Cinema 4D Tutorial - Abstract Fractal Animations Using Vectron in Octane 2018

what's up everybody it's David Aria finally back to you guys again for yet another excellent octane tutorial for I design comm this week we're gonna be taking a look at the mysterious the unknowable feature of octane 2018 called Vectron it's a fractal renderer it does a lot of really weird things that are hard to understand and I've deciphered it a little bit but not that much really I'm just showing you my process of experimentation of choosing colors of choosing lighting and combining techniques that I learned in the past I hope you enjoy it let's check it out so one of the craziest new features of octane 2018 is called Vectron and it allows you to render fractals and I'll show you what I mean here if we come down to objects and pop in Vectron and we get this sphere with some weird code over here now if we come to script category we can choose Vectron and then under script presets we can choose mantle bulb text and there you go if you play with the power you get some really weird animation and you can create some interesting formations and then of course you can throw a daylight object on it and then for good measure let's just put a colorful background behind it like a blue here and then we'll set this to mix sky texture and there you go post it straight to Instagram and you'll be famous wait no now you'll be famous but in all seriousness this thing is cool it's just hard to know what to do with it yet but I've done some experiments and tried to think a little outside the box and here I'll show you what I've come up with okay so here in this exemplary piece of abstract art I've jammed a bunch of fractals together and put my little astronaut dude here sitting on a fractal so I could do all the tropes in one image if you combine two cliches together then it becomes unique and here's another angle I didn't like this render nearly as much but it's still kind of cool so things started getting fun once I began playing with animation and this was really surprising because I did very little work to actually get this to look super inky and interesting I'll show you how I did this in a bit and this one's interesting almost feels like a procedural Moyes is revealing it or something you would get with the new fields options in C 40 R 20 but also extremely easy create and people assume that here I'm using a glass texture on the fractals but really I'm just mashing a bunch of fractals together and you get some really strange and kind of awesome results a lot of this comes from inverting the power of certain fractals which does some things that are kind of beyond my comprehension and break my brain a little bit and here again this is just another fractal with inverted power and we get some pretty inky looking results with a lot of detail and after I posted this on the octane Facebook group someone had the really smart idea to take this and then use it as a displacement map so taking that same texture and mapping it on to this terrain gives it some unique emergent properties I really like creating one thing and then using it for something else okay so here's where I took things one step further and I started to really like the results I was getting so here I was just using the raw render which looked like this but for the next set of renders here I started rendering Z passes and that got me much more accurate displacement now here I'm just extruding these a little bit so we get these slight ridges that will catch the light and it almost has this ink on paper feel or a Rorschach test especially this render has this creepy and organic feel because of the bilateral symmetry which makes you kind of see faces and eyes staring at you in here because of the top-down view and the slight extrusions it really has this animated cartoony feel almost like cardboard cutouts well at first but then it just kind of goes crazy and for these I seriously cranked up the displacement and got this even more unique look which to me feels like cities building themselves as the fractals evolved and finally I'd go back in and took one last crack at it and came up with this look which is way more sci-fi with a bunch of volumetrics and texturing the fractals in kind of an interesting way I definitely like this abandoned city vibe and I added a lot that really constrains the color palette and emphasizes these nice blueish green tones and this one here I'm actually using two different types of fractals one for all of this geometry you see here and one for the middle that's a little more blobby and I'll make sure to show you how I built this and last but not least I got a little carried away and made this little animation here this little dudes just so curious alright so I just wanted to get you guys a little bit hyped about the eventual potential of fractals by showing you some other software that uses fractals and we wrote I could eventually take Vectron and all the possibilities out there for it so this guy julius horse theorists is kind of a genius at using Mendel bulb 3d which is a standalone fractal renderer that's been out there for a while but he's just been picking away at this stuff and messing around with it for years and years and years and he's developed this really cool style and very unique imagery using this software and he's just able to build full cities with this stuff and it just looks otherworldly and cool now I don't think the renderer treats the light as nicely as octane does so that's where it gets exciting if more of these art director Bowl qualities are brought into Vectron then we'll be able to really make some unique and interesting looking stuff I also found this even unity has some fractal rendering capabilities there's this thing called fractal toy and it's awesome to see with just a few changes in parameters you get some dramatically different looks and animating between those is also extremely cool I love these light pulses that are traveling down the fractals here and finally this is a really great article you should check out on all the fractals in guardians of the galaxy volume 2 so if you look at egos home planet and the columns and the floors you can see that there are these fractal patterns everywhere and three Studios what a digital method and animal logic all had to come up with their own means of handling these fractal forms because ego this character is basically God and his home planet is meant to evoke