Cinema 4D and X-Particles Nebulas Tutorial

hey what's up motion designers this is gio from family business and today we're going to take a look at how we can deal with these types of renders those abstract space nebula like renders we're going to use cinema 4d x particles 4.0 or above and we're going to render everything using redshift render so i apologize for my creepy english i'm not a native english speaker and let's jump into cinema 4d and let's get started so i'm going to create a helix and i'm going to rotate my helix 90 degrees so it's vertical and if i take a look at this render let's break it down i have a circular shaped vdb volume and this volume is copied and rotated around so uh we need to get a almost circular shaped vdb volume that has one side very puffy and smoky looking and the other side side kind of sharp and very defined okay so i don't need this many turns on my helix so i'm gonna dial down the end angle to 360. i'm gonna make the start and end radiuses smaller as well like 150 and 150 i'm gonna create a sphere i'm gonna make its radius 25 centimeters and i am going to uh assign the align to spline tag on the sphere before i animate the sphere on the spline i will i want to make my spline a little bit jagged and irregular so i will get a displacer deformer drop it under the helix go to shading and apply a regular noise i will jump into the noise and increase the scale of my noise you cannot direct this noise however you like i will go back go to object and maybe increase or decrease my noise strength so at this point let's leave it like this and i want to convert this spline to an editable spline so i will drop this helix in the connect object hit c on the keyboard and now we have the editable spline so let's go to our uh align to spline tag and put our connect into the spline path now we can animate the sphere along our spline using the position and let's hit let's increase our frame count to 150 let's grab our sphere our align to spline the tag and hit the auto key button so i will go all the way to the end and animate my position to about somewhere about here great i will duplicate my sphere and go to the first frame and do the vice versa so i will go to the end of the animation i mean end of the spline change the position to 100 go to the end of my animation and a little bit past the first circle so they intersect and go great so i will create a connect object drop both spheres in it and i will assign a x particles exposurefx source stack to the connect object if i hit play nothing happens because we need to create an uh x particles explosion explosionfx container so let's hit it go to the first frame align our container to everything else and hit play great we have an animated smoke great now let's customize our smoke let's go to our simulation and type 0 under the gravity so if we hit play now smoke will stay on its place everything is fine but we need to get this smoke moving kind of randomly so i will go to x particles modifiers motion modifiers and xp turbulence if i hit play nothing will change because uh whenever dealing with the explosive effects we need to tell explosive effects to use to which modifiers do we want it to use so i will go to modifiers grab my turbulence and drop it in the modifiers list so to the first frame hit play and everything everything is cool now we are moving our smoke using our turbulence we can customize our turbulence however we like um but in in this shot in this shot uh as i remember it's set to standard uh we can also customize the frequency the noise scale strength let's leave it as it is i will slightly increase the speed strength to 10. let's hit play great let's look at it from another angle and whenever we see smoke colliding with exclusive effects container we can always increase the container bound size [Music] let's look at it one more time we need to make the container slightly bigger great great great great great uh-huh i will pause the so what we have here is this very messy smoky one side and very defined the sharp other side if we want to take a look at our exposure effect simulation with a better resolution we can go choose the exposure effects go to display and we have two two two things here the slices count i can increase this to let's say 132 and i can increase the resolution to again let's say 132. and we can take a better look at our smoke simulation very good we can align our container accordingly to avoid smoke getting cut in the collision parts and let's let's cache everything before we cache let's talk a little bit about our other parameters we know that we decrease it to grab decreased the gravity to zero we have also these two parameters the simulation scale and the simulation speed so simulation speed is responsible to how fast things happen for example if we have gravity and we increase our simulation speed this gravity happens accordingly if we increase it to 200 percent our gravity is happening is lifting our smoke two times faster our smoke is getting um two times faster dissipation and all that jazz so smoke is be getting faster two times the simulation scale is an interesting parameter uh if we go uh lower than 100 our smoke will get very wrinkly very detailed but we we also need to go very low