Cinema 4D Hair - Learn how to grow and control hair in Cinema 4D

today's tutorial is all about adding hair and using brushes inside of cinema 4d let's go hey everybody its Nick here yet from grayscale guerrilla comm bringing you the tools training and tutorials to help make you a better motion designer now today's video is recorded during ask GSG which is where artists and designers just like you can bring you our cinema 40 questions live to us and we try to answer them live on our twitch channel so if you'd like to get more info about ask us g and learn where you can't ask your cinema 4d questions link it up down below I'm also going to link it up here in YouTube also if you've missed past seasons and episodes of asks us G we also have those available on our training site we're going to link that down below as well if you're interested alright today's video is all about playing with hair and brushes in fact the brushes panel I've rarely used and Chris actually opens it up we start to learn what we could do to manipulate hair and in fact what we build is a kind of a hay-bale look out of these hair and brushes so let's let's stop talking about it let's go ahead right on in to cinema 4d and let's see how we tackle this question everybody welcome to another ask GSG today it's me and Chris we're in the chat room here and we're trying to answer questions in the chat room like this one from rod let's go check it out rods been asking some great questions you may have seen him in other ask GHGs um he linked to this uh this render from faux real or for real for you I'm gonna go for real I think he just kind of blend them together I've seen their work around a lot did they do some really cool stuff really cool looking yeah come check this this whole page out and and give them a give them a follow to their works really cool um rods specifically asking about this kind of hay-bale style look with what like rope going around it little plastic thing it just got a lot of little detail to it and um but it also might be something you know with kind of like one one texture that we could focus on in one kind of spot so let's uh you ready yeah we're focus the hey well this whole thing might dead-end we're making this up as we go yeah so we we actually we actually are not exactly sure how this is Mabel but we're gonna we're gonna do our best to figure it out so let's head on in a cinema goin on and do it well first of all let's decide the primitive but I think that right away you should get this thing lit like get the primitive lit and then based on that now we can start and make the hair the hair we're gonna try and tackle this with hair oh try and make that look more real but we should have the basis of lighting so what primitives should be kind of based off of generically we're doing for going for weird shapes I like going for the Platonic yeah and then tinkering with the different primitives you get the cool like dodecahedron that one's neat five-sided yeah I say pick I say pick one you want now this is gonna be a little tough because I think hair is a different thing to render and light very much then a primitive but I get your idea like let's get some lights in the scene so we're not fighting against especially if you going to tackle this thing with hair so we're not gonna fight against it you know so okay there's our size there's our approximate color and yeah I think it looks sexy so knowing that we're gonna work or I guess I should ask you you you talked a little bit about maybe doing this with hair is that your first tackle are you gonna get a geometry it's it's it's gonna be we're gonna use hair and then put geometry on the hair so we'll place it using hair but then actual actually render real geometry okay so it so I would actually tackle this slightly differently if if you're going to use hair or geometry so I'm going to set it up I'm going to set it up for um for kind of hair a little but mostly geometry and I'm also going to set up a camera so we're kind of facing the way the same direction sure all the time so here's our camera I'm going to just zoom in a little bit not that much there we go and our first light is going to be um now probably out front and it's going to be kind of this up into the up into the right light and you can um probably want to use area lights although I think we're going to go in for an another round of lighting so I'm going to try to keep this fast rendering for you Chris so like soft shadows or that can get swapped later to be airy or something yeah and then I would say it's a global light for the rest of it so it's very bright scene right so I want to take a global light just kind of give it a general light over the whole scene like 50 or 60 percent and that's going to be everything and then I just want to see a little bit um when you get that detail in there it's also going to have a lot to do with ambient occlusion so just so we are just so we're clear like once we get all those little strands going we're gonna need little contact shadows between every one so that would be like kind of my super base lighting that's going to render really quick and then I think I would go in later and maybe replace this with a softbox or something but I think this will be the fast way to start sure you want a background here so we're not rendering on black yeah so we can we can kind of put our own little gradient back there if we grab a background background and create a new material one day we gotta do some of the foreground it gets no love foreground what would you use a foreground for like a lower third or something I guess I guess After Effects is always my foreground element you know like that's how addicts is your foreground right so we can add a gradient here uh and the gradients actually have like a diagonal gradient and we could just kind of put some some fun kind of colors in here sometimes I'm stuck with this like orange to pink kind of thing all right it's kind of your deal I dig it that's good it always looks nice it's kind of like pale orange too pink look so there you go so now we have our basic look um you know we'll switch some colors around as we go in fact I'm even just going to take your thing and make it a little bit more abstract um color wise just we could focus on that I think you could still do the hey but then that way it's it's a little bit different you know sure that alright alright that's uh that's my super basic set up I think and then we'll do a pass as soon as Chris what is it do forward it's the fourth as soon as Chris has some more stuff to light we'll tweak it but there's always as Chris's same and stuff it's always a back and forth between lighting and texturing and then