Cinema 4D Fog Volumes Tutorial (Redshift)

hey everyone i've been playing around with the volume builder inside cinema 4d and running out some fog volumes using redshift and i thought i'd go over what i've learned so far and some of the tricks to get around when setting up a fog volume builder inside cinema so i've got some examples up here and uh what i'll do is just go over some of the basics so the basic setup and setting up the lights in order to work with volumes and then i'll quickly run through the example scenes that i have here and you'll notice i do have a new attempt at foam uh that got to be a little bit more in-depth than i thought i could fit into this tutorial so i've recorded a whole separate tutorial for that and the link to that is down below in the description so let's head on into cinema 4d so i've just got a basic scene here with a cube in a white space so let me just hit uh render here and i'll show you just a really basic scene i've got a couple of lights and area light and hdri so what i want to do is just come down to our cube here and i'm going to hold down alt and go up to our volume builder tab and i will click on that and make the cube a child of the volume builder and you can see immediately that disappears from a render view but we see a blocky mass over here in our viewport now i do see this because i have the display mode set to constant shading if you had like hidden lines or lines on you don't really see that but you see the uh the bounding box of the volume builder so make sure you're in one of the groud shadings quick shading or constant shading in order to see your voxels here so under the volume builder i'm going to change the volume type from sine distance field over to fog you can see in the viewport it updates into these small little dots instead of the big voxels so we see that this still does not render in our viewport alright so in order to do that let's go over to our redshift materials and select a volume material and we can apply that directly to our volume builder and still nothing down here let's select these here in the rs volume node under channel go down here and select volume builders volume builder now this is you see some of the other options here exposure effects for x particles turbulence hefty and volume builders is included in this so cinema 4d volumes do work natively in redshifts we select volume builder and now we do have something in the viewport it's a little weird though you can see it's kind of floating above the floor it's really dark what we do have to do is go into our lights and we'll select both of these at once because we're going to go over to the volume tab and we need our contribution scale up from zero so let's drag that up to one we can see now our lights are affecting our volume so a few steps we need to go through in order to get this working so you need to make sure the volume material has the volume builder in the channel and our lights are contributing to the volume now under the volume builder let's look at some of our options here we've got the voxel size set to 10 centimeters that's pretty big for our scene you can see how spaced out these little dots are so let's try doing that taking that down to half down to five and a little bit better let's go down again two okay now we're getting a little bit closer to the floor here we see our voxel size is big enough where there's a gap between our floor and the cube that's encompassing all of our voxels so putting this down again let's go down to one and it's a little bit better we can see in our viewport here we've got a much denser dot matrix and over here in our viewport it's looking a little weird so we can try this take this to 0.5 okay it's kind of okay but it kind of looks like we can see through it it's kind of a weird thing and i want to show you something here in a little bit but if you've used the volume builder the sign distance field volume builder before you know it's uh pretty straightforward it's pretty simple we drag another cube into our scene and we'll scale it down and i'll just move it over we'll try to put this there we go we put this on the corner of our cube and drag it into the volume builder and let's do small cube and under our volume builder let's change the mode from normal to subtract and nothing not what i would expect to happen so i was kind of frustrated at this like not really understanding how this worked so my understanding of the fog volume is that we've got a range of values here we're going from zero which is the black dots in the viewport up here to one on the inside zero being basically like a transparent voxel to one being opaque so the values in between would you know be like 0.01 0.02 however denser foxhole grid is so a range of values from 0 to 1. and my expectation would be that the small cube with its range of 0 to 1 will be subtracted out of the big cube so our values of 1 on the inside of our small cube would be subtracted from the values of 1 on the inside of our large cube leaving us with zero so my expectation would be that the small cube would be kind of booled out of the large cube and this is just not i i didn't really understand what was going on here so i was playing around with this and noticed that if i added a fog curve layer up above without even adjusting anything now if you're in a previous version of um cinema 4d i am in s22 in r21 r20 i did have to come down here and select this point on the curve and then it did update and then i saw what i'm seeing here so you may have to come back and actually select one of these in order for this update to take effect but now we're getting something a