on the voxel size okay if we increase the simulation scale more than 100 percent our smoke will be much more smooth with fewer details i guess i mean not the fewer not fewer details but our smoke will look less big i hope it makes sense so um the voxel size very important parameter generally lower the better but i have a very strange experience in terms of voxel size because whenever i go voxel size one and below i get very strange results very very strange results simulations absolutely don't look like they should look and so the minimum i i go is 1.5 i will type in 1.5 i will create my x particles cache object change the efx format to openvdb and choose wherever i want to save my vdb simulation so in the e drive work nebula cache hit okay build cache and let's let's see what we have and the simulation is done and our simulation looks like this okay let's go ahead and take a look at how we can render everything using redshift i will go ahead and make a new composition i will make a redshift render view i will place the render view somewhere here i will make a by 1920x90 trendy composition i will make a redshift go ahead and make a redshift volume object and i'll i will choose the path work nebula cache explosionfx and i will choose the last frame maybe or somewhere here let's use frame 116 and we got our c our one frame volume in here now we need to see how this looks like in our viewport to get an idea of the shape and size and i will go to display and by default the preview is set to off so i will choose the points and i will increase our point count just a little bit maybe to 50 and our smoke simulation looks like this okay now we need to create a material for our smoke create materials redshift materials and create a volume material i will drag this material into our volume object and i will make a simple area lights lights area light i will move this area light on the side rotate it 90 degrees so it's facing our volume object and i will hit the render and nothing happens because in redshift we have to tell lights to to see volumes so in order to do this i will choose the area light go to volume and the country set the contribution scale to one nothing still nothing because we need to tell our volume material to use data from our redshift volume in this case we need some debt to use density i will copy this thing and paste it here or i will manually type in then c t okay and we have our smoke now in space there is no atmosphere so if you're going in the kind of realistic direction you should not use the atmospheric effects but i like the way it looks and to me the most important part is the render to look cool so i will create a redshift redshift environment object redshift environment object is the atmospherics of ratchet okay so i will go ahead and choose the color tint of this of our atmospherics to be a little bit kind of kind of pinkish dark pinkish looking okay and i will set the scattering scale to point point one one i can uh go even lower lower and now we have our atmospheric effects so uh next step is to create a camera okay if you take a look at some space shots they are basically shot using huge telephoto lenses i will create a 1550 500 millimeter camera look through it go back go back again so we're looking from from a very far distance i may angle the camera i can also rotate my volume as you can see it's cut from beneath so i can always go ahead and recalculate the simulation recalculate the simulation make the container a little bit larger and recalculate the simulation by the way the simulation took under 10 minutes on this machine this is an i9 with 64 gigs of ram and the gpu is rtx 2080 okay i'm gonna leave this as it is i'm gonna rotate my volume object and let's work on the volume object itself so let's give this some color to to to our smoke object i'm gonna go ahead and make it a little bit warmer look a little bit warmer okay great it looks sweet now i will go ahead and make my area light a little bit smaller just a little bit smaller and maybe change the color of my area light to a cooler color great i can duplicate this area light since it's already i can duplicate it on another side i will rotate it 180 degrees to create kind of basic two-point lighting looking thing i can also uh place our the second light from a little bit from the back side great and we can also use the temperature and not use the color so if we switch to temperature we can either cool it or warm in it i'm not sure how to spell it correct i'm not a native english speaker i'm sorry [Music] let's make the the second light a little bit warmer now we have some beautiful definition we have shadows i noticed that in redshift when rendering volumes if we turn on global illumination it changes almost nothing okay maybe i'm mistaken but i don't see the results so uh when dealing with with shots like this i don't use global illumination in octane it's totally different so i will set this to none and now we need to kind of place strategically very small spherical area lights to create some highlights and interesting looking cool and warm tones around our smoke object so i will also duplicate my volume object whoops i will save this thing i will rotate this around maybe pull this down also rotate this guy