infinity and all of these crazy impossible forms and you can really see it here in every column there's all this crazy detail and you can see it in the floor here with these recursive branching patterns that's all driven by insanely complicated math and while animal logic was responsible for the Palace Wetty was responsible for these external environments and animal logic actually created a system of converting fractals in Houdini into point clouds and then geometry and allowing artists to find attractive looking fractals with bounding boxes and then they would locate those coordinates so they could instance that geometry and duplicated across several columns for instance so here's some crazy fractal columns now the interesting thing is it's apparently really difficult to convert fractals into actual geometry but the way that Wetty cracked it and got the detail that Mandal bulb 3d was able to create in geometry form was actually a really interesting solution this one artist ended up using mandible 3d to do full turn tables of fractal forms that he really liked and then took that into a photogrammetry program which then converted that into geometry but hopefully this just gets you inspired for the potential that this kind of stuff has it's very limited at the moment but it looks like the tool set is going to be expanded to be more art-directed belen the future so let's take a look at what's actually there right now and what we can do with it now in order to actually get this feature you'll need to sign into your Oh toy page and then go to the forum and come down to cinema 4d s forum and then go to releases so here the latest stable version is a version of octane for but below it is octane 2018 and in the future Oh toys just gonna release updates like Adobe does 2018-2019 etc so here's 2018 just come down and choose whether you've got a regular or a subscription build and download and of course you want to put it in your cinema 4d plugins folder it's the c40 octane folder and you'll want to delete the files associated with any other version of cinema 4d than the one you're currently using I'm on our 20 so I'll get rid of these all right so again the way we add in a vector object is just here under objects and then Vectron and I'll start the render going and let's just start with the simplest type here which is under Vectron let's choose mantle bulb all right and let's dolly in a bit because the fractal gets a bit clipped off until we get closer and there now we're actually seeing a lot more of it now looking at these weird bring structures here this is something that I feel like I've seen before and it made me think of ray Epsilon so if we come over here and I'm gonna undock my settings so we can take a look at both at once and if we come over to ray epsilon and start messing around with this sure enough this dramatically changes the look of our fractal so if we come this away we lose detail and if we come to the left we gain detail but it becomes much more intensive to render so if I throw a day light on it so we can see what's going on better you can see this feels much more like a full-on mesh but it's definitely making my system chug so I'm gonna increase the rapes Alon a bit and then on render time we can bring it back down if we want to but this makes it a lot more responsive now I'm just gonna switch to path tracing because that's what I love and I'm gonna take my max samples down to a thousand and GI clamped down to one this is just kind of how I like to work and that reset the Ray I've flown so I'm gonna bring that back down a bit all right so let's just increase the power here to get our normal looking Vectron that we all know and love and like it can be pretty fun to just zoom in and mess with the Ray Epsilon bring up the exposure so we can see what's going on and like this is already kind of interesting and cool you can go about texturing and coloring and lighting this but let's not get distracted let's go back to where we were and I'm going to increase the rate Upsilon again so it doesn't crash my computer and then bring my exposure back down okay but one interesting thing I noticed is that when I back the camera away I started to get this weird artifact where it looks like it's clipping but instead of saying oh that's a mistake I decided to roll with it and one thing I noticed is that when I started to play with this bounding box it almost looked like this animated growth so if I dolly out with a two key and then zoom in by holding down to and right-click because remember it only works if I'm further away physically from the object but I want to fill my screen with the object too by zooming the focal length in and then we take the bounding box here and start messing with this it creates this animated growth almost like an ink bleed or a burn or something like that all I'm doing is messing with these bounds here so as I bring this down you can see this happening now one way to make this even more pronounced is if we actually expand some of these bounds at some point the spectrum will just fully disappear and there it's gone and I'll zoom back in here so we can see what's going on and it looks like I don't have any camera selected so I'll just drop another camera in and put my octane camera tag there and delete my other cameras and I'll look through the camera and then here I just want to rotate around until I'm back to centered up on that vector on which is hard to do considering we're not seeing it at all right now all we can look at is the bounding box which is somewhere around here so let's just kind of shift over now if I go to my bounce here and start messing around with this you can see we start animating the whole thing on we're a little bit too close now so let's back out a bit and so now we can really start creating this really unique weird growth animation don't ask me why this works but I thought it was cool and the other thing is if I bring the Y boundaries down to maybe 100 or less you can see we start creating this cross sectioned MRI look which is another way to get a more unique fractal and then another obvious thing you can do is just pop it in a cloner let's go for a count of five and let's bring this down to say 15 or maybe 25 and then if we rotate it around we start to get this kind of trippy coral like formation all right I'm gonna undo and show you guys something else I thought was pretty cool also look at this weirdness now I'm just rotating the camera