little bit more like what we'd expect right like this is working like the other volume builder is working and so if we take a look at this we can see now that this is a completely dense fog here and we can take this foxel size back up like like two we can see that this still you know we're not getting that like transparent effect i think we saw it like one if we take this off in the small cube you can see the difference here it's kind of like a transparent look but with the fog curve on let's just turn the this cube off with that curve on it seems to be working much more as expected so if anyone has any explanation to this i don't want to say it's a bug i just don't really understand why that would make any difference but uh if anyone knows what's going on there yeah definitely uh explain that to me in the comments i'd love to figure out what's going on so if we put our cube back and turn it back on see here we've got our fog volume rendering and you'll notice though that we've got this sort of let me zoom in a little bit here this sort of stair-stepping effect and this is really just we're looking at the resolution of our voxel grid and this is where you know doing like angled subtractions like this you're going to get that sort of like jagged edge so our voxels are aligned uh a little bit differently than this cube is angled so if we take this down 2.5 should start to clean this up and we're getting smaller steps now some other things we can do here if we look at this cube under our volume builder the small cube we have some options here inside voxel fall off change this from one to let's say five let that update and you can see here we've got a much smoother transition between these two shapes let's take it up to 20. and we're sort of cutting this off there we go you can see here we're starting this sort of dense fog going all the way up until it's transparent here and that is 20 voxels that distance now it's got a we've got another checkbox here maximum box will fall off and what that means is the perimeter of this box will be at zero and it will calculate the exact distance between the outside and the exact center point of our cube the exact center point has a value of one so that one has a opaque center point and then this gets more transparent now as we subtract this it's opposite so this is going to get more and more transparent in the center so if we take that off and go back to 1 and we're back to our original shape we can do the same thing with our big cube if we did maximum maximum voxel fall off same thing happens we start from the outside as transparent and then gradually get towards our full-on opaque fog in the center with a value of one let's move on and take our cube back to one voxel falloff we'll zoom out a little bit let's go over some of the other options here for adding layers or modification layers to our fog volume the next one in our list was still from the curve which we've already seen i guess i could open up the curve and actually show you here so we have from zero to one the way these values are mapped in our fog volume but if we take this point here and drag it down so we have zero to i don't know point i don't know it's like point two point one something you can see it starts to lower the density of our fog volumes this gets to be a little bit more airy and ghost-like take this even further it gets to be very light it's almost not there at all and that's just playing with these values we're remapping the values between from zero to one now from zero to like point one just going to reset this to default zero to one and take a look at the next option here fog range map the fog range map is basically just a numerical version of the curve i mean we've got minimum input maximum input zero to one and minimum output max output zero to one so the same thing so our output instead of one let's try point one and we have that same effect when we start lowering this .05 let me get that very thin fog ghostly look right there personally i much rather the fog curve is much more intuitive to me than the range map but if you need exact figures the range map is the way to go next fog add as you can see bringing the fog add on top of our stack here on top of our curve brings us back to the sort of strange result where we're no longer subtracting the small cube from the larger cube but for this instance i want to instead of adding 1 i want to add negative 0.5 to this stack and i want to drag the curve up back on top so now we are kind of subtracting 0.5 from the whole thing we can turn that off you can see a subtle difference let's make that more apparent by subtracting 0.85 almost all of it and we're getting that kind of same effect where we're bringing down the value so it's a less dense fog volume it's kind of you know multiple ways to kind of do the same thing and delete the fog ad and go to our next one now fog invert this is interesting so adding this on top of the stack again uh same sort of strange behavior but if we drag that under the curve it should now do what we want yeah so now we've just inverted what is being subtracted from what so now we have the large volume this cube being subtracted out of the smaller cube i'm not sure what sort of situation that would be good for um i haven't really found a an intuitive way to utilize that um so i will just uh i don't have any good examples for you so maybe you guys can come up with something interesting to use the fog invert with next one my favorite one fog multiply this to me is super powerful i'm going to drag the curve back on top so we get our expected results here fog multiply um so in this setting here multiplied