sometimes it's gonna make it like really obviously weird like you can see some of the grain now going over each other but at the same time it can be it can be super useful all right let's try planar totally that's a totally so so here's what you're asking you're right um let me blow this up a little bit okay so you can see now like how this tri planner is working right and by default this is what the like the box mode looks like we're getting this weird this weird lines these seams but it's kind of nice that you can feather it a little bit - tastes hopefully better than this something that's really cool which I was going to show with the the dust is I can let's say just want to do for this right and this is working really well in the X and the Z so I'm gonna just put this node right now I have it set to to use one texture in every coordinate but I'm going to switch it so it only does it in the X to the Z and then I'm going to put another texture in Y and if I think I can hopefully the screen the screw of those coordinates yeah so I just I just duped it put it in Y and now I have it kind of running the same direction which helps me like fake it a little bit better I don't know but it's really cool that I can like I can customize that so some things that I wanted to show was how I can like go and add add some like dust to this thing right so get in control troll click just put this somewhere it's not in the way all right so I'm going down to my last layer imagine this was the thing I was building before and I'm having multiple monitors also really good too so what i'm doing here is i'm actually just straight-up mixing a i'm doing that same technique where i used multiple images in a tri planner but i'm using this like white dust only in the positive y so it's only sitting on top of the object and then be able to like kind of blend that result down so what comes what you're seeing then is this dust chillin on the like the positive y coordinates of these objects and then without having to go and UV this thing and do all this fancy mumbo-jumbo you you know put some dust on there and it's kind of cool like i I use it all the time to not necessarily do like dust or texture things but I'm like I don't want to break up this parametric object that I have that I know that I want this texture on just the top of right so then I'll like inside of my my techni my material all I'll use a try planer and just have you know one material on the Y or the X and then another one on the other coordinates and can be super useful most of them it's so Mars is a Mars is a conference that my CEO puts on like by himself or he invites like 200 of these different disciplines Marr stands for machine learning automatic automation robotics in space and he invites like the best the best in each of those fields to this conference in Palm Springs and just like gives them this like lavish conference it's just all these geniuses together talking about stuff and why it's not loading but I then all their cut of it but we leave for the past three years have worked on like kind of design package of it it's not you never make like an intro to the conference but we we kind of make like ambient ambient visuals so like in between these speakers they just need something to live on the screen and so we're making these like a moving wallpaper is that to live in this like mid-century modern kind of style which represents the place the the conference takes place which is in Palm Springs at this hotel called the Parker it's like super super beautiful hotel and here's something here's some frames from it in this back right corner you can kinda see I'm able to like get this plywood sort of look with try planners so I'm not having to make like I wanted to have these varied shaders like these varied wood textures in between these like pylons or whatever but I didn't want to have to make like 50 of them right so I made four of them and each one of those had two different textures in them like I was showing earlier and then I always mixed it with this this plywood on the X and the Z so I I don't have to like have multiple materials on on a single object it is pretty handy render it a little bit quicker we have any questions yeah yes yeah so I was talking about that at the beginning let me kind of show you what I what I typically use I I don't really go over like 1024 and what unless I'm at work and I'm like I don't really care because we have like like I showed this is this is stupid nobody needs this nobody Amazon you don't need this I promise you but I'll take it so yeah the max samples like this is how I usually work that or 256 always working like the power fourth or whatever reason the fuse depth I'd never really go over six maybe eight sometimes specular depth I usually stay at six unless there's like translucent or specular materials then I go to eight or ten maybe GI clamp I pretty much just keep at ten all the time I don't I don't really go below it otherwise you lose highlights adaptive sampling though that's where things get interesting I've I was saying at the beginning I've I've gone up to like a hundred thousand samples on adaptive sampling when I like really finessed the threshold and the min samples and I had like 100,000 samples render a frame and like a minute and a half and it's it's crazy it's super super useful these parallel samples I think you're supposed to crank them up I don't really know yeah so best way to prevent that stuff is is use the octane lights use the regular octane lights don't use blackbody use texture make sure service brightness is on is on don't really go over 100 they used to have they still do the sample rate and stuff it's really misleading like in in every other render engine sample rate on a light is like hey this is how many samples I want to be put in here not the case if I have these two different lights and I want this one to be 10 - more effective on like ten times more samples are going to calculating that I would change it to ten and it's a ratio thing so if this one was at 100 and I wanted it to be ten times more this one's a thousand doesn't make any sense stupid so I just leave everything at one this for entire flies go hmm I feel like if you're working if you're working with like smaller or like working in like regular scale world with not a ton of lights and these settings I was talking about and making sure that your your camera imager stuff is all set so like this by default you should really run into it too much if you do just crank the highlight compression and pop pixel removal can be useful sometimes all this work with highlight compression all the way up to begin with and almost like work around that and like not get the really super detailed highlights but then at least I don't have to worry about you know anything blowing out or basing like that does that kind of yeah so I I use a lot of HDR's it's your eyes and I like collect I you collect the crap out of them I used this one which I took more than more