making your object if you think about it in in the real world you know you're a lot of the times as a photographer you already have the object in front of you and then and then it's up to you to light that object to make it look good and really in 3d you're kind of working at everything at once you're creating the object and lighting it and moving the camera around so there's always going to be a lot of changes as those three things change if Chris gave me this just finished um it would be a lot different than you know doing this pre light sure this has an idea oh yeah does I take these basics up like I can I can work towards the lighting and then once that Sun you can relight based on the geometry so it's it's really just going back and forth and doing that over and over again I'm ready now we're gonna try and tackle this guy with hair I just saved it so we can screw it up and crash yeah you want anything I'm going to go ahead and make this guy editable and we're going to start right away by throwing hair on this guy now if we're going to get if we're going to get really detailed and we might want to do this we might use some hair tools that I think most the time people don't end up playing with too much so we're going to go to hair object add hair and in force boom there's hair if we get render right now there's going to be a bunch of hairs on it not terribly exciting um so as far as I like to look here we got none of these are the same like if you look at this one this one's kind of pushing off to the right this one's got a swirl in it like this one's just kind of going left to right like all spiky all over the place like every single one of these is completely different so we'd actually we can't just click a button and have this look like that we'd have to do a lot of individual attention on these bits so we got and so many decisions to make on this first of all first of all we don't have anywhere near as many hairs as we need so we can make like 10 times as many hairs but we got keep in mind we're going to eventually make this geometry so we got to keep in mind that you know once this is actually a bunch of polygons it's going to really slow us down the hair render super quick but right but the geometry will not right actually the gem tree might render relatively quick but it's going to run incredibly slowly in addition to that we have like how many segments we're going to need which can become really important and then especial for this one is the length our object is relatively small so I'm going to change our length down to something shorter like 50 and that's giving a shorter strand now we could if we were doing this with hair we can go into the hair and right away like maybe grab some hay like colors which I'm just guessing here let's go from kind of an ya yellow to maybe an orange your yellow and then I think we'd pull way back on the specular or maybe get relatively shallow specular dull yeah and then like we'd have to pull our thickness way up and the thickness is maintained pretty much throughout so we could have these don't get thinner over time we have them get like a little thinner and then we got the overall scale like some of them are bigger some of them are smaller so we can put like a lot of variation in here so they can get bigger and smaller and let's just take a look at that this is gonna be very different than what we had a second ago it's very silver nice um so if you pull back on the global light Chris you'll get more darkness on the shadows maybe pull that back to 30 while you're tweaking stuff up and that that's really popping okay there we go but that's that's a lot closer there but anyways you see our thickness is a little better but that's still wood nowhere near enough so I'm going to jump that to be significantly thicker we're overdoing it and now those if we were just approaching with hair so you might be able to get some reasonable stuff going with here and from here you might think like okay well there's a lot of variation like maybe we'll just throw some frizz on it and actually you can probably get pretty far with something like I don't think clumping would do it but um kink is it might be a good one for this yeah kink is like kink and frizz are similar but I think kink is closer to the base and then freezes more of the tips but just by Fritzing the up it's gonna give us a lot of variation on top of the hair but that's not feeling like hay at all like that's not helping too much so honestly where I start going from here is um and actually we should approach this by adding a lot more guides right now we only have a couple guides here and you see we've made one guide per point so if we set this to polygon area and we start increasing the count going to start creating more and more and more hairs if we subdivide this if we subdivided this properly it might actually be the best we'll get really clean distribution on this so will be the best way to do that maybe if we melt this whole guy or what's untrained you late and I'm going to set I'll set it slightly large and recreate end guns so it's going to do it's going to melt away all just those triangles and now if we subdivide hopefully this works pretty well we're going to do a regular subdivide it's going something like that and if we do this a couple times because our base object doesn't matter like this geometry isn't gonna be too big a deal so now I can subdivide that a couple times and I'm actually going to go ahead and remake the hair object you can also regrow that might actually work I don't do that too often but if we sorry that we get this tiny interface going on right now with our low resolution but if we regrow they'll actually that's like creating a new hair no so instead of having to do that we kept all of our settings so we get a whole bunch of new ones and now we can set this back to like polygon center and regrow and now they should start appearing if we give them the proper count I want to crank that way up and now you're going to get one for every spot so that's actually working pretty well so now what we might start tinkering with is the brush tools which I don't think I don't think get used terribly often I only had to use of one time on a project as what I think it really specific but I've always thought it was a cool concept to have brushes for hair to move the hair around but I've never had a great use for him yet um but like I feel like this is actually a really good example we're not gonna have enough time to give this a lot of love because we're this quick live tutorial but under simulate under hair tools I tore off this menu and we get all these cool brush options so I can do something like grab this brush oh