let's say i'm going to multiply this by zero and the whole thing goes away now because every value in our voxel grid is now zero which is nothing transparent but since we can use fields which with each of these layers if i drag in a spherical field and scale this down we can see we're multiplying by zero inside of our spherical fields now we're just deleting out part of our volume same way we use subtract with a cube we can do the same thing with fields and a fog multiply and this gets to be really powerful when we start to look at some of our other options here for ways we can limit the multiply so i mean you know formula field linear field to fade out our fog volumes over distance um you know the i'd say probably the most powerful one in my opinion the shader field where we can put in a noise to drive areas of complete transparency so if we go into our shader field change the noise type to i don't know let's do like uh self or annoy just up the low clip and for this effect um i kind of want to get a lot of white areas in this because white is going to be the areas that are going to be applying a zero value to our fog volume so those are going to disappear so let's get some contrasty areas like that all right and turn the volume builder back on there we can see we're using the shader voronoi to delete areas of our fog volume uh now on this i should note let's move the spherical field and the shader field down into our objects shader field under noise we can animate our noise and let's go with uh 0.5 we can check this out here do animate let's turn off our render view and we can see how a little preview here is animating so we want that to happen inside of our fog volume so that is animating now let's for this instance let's increase our voxel sets this runs a little bit quicker and take a look okay so we've got our chunky voxel grid and our chunky volume let's hit play see if we can get here and as you can see no animation it is not running so it took me a while to figure this out under the shader field under refresh field we've got the noise type at the very bottom refresh frame you need to check that on now go back and our noise is animating through our volume my opinion that should be on by default but it is not i need to check that on to get the animation to run in the volume okay so let's go back and check out the last option here under our stack a fog smooth and let's take a look here and render this and it does what you expect i will point out though so if you notice our bounding box our original cube is still containing all of our voxels the smoothing happens inside so this blurring effect that's happening in the fog smooth is happening from the zero point of the outside perimeter inward towards one you know i first started playing around with this i thought oh it'd be nice to kind of blur outward to extend the fog volume out so it blurs in both directions but that's not the case so you're really just sort of limited still by the bounding box but we're blurring the values the interpolation between the values inside the cube hopefully that makes sense so we can exaggerate this in our smooth tab we have the operator type gaussian mean and median so i'll leave it in gaussian and change the voxel distance from two to five and let that update we can see the volume builder calculating down here so now see a much cloudy foggier volume much smoother and softer iterations you know as you'd expect just how many times this is being applied so the higher this number the more iterations the blurrier the foggier the volume um i want to change this back to the default by right clicking on the arrows here now we're back to two and one mean does something a little bit different it's a little bit tighter of a smoothing effect so it's not as large so you still get more i don't know it seems like it um kind of preserves more detail and median is an interesting effect i'm going to turn this off so we can go back to the regular sharp edge and i'm going to take this to median and then turn it back on so we can see the effect here what this is doing it may be easier to see actually without the fog multiply on so we're just looking at these edges and let's uh zoom in median is kind of uh kind of cool it almost uh sort of rounds the edges we almost got like a bevel effect so voxel distance up to five i'll kind of show you look at this like a bevel and we get the stair stepping back because of our uh you know sort of revealing our voxel size but um you know another another fog smooth on top of it maybe set to instead of gaussian set it to mean see if we can smooth these out there we go a nice sort of rounded edged fog volume yeah all right coming back here let's zoom out a little bit i wanted to go back over into the redshift volume node we've got the scatter coefficient and on the next tab down the absorption coefficient these are both set to 1. adjusting these also affects the look of the fog volume we can take these values and change them and make the volume look denser or more light by playing with these values so the absorption coming down you can see this gets very bright same thing with the scatter coefficient we take these down pretty far we can start to get the same sort of well if we go down too far we're sort of amplifying the light inside but we can get this to look very very soft and sort of adjust how the light interacts with this so this sort of like you know if you're going for like puffy clouds you're going to want to adjust these the scatter coefficient and the absorption coefficient to pretty low numbers to allow a lot of light in and adjusting these we can get if we bring these