and as I rotate around at some point it fully disappears so if you just animate your camera orbit that could be another way to create some pretty bizarre animations now my other favorite weird quirk that I stumbled upon has to do with the power setting though if you notice sometimes we lose our settings down here so all you have to do is go back and hit compile so sometimes this works where it doesn't really change the fractal but other times I find that it does so I'm not really sure it's a little bit weird still so we've seen what happens when we go to a higher power level and say go beyond 10 let's try 20 okay that's interesting let's go to 15 let's try 11 you can see it just duplicates the fractal features more and more so I don't think it gets that much more interesting beyond 11 or 12 but what happens if we go into a negative zone okay so we get something like this which is totally different and might feel like an error or a mistake but this is where I was able to create way more inky weird formations for instance watch what happens now if we animate the bounding box and now let's say we zoom in on this look at this crazy detail and now look what happens if we animate the bounding box if you remember this example that's how I made this inky effect literally just animating the bounding box all right so before we move on to the more developed looks that I showed you earlier I wanted to give you a taste of what's possible just by messing around with some different shaders just to hopefully inspire some creativity in you and show you some things you may not have thought of okay so we can add any kind of material we want to this so let's just start out with a glass let's drop that on there it's looking pretty different already now let's pop in add a light and then if we want to see this with our white background again we can just put a texture environment back in and in the daylight we can set this to mix sky texture so that's just an easy way to flip between black and white depending if we want to see a dark look or a bright one let's try to get this centered up so we can actually control it in the viewport here so I'm going to pop it under the camera here and reset PSR then I'll take it out of the camera and now we still can't see it but if we pop out of the camera we'll see that it's sitting right in front of the lens so let's just pull this a little forward so we should be able to control it now there we go and I'll just swing this around until I get some lighting that I like a bit better and one thing that could really affect this is the roughness of the material so let's come up here to roughness and crank this up you can see that's really making a difference now what if we go back into our note editor here and play with some other stuff like for instance let's go to film layer and crank up the float on that okay so that's really pretty we're getting all these pearly colors let's turn on fake shadows and just so we can see what that's doing let's go compare still render buffer and let's turn it off and like usual with fake shadows that's just letting a little bit more light in so I think I'll go with that let's turn it back on here okay what if we vary the roughness across the surface with an image texture okay let's immediately gone back to zero roughness and let's just pull in a weird texture like this and it's not really clear what's going on so let's actually change this from specular to diffuse and here we can even solo this node and get an even more clear idea of how this texture is mapping to the vector object so let's hit UV transform and as we scale it up and down literally nothing is happening which isn't that surprising because this is a fractal form and I don't think it has any kind of discernible UVs so the best way is going to be changing it to some other kind of projection type so if we hit projection here let's bring this down and let's change this to box and now we can already see this is mapping in an interesting way okay let's disable this Solo node and then let's pop this in the diffuse and now we can see it having an effect but let's go back to our previous specular material and now if we kill this old link which isn't linking to anything anymore and reconnect us the roughness we actually are affecting the roughness across the surface but it's not having as much of an effect as I'd like so maybe instead we go into the transmission which is definitely going to have a bigger effect because with specular materials transmission is kind of like the diffuse slot and also maybe this material is kind of boring so let's just embrace this trippy DMT art vibe we have go and pick something crazy like this I don't know what the hell that is but let's do it okay that's kind of cool that might look better with some more interesting lighting let's disconnect this for a second and let me show you one more thing before we continue with that another way we can introduce color would be through a scattering medium and then if we grab to RGB spectrums and put them into the scattering and absorption that's already looking pretty cool but let's take off the film layer real quick so that we can just look at the scattering and what that's introducing so we'll just remember this was around 0.3 one okay so let's come back here and the density is also gonna have a big impact but when I introduce a color here say I introduce a green what I'm expecting to see is some green and some color opposite which would be pink or magenta so green magenta cyan and orange that kind of thing and it's not very apparent yet but if we crank up the density a bit now we're starting to get those hits of pink so instead of green let's choose I don't know let's try cyan that's kind of nice so we're getting cyan and red let's try a color for the scattering as well let's see what happens if we crank up a yellow we're introducing some pretty cool colors let's take down the density and see what happens it all kind of blends back if we do that so I was actually liking it more before okay and what if we take our daylight and try to backlight this thing so let's just bring it up towards the camera and it's kind of hard to tell what's going on so this is a new trick that I like to do courtesy of my good friend Ryan Talbot so if we got a panel here let's go to new view panel and so this just gives us a new perspective view and we can dock this right here and so now I can kind of orbit my scene and it's similar to