and there's another important factor we want to on are our geometry here I'm going to throw a hair tag hair Collider and now we've made this geometry a Collider body yep and so now the hair shouldn't pass through it and I think it doesn't pass pass through even as we're brushing if we turn on collisions I cool or that might I'm not understanding that I use this too infrequently that might be hair - hair collisions I'm not sure you should save this right here I should totally save this right here well okay I'm gonna try and mess it up and see what happens I'm gonna just brush weight right through and look it is working like actually those hairs did not pass into the geometry that's exactly what we want so I'm going undo and now there's just there are there's this huge suite of tools that aren't used because how often do you actually have to really get down and dirty you the hair so right now I could like start gently brushing these specific ones and wherever my brush hits they will be affected so I have to be really careful about the angle you see that I kind of leveled off the camera so we're viewing it from the side yeah and I'll say this one over and then even that we lost that hair and I think if you use a small bracket we can increase or decrease the size here oh cool that works on everything actually but if I make it smaller I can grab this that one kind of straight and keep in mind these are guides everything else interpolates between them so we might actually have some trouble with that as well but I kind of pulled that guy here and let's say these are going to get swept this way a little bit and so we could spend hours and hours brushing hair and you can also throw and clump and stuff I've seen what those do as well I played a little bit with those I'm actually not entirely sure okay this is gonna affect everything but let's say we want this one to be swirled around so I'm actually going to go to our simulate hair selection tools and I rip that off wet it not rip off simulate hair tear off cool I'm going to do something like a rectangle selection and actually I guess I'll do lasso and I'm going to say I only want to deal with these points well and now I don't know how the swirl works entirely so or the curl so let's just click and see what happens and well that's granny curler just twirling around there it looks like every individual hair is twirling which is interesting um which isn't actually necessarily we want we get some nice curls there but let's say that we actually want these to kind of spiral around uh if I don't I don't see a specific way to do it so oh we have we also have to lose restrict by restricting now that she don't know that apparently wasn't it well visible only long khanh here selectional like there it is selected only there okay now only the ones I've selected so we'd actually have to go through and can now you see it wasn't terribly hard to do I like this whirly one um so but I mean like I I have spent on the project I had to do that I spent hours combing a character's hair for like a still and then you can get like any hairstyle you want it's amazing did you everything that you would spend hours combing hair when you got it virtual hair 3 when you do 3d you do a little bit of everything so yeah a so that without working if I I can actually use regular selection tool so if a command a you'll actually select all the points again well so I can you know go through and just add let's just add a little variation here like effectively we only want actually what's the angle you okay this one so let's make it look good just from this angle sweet so let's get this one doing something so I'm going to try maybe brushing that one back a little and then near the top it'll kind of swirl down down here let's have this one kind of push forward I like all this hand randomness you know there's a lot of there's a lot of tools in cinema that you can click on and have it be random but it's kind of like based on a noise random you know yeah and the fact that you're getting in with your with your mouse and like just really kind of random a doing something is giving it this heat more I think more human fuel yeah once we hit render like I mean like I know I would think like this is where you're doing the art part of it is like these I mean I'm all about doing things parametrically and procedurally but like here I mean to do a lot of this you just have to you just have to paint it now I have no this might be awful yeah let's just go ahead and go to our proper camera angle and hit render and see what we have now I think this camera guy moved a little bit but I kept the linking from out it obviously must over it I got undo camera view oh that's not gonna work yeah just kind of center I'll just not I hope here oh yeah so let's render our hairs and see what we're getting so we're actually getting some cool flow here like they like we're definitely getting the swirl vibe and these are pushing around like that's actually working pretty well yeah um now the big problem is that the hair is just not going to render to look like hay that much like we probably push it further and tweaking but what we actually are going to need is geometry yeah and the other thing you're never going to get with hair is the anti-aliasing or I'm sorry the ambient occlusion between it yes and that is going to be a big part of this look is getting all those little detailed shadows that you as far as I know can't do with a hair render you gotta use geometry yet the hair hair gives you good volume but the volume is like between hairs any individual hair can't have a volume really um let's see and there's a bunch of tools here like this area we're starting to look a little bare so you can actually go back to I haven't used this in years but one of them is comb curl cut push Oh straighten by using the straighten tool oh that's on everything currently selected so if I did a live selection and just grab a couple of these guys not visible only grab a couple of these guys I can actually go to the straighten tool and that's I dragged they actually start slowly reverting to their original position well so like if you push it down a little too much like you can pull them back that way okay cool so we're actually going to save this as another version because we're dealing with a lot of potential geometry here so we are now going to go into the hair object and instead of rendering hair we are going to go to the generate tab I'm going to say don't render the hairs anymore and we're going to say what is this now so we could say let's try doing something light to see if it's like super complicated so I'm going to do a triangle so what this should be doing in