down actually i want to show you so in situations like this where we've got a scatter coefficient over 1 and the absorption coefficient down pretty low you can see how this is now looking almost like an emissive material so we're amplifying the light now that's coming into this fog volume so this is glowing now we do have an option to control just that under the emission now this does offer another channel to control emission and you could go down into the volume builder and select volume builder again to turn on this emissions let's take these back to one and one but i if you don't want this to be glowing or emitting light you can just leave this blank let me just delete this and as far as i know there's not any additional information um you know for like color channel or an emission channel there's no way that i know of of separating out in like the information that's coming from cinema 4d under the volume builder into a different sort of emission channel or scatter or color channel um if somebody knows a way to do that please uh yeah let me know in the comments um to be great to know like you know setting a spherical field here to apply only an emission part of your fog volume would be super useful but as far as i know uh you just get the one set of just a single set of data for this fog volume so all of these are controlling the same thing so back to the scatter coefficient i do want to show you there's um [Music] setting this let's go a little bit brighter and get this to be a little bit more light the tint effect we can adjust the color to this so do like an orange and a little bit goes a long way on this uh you can see here um we can tint this whole fog volume with this color here and also with the absorption coefficient tint down here so we go a little bit like more red you can see these combine a very intense way so um you know bringing up the absorption will kill off some of that extra light and bringing these back down we can still get that same light airy look it's just a push and pull and i think a lot of this also has to do with you know these numbers may be much different in your scene if your scene scale is different if if your fog volume is not the same size these numbers will probably be a little bit different another option actually you know i do want to show you so uh if we take this all the way down you get some interesting effects we take the scatter off completely we're now only sort of tinting the absorption of light through this volume i think it's kind of an interesting effect where you know some beautiful gradients uh can happen in here and so i you know interesting it could be some interesting ways to uh utilize this sort of effect uh without adding in this sort of um sort of the volume look it's sort of a flat smooth gradient and it's sort of the same effect i use for uh this poster here uh where i've just rendered out a camera panning along over the fog volume i can actually pull it up here yeah so this scene here i've just got a bunch of shapes i've thrown into this volume builder adding and subtracting and i've used a uh cache layer here to just keep this pretty simple so i just have a um camera animation sweeping around this shape and what i have done here is just taking the scatter coefficient almost to zero just 0.01 just just barely any scattering going on and a very low absorption coefficient and instead of tint i've changed the values of the ramp here the scatter ramp and that also allows for some interesting effects we can go from really subtle gradients so if actually switch back turn this off real quick switch back to our other scene now so i'm going to change this to 0.01 i'm going to come down into our absorption remap and add a point here without dragging it left or right i'm going to come down and adjust the saturation do another one here i'm going to take the white value here at the end which represents our opaque fog volume it took me a little bit to understand how this works so it's the same sort of idea that the perimeter of this fog volume has a value of zero to one uh going towards the center and it's the same here so this would be zero all the way to one white being the opaque or on voxel that represents the fog so if i change this from white to let's say like a deep blue we're getting that as our result and the falloff is pretty quick here so if i wanted the edge of this to be a different color i'm going to need to come in here and adjust it pretty close let's see see the effect there just another option as uh you know maybe it could be interesting for some non-photorealistic effects something more graphical yeah i'll undo that come back and re-enter in our volume builder i did want to bring up another scenario that i did run into it took me a little bit to figure out what was going on so let's make a new volume builder i'm going to do a sphere and just pull that into our objects and hold down alt and drag this into volume builder one now volume builder one has no material and dragging this material on it nothing we need to change it to a fog volume but it doesn't render it shows up here but it's not rendering take our voxels down to like one let's do it two for this so it speeds up so we can see it here in our viewport but it is not rendering and that's because each volume needs its own material it's referencing a specific volume builder here this isn't just generically the cinema 4d volume builder if we come down here to volume builders we can see both listed volume builder and volume builder 1. so if we say volume builder 1 our original volume builder turns off now we're left with our second volume builder let's take this down