going up to options on tick check camera but for me this is even easier sometimes I still like having this option too but it just depends on the situation okay and now I can see what's going on the daylight is pointed towards the camera but it's at such a low angle that we're getting these extreme orange colors so let's bring it down a little bit and that should bring in more of that yellowy color maybe even more there we go and remember we can always pop back to that white background and now if we want to let more light through we can always adjust the density let's try bringing that down but I'm gonna hit undo a few times because I actually liked what we were doing before better okay so I just hit rerender and the colors shifted so we're not getting that same blue but that's okay we're just experimenting so I'm just gonna roll with it and let's reintroduce our film layer here this was at point three one and already this could be something pretty cool to animate like imagine if we animate the power this would look really inky and complex as a pattern or maybe we could just render it out and use it as an animated texture mapped on to something else in another project entirely so if we come back here to animate it we've lost the controls again and when we hit compile it jumps off somewhere crazy unfortunately so we just have to take the power back to a negative value and we're not gonna get the exact same thing as we had before but we'll get something super crazy and unique so it doesn't matter that much I also keep in mind the way we've colorized this if we bring it to a positive value we'll get some pretty interesting results as well so this thing is cool in its own right what if we go over to our panel here do a new View panel and pop that over here instead of our daylight let's shut that off for a second and let's set this background to black here and let's just drop in an area light and bring this back and a little bit forward and rotate it towards the object there we go now we're starting to see something let's get an area light in front as well just to give it a bit of fill maybe a little less high-powered on this one let's pop in a/c 40 octane Gaussian spectrum into the distribution just bring the wavelength down and the width down and now we can shift the color and then let's put one over here as well and maybe with this one we change the Gaussian spectrum a bit and here I'm going to boost the power and in our octane camera tag let's change this saturate to white all the way up to white so we get some more natural colors going on maybe this would look cooler vertical so let's dock the window over here let's copy this light tag over so that our backlight inherits the Gaussian spectrum as well and then let's shift this around as well and then let's really boost the power of this because it's the backlight so I can see the yellow coming through this subsurface scattering deal here so maybe if we bring down the density we'll see it come through the model a bit more let's just pull this way down and see what happens let's make sure we're seeing the correcting so let's rerender there we go now we're starting to see through this a lot more so obviously this is too bright at this point and let's just make sure we're looking at the right light here we could move this even more behind the subject okay and then obviously we don't want to see the light so let's take the Apache down zero and just to double-check what contribution this is making let's turn it off for a second ya see it's bringing in the light that goes here if we turn off the other two we can really see it that's pretty cool and alien right there okay let's trim these lights back on okay and I brought this blue light around a little bit more to the side because I want this to be a bit more moody let's try the same thing with the red light there we go that way we get some shadow and now if we shift the backlight around a little bit I kind of like that that feels a little bit creepy like the red is bleeding through here and we're really just seeing different shades of blue and red versus that yellow that was being introduced and now maybe to tie it all together let's add in a lot let's try vision X it's kind of cool it's a little bit washed out let's try vision for or actually let's take the redness of the light down if we jump into the Gaussian spectrum and bring up the width a little bit that should reduce the saturation but also let's take down the power we can even turn this off temporarily it help if I would actually name this backlight don't be me kids blue red red backlight now the question is is this red adding anything extra here and I think it's kind of cool to see a little bit more detail but maybe we'll just take it down even more so that way we're kind of seeing into the shadows we're seeing a little bit of detail but it's still moody and dark in there and the fun comes in when you just start exploring this fractal weirdness that you've created so let's zoom out here and explore different parts of this thing let's stretch this out so we can see things a bit better maybe I'll stack these vertically it's a bit easier to navigate so this is the entire fractal right now and if you remember from back earlier this is just a slice of the thing so we could also play with the bounding box to get a really different look I like this part feels like a gross crab to me so this is how thin our slices right now so let's let's make this a bit bigger there are just so many moments when you're playing with this thing that are like what the heck is this thing and what have I done also keep in mind if you want to see this stuff render faster because it's going really really slow right now crank up your ray epsilon and it'll get way less detailed but it's still really cool-looking I mean this could be an interesting look in its own right and I just changed the camera angle and found this bizarreness just sitting here waiting for me okay I've taken the wraps line back up so we can work with this more easily and I'm just gonna mess with the power and we can expand this bounding box back out to get the full sphere and these are the kind of features I'm getting with the power in the negative zone and at this point I feel like there's too much red coming through so I'm going to decrease the red backlight I definitely like this area here it kind of feels like swirly Jupiter cloud patterns to me okay so it can be pretty difficult to navigate