theory is changing every single hair to a triangle sweep so we have real geometry now and actually that's running incredibly fast this is the same concept we're using the pillar render but those are straight and because their hair only has to calculate that one time um so we actually get incredibly fast refresh so I thought this would be really bad it's actually working really well is amazing um so let's go from triangle to a circle hopefully it's not it's going to be a lot heavier but hopefully it's not super heavy boom it popped and now that pop that's going to refresh and we could see all it really accurately now we can we can go into the Advanced tab and I can put a star cap or an end cap we want end caps which it's going to take a second for it to calculate and then it's going to be fast again so now we get this and now we actually have the caps on there now but the caps are there they're welded automatically so we're getting some phone problems so the way we fix that I think is we can actually oh it's got a foam tag so if I just limit our Fong angle and our limit is really high right now so if I set that to something like 20 to my favorite Fong limiting angle hopefully that will pop in actually is a little too small so let's go up to like 45 anything under 90 would really work and that should smooth that out properly we still get our hard edge cool um now I suggest when you're combing your hair and whatnot it's going to take this long to refresh every change we make is going to take that long to refresh and then run quickly but every refresh will take a while so only show this geometry once you're kind of down to like okay what is it rendering like but now what's super cool is all this is still controlled via this hair so even though the hair is not rendering if we throw if I just turn on frizz going to take a second but if you watch the viewport no way but no all the frizz pops in so we can now add a little bit of randomness on top of what we were doing so maybe the frizz isn't good because I effect the endpoints a lot um but if we maybe we put a little bit kink in there let's see if that looks any good I don't know is super spaghetti II so we might people put like a little bit of variation in there like these are the scales with scale seems alright but if we just put maybe like 10% with a lot of variation I mean some of them might stick out and some of them won't they're up there okay well that's not bad like a little bit of variation in there and then something like clumping might actually be pretty good uh this is the radius of which a tricycle um I'm not sure what our overall scale is so it would be kind of just grabbing the dark but oh it even does count based on percentage which is cool that means if we increase the hair can it doesn't mess up our clumps but by turning on clumps it'll actually pinch a couple clusters together um and let's push it super far just so we can kind of see what it's doing so by pulling this up look you see that we start getting all these nice little pinchy swirls going which is really really cool I don't know if that meal I obviously went way far it's like dirty hair button yeah you just came out shower and saw spiky kind of thing so we could do a little bit of clumping and whatnot so that's working pretty well now a big thing in our reference is we get like big fat pieces of of hay and we get these tiny little thin ones so we really want to try to get that variation in here so I think we can probably do that via our thickness and here's our variation I'm not 100% if the variation is global or additive so if I turn on four would you get zero yeah do we get zeros so um I don't so I hit render pretty subtle um so obviously taking a while to prepare not sure yeah I guess that's a big question I mean I guess it's having to calculate shadow maps for all this and yeah it's gonna be a lot of geometry and for that for the lighting so we may have to retool the lighting just based on the geometry yeah and what make it out oh yeah yeah we can make this editable and then we won't have to do that pre calculation so once we're kind of happy with it we could be like okay here's the done this one's done it's also doing a ton of anti-air up I keep saying into a listening today but I mean ambient occlusion yeah that was going really like it's pretty much stopped dead from all the ambient so yeah you're also using the local machine which is only one set to one core that is true always do a team render okay I'll leave that bit to you and even now as we're doing these tweaks like that looks really cool but we can easily go back into our hair and this is like all we did was was brush our guides which means we can still change the number of hairs whenever we want so I can go back in here and knock off one of these zeros and that means it'll be showing a tenth the number of hairs we can really quickly work with it and I don't know but if I hit render hopefully this would calculate really quick like you immediately went to shadow maps and it's immediately gelling here and now it's I didn't change any render settings but there's so much there's not as much geometry so it's going to calculate everything way faster that's great um see we could always even light it with these numbers yep and then crank it up exactly now it's hard to oh yeah we were checking on the thickness and it does seem like we have some pretty dang thin ones um so maybe that's exactly we want I'm just just for the sake of learning let's crank it up to something hugely 12 Oh an hour gain real-time feedback so now we get these big old fat ones and we get some skinny ones honestly Oh something I didn't know and it's a little disappointing actually is this is adding variation to both the root and the tip so keep that in mind because you'll see this one starts out super skinny and it gets all fat and that's weird it's just because adding that kind of variation to both of them so and this curve will only apply to the global so that's just something to keep in mind it's just a limitation we're going to be dealing with here in addition to that we also have our scale and if we turn on scale variation it'll actually randomly make it'll just take the entire hair hair and scale it up and down um that might be what more what we need then mm-hmm then the thickness yeah thin and thick is important but I think visually that's going to do enough for us so adding this kind of variation there for scale once again I'm gonna crank up crazy eye so you can see all the variation or we get these little stumpy hairs and we get even longer ones so it does push up and down probably need it quite that far I'll pull it back and that's actually working pretty well