to one that looks whoops another thing i should mention under the sphere we have the same option as the sign distance field to take a low poly primitive and say perfect primitive so that the volume builder does not take into account the faceted low poly exterior just renders a perfect sphere for the volume builder to populate the voxels inside of it so what we need to do in order for both of these to show up is to go and create another volume material and we'll go into our volume material and change the tint to a bright blue and look like green and now we will apply this to our volume builder one and select volume builder one and come back into our original uh redshift volume material and change the channel back to our original volume builder and now we've got both of these in the scene that we can control individually another gotcha coming in here and reorganizing things and staying on top of what everything is we're just going to call this volume sphere and it disappears and we're going to call this volume cube disappears these do not update automatically these the channels in our redshift volumes need to be updated manually which is a bummer now we need to go to volume builders and reselect volume sphere to original volume material and change it back to volume cube took me a while to realize what was going on there all right so um all right let me run through some of these example scenes so i have the um landscape fog effect you see here it's a really subtle slow-moving uh fog in this sort of sci-fi environment okay so the way i set this scene up is very simple all i have is a um let's go to our perspective view here just a landscape object uh with a couple of area lights up above and i have a cube in my volume builder that's just covering my scene here and i've got that if i turn off the volume builder here i can show you the cube it's a really simple cube that just peeks up into some of these valleys so i've turned that into a volume and in our volume builder let's see here our cube and i've got maximum voxel fall off checked so that the top of this cube is very transparent and it's only until we get to the middle of our cube that we start to get the densest part of our fog so we get a nice fall off from the top to the center so basically from the top of our fog to the valley of our landscape and inside of the volume builder i should say actually before i go into that the cube turn off the landscape the cube has a displacer applied where i'm actually displacing the mesh to wireframe you can see my mesh and under the displacer i've got the shading set to noise with a very low animation speed so if i hit play here you can see this very gentle undulation i can bring that deformed displaced mesh into the volume builder and the volume builder will calculate each frame and adjust the bounding box of the fog volume based on this displacement so i've got this subtle undulation going on the actual mesh and then in the volume builder i'll turn that back on i've got a fog multiply set to .001 so almost completely off i'm just getting a hint of the mesh i wonder if i can render this but i've got a random field under the falloff if i turn that random field off can see it's pretty much gone nothing there but the random field is limiting the effect of that multiply to only where this noise is i've got the noise set to gaseous with a scale of 50 and an animation speed of 50. so this noise will be animating inside of our fog volume and basically deleting out the areas where this noise gets to be white and on top of that i've added another just go back to second multiply i'm adding another same thing where i'm multiplying by .05 almost gone completely i'm still keeping some of the fog there on the top so getting that like natural fall off at the top of the cube and under the fields tab i have another random field set to gaseous with a larger scale and a different animation speed so these two are combining to create this look so if i turn the landscape back on let me zoom out here you can see the effect if we zoom out here you can see it's only in this one area i don't have to render redshift environment or the fog and some of these things i you know i know you can plug in a noise into the um you know redshift environment to get sort of these volumetric effects but i do find this to be a little bit easier for me to understand and place things and art direct instead of doing like scene-wide effects the ability to just place the fog in one specific location is super beneficial so i was really excited when i uh found out that redshift could render these fog volumes directly i want to move over to the a more cartoony version so i've got this smokestack that i've animated in a way that's a little bit more stylized um it's cartoony so i can pull open the let's see the scene file here so i wanted to see what uh what would happen if i went for a more uh stylized or cartoony look and uh came up with a soft body dynamic simulation inside of the volume builder so if i turn off our volume builder here and our subdivision surface i don't need their interview for this let's come out of the camera view here so you can see i've got turn off this tube we can watch the dynamics simulation so i've just run this uh kind of this expanding sphere where this sphere here has been given a soft body dynamics tag i've uh let's go over here to dynamic settings expert i'm sorry two dynamic settings general you see i've turned off gravity here and i've given this sphere a soft body tag and i've taken the structural way down along with the shear and flexion way down no stiffness but a lot of pressure 18 pressure and i've also