gorgeous i like it okay we can create another area light or duplicate the existing one i will duplicate the existing one i will switch back to color mode i'll make it a little bit warmer blue i will change the in general excuse me i will change the shape of this area light to to a spherical one so where is this in the ray it should be in general area so in general we have the area tab and instead of a rectangle let's choose the the sphere great i will play take a look at this from the top view i will maybe hide the lower one lower lower volume object i will grab my light and place it somewhere inside of this circle so it's lit from from inside and work on the color and the intensity of this light i will drop down the intensity to 35 make it maybe bluer looks nice maybe switch to more greenish blue and drop the intensity even lower like 20. we can also move this light a little bit up but i like it lower much better looks nice i can also duplicate this light and move this on the other side and switch from cool color to a warm color and create a interesting look i also can increase the brightness of this volume take a look at it from the top side and we have some beautiful contrast between orange and blue uh-huh we can i will unhide my second volume i will hit save now we have warm on this side cool on this side why don't we kind of mix things on the lower sides lower side so warm in here cool in here so i will duplicate this guy looks cool uh maybe it would be great if we add a light from the top to highlight this area also i i find it very interesting when when duplicating for example this light this was all yellowish orangish and we duplicate it right if we change even slightly the color image becomes interesting automatically so i will just slightly change the color so we get more color variations in it okay the blue one maybe since it's very low maybe make it a little bit cooler great uh and also play with the light placement in the z direction okay so it's right here maybe to duplicate this somewhere inside this volume great let's go ahead and duplicate this light somewhere here so we get a warm highlight or maybe your you you will like more more cooler one in here great also where wherever you see a hole you can pop a light inside of this hole and it becomes very beautiful automatically let's take a look if we can change some something in the volume material itself so if we play with the scatter coefficient we can make things brighter i mean the smoke make the smoke brighter let's set it to two i liked it better with the one let's leave this on one absorption coefficient if we go lower it will make things more transparent and the smoke will absorb much more light so i won't touch this uh great let's let's make more duplicates so far area like to maybe create more highlights i will drag this guy somewhere here make this warm again maybe a little bit desaturated up the brightness 275 maybe move this from the front so it's from the front to the back you can always check and uncheck lights to see if it makes good changes okay maybe change the color to some other red ish color the the brightness on 75 is too much i think let's go 35 again so let's go 50 and let's try some strange weird colors like pink or maybe greenish it desaturated everything completely let's go to a warm color again or maybe place this up above okay looks interesting let's place it a little bit back so we keep this dark part so it keeps dark in the shadow so maybe even back looks great looks great and still now i thought i could get away with this cut but i don't like it anymore let's save this file i will go to my simulation i will make my container larger slightly larger great i will go to frame one go to my build cache recache everything and let's go ahead and see and great the simulation is complete it took almost the same time 10 minutes about let's go to my nebula lighting setup go to my redshift volumes these two ones i will drag those down let's go to my redshift volumes reload those volume files let's choose the 17 this time great uh and uh value vdb files take a lot of place so if you're using only one frame to complete this image you can get rid of rest get rid of the rest and shift delete those so now let's let's work on our volume material a little bit more and i will go ahead and increase the scatter coefficient to three and let's talk why because whenever we increase this more light goes travels through our volume and this makes our volume brighter we will need to decrease our area lights intensities so i will go to my first emitter first area light and choose the 50 i i will the rest i will check the second one and go to 50. i'm avoiding the bright spots i'm avoiding the huge highlights so i may go down even more on this one let's go 35 and this way we get much more interesting volumes more light travels through our smoke okay make it ten maybe five maybe play with the collar more or the position i will move this one up great check another one this one i like bright kind of but i will still still i will decrease this to 25 maybe great let's check another one let's go with the weird color on this one pinkish looking decrease the brightness if if needed maybe greenish looks cool to me the the green complements