now what's going to be really cool is this is we get to texture the real geometry um III still almost feel like we should drop that back down into a triangle I want to glam a different display mode and I'll see how many polygons is actually giving us I actually think the triangles would rent even render nicer because that hay is really kind of a flat ya know it's really a flat piece if you look at the original or if you just picture like a piece of grass it's really kind of a two-dimensional you know it's really kind of more like a paper than it is a round kind of thing yeah so this gives us a little bit of volume and it will go a lot faster with a lot less geometry ya know that this is how much geometry we have a kind of spinning around it but how many segments we have which is adding a lot of geometry is determined in our hair tab and our hair tab we have that the number of segments we have twelve and there'd be twelve subdivisions in here so if I were to drop that down to eight like you'll see it all immediately drops and if you don't need like we have a bunch of curly twisty hairs you need a lot of geometry but if you don't if it's smoother then then you can actually ate away with us and we just not out a ton of the geometry from the scene and visually I don't think it's gonna make that huge of it look how fast that's rendering now like him before even with a lower number it was taking a lot longer to render I've clearly rotated us to oblivion but what's really cool now is we will be texturing this via normal materials like we're just we're just texturing a sweet nerve at this point I'm pumped um I'm pumped so honest well honestly uh like this is really cool they obviously did their homework as far as making hay look correct I I would tend to I would square that looks like I can't point at the screen bro if you could point at that piece see how like that little most looks like a square or even it might even be a triangle it's like really flat feeling like it has definite sides like that little one sticking straight up the little alfalfa piece there uh hey I use bail bail for a hay bale oh I I do not know how it worked anyway but what I would do is instead of referencing theirs directly we could like maybe google different pictures of hay oh yeah and now we have this now we're not referencing their image directly as far as uh like maybe sourcing colors and I love sourcing colors if I were to pull this down I can um actually we want variation in here so how would we you tackle variation per hair outside of ammo graft context won't the hair so the hair the hair settings are doing everything except texturing it corrects that true is there any way to handle that mmm no no variation within it have to be just based on the specular angle I guess well here here's my intent no here's my thinking Chris I really don't think there's gonna be a lot of individual differences yeah in the texture so I would actually just make it one color sure and we're going to use ambient occlusion and specular to create the variation based on lights and reflections and all that so something I get to show off here is right now on the Mac if I click to grab a color this is cinema's color picker but I actually like the system color picker a lot more so I'm going to go into file and actually edit preferences and then if we go to units I can click use system color picker and now when I click I'm gonna move cinema out of the way now when I click the little image it picks up the it opens the Mac one if you're on a PC you're still kind of screwed but I can click I can click this magnifying glass and I can go over here and pick the exact color from anywhere on the screen so I want to kind of find a midpoint here not the brightest not the darkest and it it's almost never the color you think it would I thought there's a lot more yellow in here but that's actually very kind of a peachy yeah and we can always you know kind of managing expectations like maybe we do put more yellow in there but I could just take this material throw it directly onto this object and well I guess I am kind of expecting a little more yellow so I'm going to go ahead and just put a little extra in there so that's going to turn into a lot of like reflectance and getting the ambient color going and um got just a lot of fun texture stuff so I might be able to pass this off over to you now to do a little bit more lighting and all that good stuff I can always come back in the texturing we're starting a little faceting on the curve so I'm actually gonna go back into the hair and go back up to the twelve segments but not the triangle will leave the triangles so I'm gonna go ahead and save that and now you can take over and maybe do a little bit of texture lighting I guess we can close those of those up close these out the brush tool so the thing the thing to me before I get into the textures and lighting I'll just grab your opinion on this case the more curly and wavy it is the less pay it is to me like the more of this um did you think tough is that the case that's doing that now you get the my smoother curves yeah this feels more um because I think the thing with hay is that as soon as it's bent far enough it's gonna break so you're really getting swirls of straight pieces sure if that makes sense like it's all if you if you look at each individual piece you're gonna see a straight piece but they're all coming together to create a swirl if that makes sense that is very true I mean I even along those lines let's try I look down at it over again yeah quick if we drop these segments down to like one yeah then we're literally going to have a straight piece and these are all now super straight and if we I mean I think if you then put that means they're all gonna have like a right in the middle oh they always might I mean I mean it render real quick and just see what that does but yet now we have a series of here we get the band it's not too bad but she would get this or else you get that harsh ban the bend but if we go down to one then literally these are all straight pieces but we don't lose the swirl so here's my theory if we keep it at one and we second of all cheat a bit and texture are inside Oh tough piece with the same texture but then go back and add more hairs yes uh you click on the hair object itself may be on the final writer the a dizzy row so once we get more hairs in here I'm just going to turn off our immune occlusion just for a kind of a quicker render here but watch I think this is going to give us our kind of like straight hair piece now there's not a lot of detail because of the ambient occlusion stuff but once this is on and I haven't tested the team render with this yet