than anything see if I can Photoshop it maybe yeah I use it so much pretty much any time I find like a gritty Shara HDR with like one directional light like one kind of natural or like soft body directional light I like the main source I'll use that and then I'll like turn turn it down super far and then add extra area lights to like kind of fill in areas that like or help shape it that way and then like I was talking about at the beginning I really really like here's it I really like shading normals this channel or this path I just find it I find it to be super super useful because I can I can take my lighting and awesome like you know shift my channels to to read and say okay this is this is now this is now mat so I can courage this down great that's beautiful set this to Illumina and kind of like go in and relight my scene a little bit like it's super super useful as well as a path I didn't talk about which is they can show that real quick this pass is called light pass that's it's literally just breaking out the data from every light and so if I have I only have I don't really have a good set up to show it off but try real quick yeah well that's or anything real quick simple HDR eyes I think they're really good sometimes I'll go in and just blur the crap out of it so I don't want to meet any detail so I think I have like several different blurred versions of every issue I that I use to different degrees like like this looks like it would be a really good HDRI to me just because there's like this nice fill color and the wood there's some details on the ceiling in the ground this this directional light lets me like very easily shaped the the lighting in the scene then you know if I if I wanted to fill in like a highlight right here just really easily just put a an area light right up there fill it in all right so this might be rendering I go to my multi pass so let's see if this no it's not ready cool all right so what's really cool about this is I'm sending out these light passes right and I can get a pass out of octane that looks just like this which is literally only this one area light right here and then this is Miami lights this is my my hgri that I have in the scene and you know so this is them together right you can kind of see on the horses like the front part what it's actually doing what this light is doing as opposed to that but like I can then clump all that myself super useful for device stuff anything you need a lot of care and it's worth doing I humbly do it for animations and stuff it's just like extra data not really worth it but yeah devices and stuff man this this is a huge huge time saver because a lot of times my working near a I would render device and I'd be like oh actually I want this more in high light also here I'm not gonna like go in and balance all my lights to have that one extra highlight I would just make another render of a black device with one light hitting that one specific area that I want render that out composite it this lets me like put lights wherever the heck out one I can make like I'm gonna I'm just gonna comp this whole image in post I'm just gonna be like I want this highlight I want this highlight I want this highlight kind of like a retoucher does a lot of times like a retoucher is like I want a photo with the light this way and I want to put it with light this way and I'll just paint it out I'll make it how I want sometimes that's useful just just object buffers for whatever reason with with octane just object buffers so avoid these these render layer masks they're they're terrible just get rid of unwanted so bad yes by you I do a lot of antics it might like my day-to-day but then one day yeah those are typically static or like a slight camera move and in in that case I can like really kind of customize how I want the lights to look and post with with something like you know that's in motion it's a little bit more challenging I still will kind of like I showed in that iPhone example I'll still like have these these flags everywhere blocking blocking stuff off and then these these other lights that are like super super close to the device kind of like it's a instead of there being this big studio light like you'd see in like these light kits you can download these HDR I like studios right and those those are great for some skills but for animation and stuff this way is super nice to get these like nice clean consistent lines and you can kind of like customize how the animations of these lines look it's it's weird when you're working at this small scale like with you're working with a car model you would still light the car the way you would in a studio right you would still light it with this like huge softbox above it and and big you know like long reflector or likes another softbox like hitting this one part of the car but with phones and like other small devices i I I was on a couple shoots actually where they were doing this to practically on watch like the grips and the lighting guy like straight up grab a piece of foam core and like or a tape measure and like random pieces of paper and like feather it and they're like they're like the feather by the putting a light like right up against it at an angle and all these little things that like oh yeah you could I see why they're doing this but you get so much more control if you just like do this in 3d obviously and like kept the lights really close instead of having to put them 10 feet out because the camera who's gonna see it otherwise right like I don't have to worry about the cameras seeing these things because the CGI I turn these lights off the cameras never gonna see him I kind of went off on a tangent but its weak it's weird like I I've been doing a lot of lighting lately so I even when I freelance like all the freelance I'm doing right now is like phone Chinese phone spots and there's a lot of Chinese cell phones out there I'll tell you what you hear ever bored try to count them but they're cool they're fun but like I'm learning a ton about how these devices can like look nice and depending on how like the shape of the device and the materials they're made out of I think bottom line from even like diving into some like the super cool like so my pieces like I got a chance to like went through some of those scene files everybody's doing their their lighting with these like gradients then being able to really customize these gradients and then as well finding finding a super clean HDRI where if I have like totally HD right yeah something you took like a DSLR no it's one of those Thetas the right code athina' yeah so sweet well yeah thank you very much for having me this is very stressful [Applause]

Channel: Cinema 4D Seattle

Views: 74,080

Keywords: C4d, cinema 4d, 3d, design, maxon, octane, octane render, otoy, animation, meetup, tutorial, seattle, sfi, seattle film institute, after effects, redshift, materials, texture, mars

Id: wsHO23Af3TE

Length: 68min 15sec (4095 seconds)

Published: Tue May 08 2018