applied a field force with a random field and a solid so the solid is giving a direction up and the random field is adding in some random motion so that is being applied to our sphere that is sort of growing and expanding out of this tube so i've taken that and thrown it into a subdivision surface smooth this out and inside the subdivision surface i've added two displacers and i've given these displacers a noise but i've set the noise to world so that means that this the noise is stationary and our sphere is moving through this noise and that sort of gives that effect like the smoke is sort of billowing up through some turbulence so all we do then is just drop that into the volume builder i've cached the animation which makes this render much quicker so i've turned off the cache layer here so we can go back in to take a look at each of these layers so i've got the fog curvature i don't believe is doing anything it's just sort of correcting like as we've seen in the last example just sort of making sure our fog volume reacts the way we expect it to on top of that i have a fog smooth let me turn these off and take a look at the so this is the render of just the fog volume straight out of just straight from the subdivision surface into the volume builder i'm adding a fog smooth just at the default settings you can see it sort of softens that up a little bit and then i've added a secondary fog smooth does have a linear field so we'll let this calculate and zoom in here we'll see what this is doing you see the top of this is much smoother than the bottom so basically as this goes up into the air through this linear field it's getting smoothed more and more so we're getting full smoothing effect up here at the top i'm just limiting the secondary fog smooth down here at the bottom so we're still getting the undulating surface becoming smooth on top and on top of that fog smooth i have a fog multiply where the mm let's go back here the filter it's set to 0.05 so it's almost zero and so that multiply is multiplying everything except what's in this linear field and this random field so we're getting this sort of um fade out effect you can see here this linear field turn it back on so the linear field here is fading this effect off closer to the bottom so we're getting this multiplication of zero up here excuse me non-zero so we have this set to 0.05 you're in this hazy view here now truth be told i should have spent more time on this um look at the example i mean it's a pretty harsh cut off you can see the linear field right in here we're just getting this line as it's fading so adding in a um you know for instance this random field should probably be set to something like overlay and let's see here what size are we at here so maybe like maybe 200. yeah maybe something like that to just sort of break up that line so speaking of that sort of effect of uh layering up the norse is it i have this example here where i've rendered this sort of uh i don't know foggy hazy mist inside of this tank so i'm using a shader field set to box creation space so you have the option to do objects below where you are applying the shader field to you know a cube or a sphere whatever piece of geometry you have in the volume builder but this option allows you to actually just create a box of whatever dimensions are entered in here so i have a 90 by 68 by 60 centimeter cube which i've made here so if i take the tank off you can see this is what i'm creating here with just the shader field inside the shader field i'm using a layer shader where i've stacked up different cinema 4d noises so in the first base layer i've got the vl noise and a scale of 240 so it's pretty big in my scene and i've cranked up the low clip and increased the contrast to try to get some more of these black and white values and that'll give you know more contrast to the fog volume so more areas will be completely gone nothing and some will be completely dense so i've just stacked up this is just a regular noise with a big scale a luca noise animation speed um changed the high clip and just started stacking these things up to get uh kind of look i was going for and you know another thing don't forget refresh frame checked so that the animation does play through in the shader field volume uh back into the volume builder stack i've got the fog multiply set to zero with a linear field and the linear field is just sort of fading out from the top see here i've got this field from full on up top to fading off here so we're getting this sort of nice fade out from the top to the middle section i'm using a fog ad with a another shader field i am adding one and i've got a shader field with a linear field mask and what this is i wanted to get a more dense bottom area if i turn this off actually you can see so it's getting sort of this all over effect let's do these here so i can turn off the fog multiply and so this is um just the shader field working you can see here we've got oops we've got our layered noise creating this uh this foggy volume so adding on the fog multiply on top this is where the linear field is fading down from the top towards the center get this nice fade out but i wanted the bottom to you know look like it was like sort of emitting this smoke so i've used a fog ad and given it a shader field with some animated noise and a let me go back here oops and i'm using a mask with a linear field so i'm basically fading off from the bottom up so this linear field here is on at the bottom and then fading off here so we're giving this additional data here and just filling in the gaps at the bottom but it's still moving and still undulating and