but we'll see if it works it's definitely too big but I think all that little detail that's going to help a lot really a little more like spaghetti than hey right now but there's a lot of texturing stuff where we might want put a little luminance in there because it you know there's a transparency to it and that's not working the but like I really like that's our best piece yeah um alright so here's how I would approach it I would say um this the just real quick the thickness I would just drop this stuff down Oh 2.5 drop this down and then once we get kind of a good uh once we get kind of a good um a render with basic lights then we could start to go in and do more so I'm going to turn our render settings a little bit lower just we could see them quicker and you guys could view it with us in the in the picture viewer so here we go picture viewer go down my man so now we're talking we lost your aiming like because I pulled that way back so we're getting really dark in some of those areas yeah so that so instantly I would pump the global light back up to get a real nice base kind of level color what was that boom I always miss it optional tab control tab boom did it yeah I've already filled it out a little bit more yeah so already you can see the difference between without the global light and with the global length and then we're relying on the ambient occlusion to really fill in the gap the next thing is specular so you can see when light hits hey like this it's going to really bling it out so it's got a lot of specular now we can do this with reflection true reflection with with reflectance and all that stuff but when you have this much detail on this it's actually where specular does make more sense hello blurry reflection this would be obscured yeah so um I'm gonna go into our default specular that's already built in now the only speck it's going to grab is this one light so we might want to add some other lights maybe that are just specular and I do this a lot with hair so and like multiple things like this so I'm just going to crank up first of all our specular I'm not going to make it white so I do want it in the color family but I want to skew it into that color so it's not a white specular this already helps specular a lot if you just make it not white um and then I'm going to add another lights that is only a speck light now we could add it and add shadows and maybe we'll need that but I'm just going to go here and turn off diffuse so it's not going to give it any more light anywhere it's only going to add specular hits so I'm just going to grab that light and move it over and behind and up so I'm going to kind of move my camera for now and make sure kind of this is where I'm looking at it I'm going to look from above and make sure that it's kind of off to the side but it has to be above it because we're trying to make like kind of a rim light out of spec and the way that that looks hopefully is all this stuff will kind of get brighter so let's do let's do a render with our specular cranked up we have a rear speck we have all this stuff happening and then let's just do a kind of compare and contrast so there you go you can see the speck popping on to that texture there we also lost our rear specular mostly because we have no no shadow so you do want to make sure your shadows are on or else it'll just pop specular on everything we can also brighten this up and in this case because we're using such flat objects this rim light effect might not work as well as I thought there's really no rounding happening especially on this side they're kind of sticking out straight along those lines though wouldn't it maybe catch individual hairs better instead of like transitioning between them maybe even kill the other lights so we can see just what that one is doing that's good idea so here's a render with just our rim light I'm going to turn it up just so we can see its effect and we're trying to build a rim around the object to give it kind of a more of a fuzzy feel we're really only catching that right here so I think I'm just going to cheat it and pull forward and just kind of off to the side more instead of to the front and that might grab even just small we'll be able to see this really quickly that's that's the rim right there see so at that scale you know it's all about scale with at this scale it's going to it's going to be a lot cleaner now let's turn the other light on and we could balance the two lights but now we have a little bit more sense of depth because we have this kind of hotspot here that's coming through and then we'll have our front piece so that might be a little little warm or a little bright so let's knock that to 150 let's turn on our other light and see how they combine it's looking pretty good in places now I think the ambient occlusion overall is just too much the thing to remember with an occlusion it's all about scale so a default cube I always pull a default cube into my scene when I'm working with ambient occlusion a default cube is 200 by 200 by 200 centimeters right which means if you take a plane and you put it at the bottom of a cube and you make sure there's enough room out front here let's just go zoom in here and we hit render now I should probably make a new white material there we go one more quick render so we have our plane we have our cube and the ambien is looking at these contact shadows and trying to add shadows as they get closer together by default a mean occlusion is looking a hundred centimeters which means the farthest the shadow will go is halfway up this um this object right so that is a lot of calculations to worry about and it's also way more than any individual one of our hairs is making for detail so we can turn that number down like 10 this will do a couple things it will let's just do a render here and we'll compare and contrast on the on the plane now we just get a little baby contact shadow here's the bigger one here's the little one and it's going to render faster it's not going to calculate as much and you can see already over here it's not pulling as much detail into our thing so we're gonna have to find the balance but I think that's going to be an important setting for us so let's go back to our camera let's turn off our little settings here I already know it's going to be higher than 10 but we could find a balance maybe in 30 and with more contrast so it's a little darker so let's do a look here I think that's going to help our render times for sure and it's going to give us a little bit more detail in between each individual piece the other cheat here is that black is a little bit heavy you can see there's really no black almost never good like and it's