the the red reddish tones and it creates this white look so this one i will leave maybe this one it creates a huge highlight somewhere here let's play with the color yeah i don't like this let's leave it as it is this one is very interesting i mean may play with the position of this light let's choose 10 check it uncheck it see what what changes it makes looks cool let's play with the color one more time looks cool maybe dial down the intensity a little bit great let's pop it back up maybe increase the brightness and this whole process is playing with the colors and temperatures and positions of the light okay so this one this one looks good let's go down on the intensity let's change the color great great we have a lot of variation in here uh-huh and the super bright top maybe play with the color make it a little bit greener play with the intensity play with the position i kind of like it this way maybe looks cool let's try something other i don't like this go cooler on the top and from the back okay maybe green green one kind of makes it a little bit beautiful but i don't like it let's leave it as it is [Music] and that's it let's use our houdini jail particles to create stars and talk about uh depth of field a little bit uh look at this we have very beautiful detail in here the smoke is thin very thin in this part and thick all around looks cool looks cool we can also make a ton of variations with the with our nebulas with our smoke objects we can duplicate those guys we can rotate and play a lot we can change the size of the of those volume objects but not with the scale tool if we want to change the size we have to change it through our coordinates so 0.5.5.5 and oops 0.5 0.5 it will make the smoke object smaller okay so we're almost done everything rest is just your imagination how far you want to go with this setup choosing colors different angles if we take our camera and rotate our camera we get very interesting different looks okay for example this thing is absolutely same but with the camera tilted upside down in this one and zoomed in completely let's talk depth of field in in space in real space shots i guess how how you would call it they don't use wide aperture because the sunlight is very bright in the space i think so in space you don't have that much depth of field and if you want to go to the kind of real space look you should completely avoid i think that you should completely avoid the depth of field but uh if you add a depth of field let's let's add by the way you should you should click on the camera right click the the redshift camera tag i will create create a null object somewhere in the middle uh grab my camera in the objects i will put my null object in the focus object and i will go to my redshift camera tag in the bokeh i will i will enable override and enable this way i have the control over my depth of field okay so uh also i will change the focus derive from camera only focus distance now i have control over over my coc radius if we increase this we get our depth of field and the power of depth of field is controlled by the power so bigger the number the the blurrier the of autofocus areas will become so let's see let's try 20 and 20 and from this far away you don't see much depth of field but if you go crazy high let's see what will happen you you you will start to see some depth of fields and again you don't have to try zero depth of field because you can use these types of shots to kind of imitate something happening in in the maybe blood vessels or some somewhere very microscopic environments and have fun also also where i forgot to mention is i have stars all over and i think the easiest way to generate stars to create starts still and the most customizable art directable way of creating stars uh is in the after effects or photoshop so in the after effects i would create a null object and export my camera animation along with my null object and do some fake 3d star images all around so that's basically it this is the basics of space like renders in cinema 4d with x particles let's see how we can animate this thing i will put my camera under under the null object uh let's hit save so we don't crash i will enable my auto key go to my last frame and rotate very very slightly my my null object oh it looks cool i can click the make the right click on my null object so f curves make everything linear and whenever you render this you get a beautiful nebula like render that's it oh ho i hope you liked it and see you next time bye bye

Channel: Motion Designers Community

Views: 46,023

Keywords: motion designers community, tutorial, motion design, video, copilot, greyscale gorilla, greyscalegorilla, eyedesyn, brograph

Id: cQYNh5sydag

Length: 39min 53sec (2393 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 14 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/stuff_rulz]

Hey, thanks! That was a fun tutorial and I learned a lot. This is how mine turned out. I was thinking of making the top and bottom look like fire expanding outward from the center, then a couple areas of some fun colors. Purple electrical storm area in the back, the fun blue part at the top. I didn't have PS or AE and got tired at the end, so no stars :p

Had a good time with it though! :)