back here i've got a fog smooth just to smooth out a little bit and i think my things are pretty low here yeah i'm using a median and just one and strength of four percent just to give it a little bit of smoothness and just turn the tank back on yeah it's kind of a stylized effect you know it's not the smoke isn't really interacting uh with the bounds of the box or um you know really uh being emitted from the bottom but i think it's a pretty good fake so for this last example i have um sort of an interesting setup and super simple but i like the idea of creating the sort of wall of fog that um you know objects could sort of like fade away into um but the this wall would still be able to um you know accept shadows and um you know glowing objects would still glow inside of it so it's uh kind of a cool thing but it's super simple i mean really this is just a the same thing we set up from the beginning this uh cube and i've just put this cube into the volume builder and i've given it a inside voxel follow-up of five so it's a little bit uh softened um but i'm putting a pretty big uh fog smooth on top so it's really giving this a pretty big fall off here and uh for the um settings of the texture the volume texture i've just tinted the scatter coefficient a you know pretty bright yellow and left the tint of the absorption uh the same and just played with these numbers until i liked the density until i liked you know how much the chandelier was sort of fading off into the background so if i you know for instance like take down the absorption you see this gets much brighter um i take this down too you can see we'll be able to start seeing more and more of the chandelier as this gets less dense see now we can see all the way through it into our hdri just undo that an interesting thing to note if we did want to maybe make these fake candle things glow if we grab uh i have an emissive material here i'm just going to drag onto the chandelier object and then limit it to the selection i've already made of these little lights and it works okay we've got some interaction here with the with the fog um if we look in here in our light material i just have under overall the emission set to this blue with an emission weight of 10. if i crank that up to like 55 let's say it's just something crazy you can see this sort of glowing effect inside of the inside of the fog but i wonder if maybe a better solution to this was to utilize the redshift mesh light so we can compare the difference here i'm just going to make that polygon selection invalid so that should turn this there we go and we turn on our lights oh did they get messed up there we go and i have a mesh light here it's just an area light set to shape instead of rectangle i've got it on mesh and it is set to the lights geometry so if i turn that on so you can see it's a similar effect but i have a feeling that this is going to be a little bit more accurate and it's probably going to render a little bit better than using the um the emissive material to look at just these lights so it's close but i do feel like this may be interacting with the fog volume in a more realistic way um i don't know for sure oh i did want to go over one other thing uh i forgot splines work really well inside of the volume builder this example seen here just playing around with some of these fog volumes and just drew a really quick spline and just went into the volume builder and just dragged the spline right in and inside of the volume builder when you drag a spline in you get the option for radius and density so right now i have the radius set to nine and density of one i think this comes in at a kind of a low value where you get this sort of stepping it's like spheres are generated along this spline so setting this to one uh fills that out and the radius i just said you know what's it coming at set this to default 15 this big chunky volume let's set it back to nine another cool thing is we have the scale along uh options we can drag this down and scale splines right inside of the volume builder which is great and yeah you can throw pretty much anything into the volume builder like any splines you can even do a hair object and set the hairs to render as splines and so each of the you know hair splines you get this sort of effect which would be really interesting even works with the dynamics um the hair dynamics so super powerful so obviously just playing around with this scene but it's really excited about the options that the fog volumes uh give and i think it's kind of a unique look and there's a lot of options between changing the colors and the gradient between values inside the fog volume or giving a really dense mesh and i'll show you in the um what i've come up with to replicate foam uh in the tutorial that's linked down below but really looking at ways to vary some of the the way i'm texturing or where i'm showing objects in animations and in still lives and um some of the renders i've been creating so i thought this was uh really interesting and i was really happy and excited with the results so i thought i'd share with you what i've come up with so far so if you like this and you're interested in taking an even deeper dive i've got another tutorial linked down in the description where i take another pass rendering out foam using this fog volume technique thanks so much everybody

Channel: i_go_by_zak

Views: 13,610

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Cinema 4d, Volumes, Redshift, C4D, Tutorial, c4d tutorial, Redshift Tutorial, Redshift Volumes

Id: -tP9kqS0Dks

Length: 50min 12sec (3012 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 11 2020