also like it seems like the shadows are quite red actually it so it's gonna it's going to base a lot on some of the colors but it's also the perception of that black on top of the object so what you could do with a MIDI occlusion at all times is look at your shadows where what is your environment look like you could either pick a color from the environment like this or you could just pick a color of the object picking it if the object is all the same color if your ambient occlusion remember is a pass that goes on top of everything so you really have to make sure that your your shadows and everything are almost going to be one color but think of your environment and then just pick a color that's more in line with that so we can pull this up and we know it's in this family over here it's in this brown kind of family and we can pull this down and now our shadows are going to be that color just pulling up a little bit from black is going to do a lot of work to make it less dark so you can see the difference right in the middle there we could probably brighten it up more but see how much more yellow that is feeling that's the right that's the right move we could even brighten it up even more so we nothing will be darker than that color we just won't let it allow it now with the contrast we might have pushed it that way but now let's compare the two there's black much brighter nice and warm almost like a subsurface scattering kind of feel because that's really what you're trying to find is this is the inside color of this the other thing you could do is play with your global light so if you really want it to be brighter you just pull up that global light now everything is going to get light and the ambient occlusion will be added on top of that or you know like multiplied on top of it so subtle difference but now we're just bumping that whole thing up boom boom there you go so a lot of little details for each one of those this kind of specular over here is just still not my favorite thing I've ever done so I'm just going to move it we're actually getting some specular detail in our on our object if we turn off that that lighting there we can actually dial up or down the specular and find a good spot for it now because all these little hairs are moving all around the place we may we may find a weird place for this well let's see what that looks like I don't I don't even know if there's a setting of this in fact I'm gonna look at my laptop while you're doing this but if we can randomly twist those hairs around then they could each individually be catching specular is better or right now they're kind of being caught in clusters so I mean let me try see if I can find that well we have thickness length scale that's density or you doing clump Bend twists we it looks like they are twisting so if the checkbox isn't on it won't be twisting oh I see I give it lots of variation and with that might that might actually do a lot a twist and I'm not sure if twist is doing what we think it might actually twirl them together mmm I see what you're saying but without without a lot of geometry they'll Chris as well without all the individual what would you call them the sections that you made for this I'm not sure that it will the segments I'm thinking maybe the segments will keep it from twisting since we only have one segment per piece I just mean the overall sweep would be twisted Oh each one yeah each one but I'm gonna look for a setting so you just keep doing you doing all right hopefully uh yeah and Chris is talking about having each little french fry here see how they're all aiming in the same direction Chris is going to look for a way so that each one is pointing a little bit more randomly but I think we're pretty close with um with this here if you want a more of a light source like this you might want to try like a larger you know light like a softbox kind of kind of look to get more of the reflections and everything but this gets pretty pretty close while Chris is messing with that I just wanted to try one thing that I wanted to try this whole time which is uh basically duplicating this rounded platonic here and just I'm gonna take everything off of it and this is just going to be a guide I'm gonna scale this up and I'm going to UM oh can I melt this back down to its individual polygons or not yes uh right-click and go run triangulate all right I could do that OOP nope you missed it you don't lose polygons that's what happens when I right-click oh here I get my rope I'm gonna right-click I'm going to distress works a lot better with a mouse when I should note down actually it's going to give us exact reports but I don't think you care I don't think it matters all I wanted to do was um do a quick um atom array on the platonic oh that those those will matters so you just make a new one I make a new one yeah we just make a new one and that was a buckyball dodecahedron dodecahedron let's scale it up make sure it's the same scaling everything's perfect boom let's dump that in instead and now we'll have to melt those pieces but that is a really quick way to get that um mesh around it that I know we didn't really get to but that would be the fast way to do it is to use them use an atom array just want to play with out there all right what'd you get we might actually be able to if we gave our self a bunch of segments we might actually be able to squish the hairs in dynamically we're not going to tackle that but there is possibilities today anyway to get these randomly rotating really straightforward I'll have to just go back to the generate tab go to alignment and set it not from free but to random and now each one of them is real instant we do that we're gonna have a specular is going to be completely different it will but I think this is going to be a critical move look at that yeah there we go wow that made a huge difference critical move lay that between real flat kind of pieces well now all of a sudden it's all malt and we can all randomly the main thing being when you look up here you see how like this this highlight is like this big big glaring highlight in one particular spot as soon as we randomly rotate it gets spread out among all of its neighbors oh dude that see this makes me want to kind of tint that that specular a bit now we can really dial dial the specular um and find a place for it so yeah you're getting really good real-time feedback on that yeah we're getting we're getting some good good feedback here now we can make this even more of like a fuzzy arm specular and not as much of just like a side kind of afterthought I think this might actually make it look a little bit more fuzzy in the back yeah those little catches right there and that's that's the that's the thing for me like all those little all these little like fuzzy thing and this is going to anytime you have hair a backlight is always gonna make these little edges pop like that um but man I think that's pretty close buddy uh I mean yeah I mean we like if I was trying to recreate that image or if there's a job like you spend five more hours doing things I was thinking about if we want to get additional variation in the size and whatnot we can actually copy the hair object have multiple hair objects yeah multiple hair objects means we could have darker strands of hay and lighter strands of hay I mean look at the specular that's super broad but yeah that could be - you know maybe we maybe we do a last minute check on the specular because that's going to do a lot of difference so it maybe instead of it being so high it's got a little bit more it's like a little more squarish and that's going to really bling out the the speck on more pieces you're just going to see it more of it more of it and it's going to be a lot brighter so there's a good difference between the two much brighter overall I think you're right that's that broad spec is a thing the other thing I would do and and all of these are last-minute things right I try this all the time when I'm playing with hair and all these kind of thing I know we're not actually rendering here but it's with all these different particle kind of things I'm gonna I'm always going to try these these last minute tries so I'm going to turn off diffuse I'm going to try to find another good place for specular maybe it's actually from below because it's a little bit dull on the bottom and then just try like a slightly different color so there we go same camera angles same everything and we're going to go because of our specular settings we could just pick up a little bit more detail on the bottom there see how it filled in the bottom just by adding that speck and actually we have to turn on at least some soft shadows because it's really adding spec to everything even stuff above it so you want to make sure you at least have some soft shadows on so that the specular is not again hitting everything on the object it's only where the light is sure so now we can compare these we're getting down to these little subtle moves yeah I think Chris what you're saying is we can tweak each one of these little hairs a million different ways to make it look a little tighter to this original but I think the concept other than you know I'm seeing maybe some some size things we could try maybe even smaller but then with more hairs which we could add even more hairs right now can we Chris actually before you do that let me take it real quick yeah I was gonna say is uh like when you look here you see we get these cool little like random guys shooting off in the middle of nowhere like doing that would be crazy easy always to do is copy the hair we have a complete duplicate but this is way too many so now we can drop this down to like five hundred so it's very few and we'll also copy this hair material and I'll put that on the copy and we'll just call these uh the stray hairs great idea and now here I can hear now we go and we'll turn on the frizz and we'll turn on the kink and now those guys can get pushed way way the heck crazy and hopefully there yet I'm not let's turn down an often see if we see him yeah see these crazy guys off to the edge and in fact we can go and make these longer so I'm gonna grab these and say okay these crazier ones are a little bit longer there's very few which should add almost no render time on this five hundred crazy random hairs on top of it and and what's cool is it we could you copy our original hair thing add a little bit of variation on it and we have two different textures oh yeah we could that's how you get the variation on them you can make multiple hair objects well I'm gonna hit render see what we got I think that hair that strand thing is great great tip man oh I used to see it sticking out yep yo wow that goes a long way random hairs buddy that's amazing uh yeah I think the scale here is a little nice too and I mean we spent like no time combing it so it's getting all get fluffy over there and you can actually end up you can right now we were just painting the hair tips you can paint every individual segment of the hair like if we did put those strands you can actually paint like the points that are intersecting it down to be avoided like that the hair brush is is pretty huge like you could do a lot with it so this is this is fun man I like this one a lot I we might have to leave it here let's do one more last big render here let's um yeah I mean we've been talking about this for almost an hour and but like we're saying keep in mind that we've we were doing this for real for a client or something you easily spend another five hours like tweaking and oh let's try around here so let's try putting a custom spline in there so they're like right around 'add but squished like they were stepped on and I don't know like and then combing you know I spend over two hours combing this thing well this is cool dude very very good um well I hope I certainly learned something with just watching Chris make this thing hopefully there was some some stuff in there if you've played with hair and haven't really taken it this far which I never have I didn't I knew you could put geometry on it but I had no clue would be that fast um and it actually moves fast once we get it in the viewport once it refreshes right we like we get it yeah where we change it a number it's gonna okay got it but after that you fly through it thanks again for watching everybody hey if you have a question for ask GSG don't forget to stop by live wednesdays at 1:00 p.m. central to ask your cinema4d question live on our twitch page I'm going to link that down in the description and again if you've missed old seasons or past episodes please check out our training page where you can get all of those to watch at any time and on any device alright with that I hope to see you in another tutorial really soon bye everybody hey I need it anyone got a brush we got close-up that's some hair folks you need this tutorial yeah

Channel: Greyscalegorilla

Views: 83,136

Keywords: cinema 4d, c4d, tuts, tutorials, motion graphics, greyscalegorilla, cinema 4D tutorials, Cinema 4D, Cinema 4d tutorial, c4d tut, cinema 4d hair, cinema 4d hair tutorial, c4d hair tutorial, greyscalegorilla hair, C4D hair rig, use cinema 4d and brushes, c4d hair and brushes, Nick Campbell, Chris Schmidt, Askgsg

Id: Jx2PIo-nsTk

Length: 52min 32sec (3152 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 03 2016