around this thing because there's literally no geometry in the viewport and if I try to rotate it just takes me off all crazy so what we can do is we can drop in a cube and like we did with the daylight let's just put this underneath the camera and reset PSR and let's scale it way down and then in my second window here I can just bring it forward and scale it down even more and make sure that it's intersecting with the fractals so as we bring it closer to the lens we'll see it pop through the fractal this should be good so now if we rotate around the cube we can move around the fractal and get different perspectives so let's turn off the cube in the render and maybe we want to play with some shallow depth of field so let's come in here and let's crank up our aperture aspect ratio set to aperture edge set to three like I do and let's zoom in here and maybe for now let's turn on auto focus and let's make sure this light is set to zero in the opacity let's take off autofocus and let's focus on something here and now we're in the world of swirly paints and I just cranked the lights a bit raise the aperture and pick focus around here and this is what I'm getting and here's the same thing without shallow depth of field so that makes a huge difference okay now remember if we pull out the bounding box the object still stays pretty static but if we make it too big and we start rotating around you can see things get a lot weirder and this can be a really good thing so now as we get closer to this object we get these crazy swirly patterns so imagine just slowly animating the camera and seeing these swirls happen here's another idea let me give ourselves a little more room and bring up the node editor a bit now let's mess with this texture that we had earlier if we put it in the transmission we're not really getting anything great that we can see it's mapping to all the different areas properly so let's try out another new feature of octane it's called the universal shader and by default we're gonna get this metallic material which is cool and you can totally experiment with metallic materials as well you can even create mix or blend materials using a procedural noise so like say you had a noise and you cranked up the contrast you could create patches of a glassy material versus a metal material and create a really unique look that way but right now what I want to do is I actually want to get rid of the metalness so we're just gonna go to metallic and we're gonna take this all the way down okay so now we've got this different look the albedo is basically the diffuse and if we take this down we should be a lot closer to where we were before with more of a specular type material but if we use this now in the albedo slot we're going to map that texture in a much more interesting way now let's compile this so we can get a little bit better control of it and let's decrease the bounding box so that we have that slice going on again and if we really want to see what's going on we can solo this node and there we go now we can really see how it's mapping so let's increase the transform to full psychedelic and let's disable this and maybe let's see what the daylight looks like versus these colors let's bring this around with the North offset and let's bring down the power and now we're getting a very different and unique look and we can go back to a more shallow depth of field and maybe if we increase this bounding box again we'll have a little more depth to play with now let's compare this to our lighting original lighting scenario maybe we'll take down the amount of blue let's balance it a little bit and we could always swing the red to a different wavelength and same thing with the blue and we can also play with the highlight compression or the exposure but I kind of like where it is a little bit overexposed and we can bring down the rape salon or actually bring up the rape salon that's kind of neat right there I'm just gonna keep playing around until I find some more stuff I like bring some camera bloom in there this is what it's looking like without the shallow depth of field and again if we make that bounding box overly large crazy things start happening take that post-processing off again here's another thing we can do let's duplicate this texture and let's put something in the blackbody emission slot let's bring this way down so this is a good way to really emphasize some colors though it does kind of flatten things out a bit let's try a different texture well now we're crazy let's bring our gamma down I'm gonna render a slow camera push overnight and I'll see you guys later all right so this is what we got pretty gooey and cool-looking and quite colorful all right let's move on and there was one other idea I had that I forgot to show you okay let's take this background back to black and here's another idea let's just drop in a new material and let's overwrite the old one and under the type here let's scroll down to tune and I'll just refresh so we can see what's going on there we go so let's boost the power of this actually let's add in a tune light so we can go to objects we can go to tune lights and go to point light and now we can colorize this a little bit or we can do objects tune directional light this is more like a sunlight and we can rotate this around and over here there's actually a tune tabs we can add a tune diffuse ramp and a tune specular ramp and these can further colorize things so there we go now we've got this kind of gradient going on in the diffuse ramp let's see what happens if we mess with a specular ramp just adding in some random colors here and let's move this point light around and see what different effects we get and the outline thickness will also affect things a lot so this is almost a little more vector II maybe we take this back to white and obviously I couldn't get this specular ramp to do anything so let's just disconnect this there's a spot for outline color which might be cool so let's try let's just add in an RGB spectrum here and let's just make this something crazy so that we can actually see it let's bring up the outline thickness so I wouldn't necessarily call these outlines so much as almost like a shadowing that happens just a different look I wanted to show you guys it's a bit flatter and might be useful for 2d design and if you're doing like illustrator or more vector-based graphics could be cool but I'm just gonna pop in a diffuse material go back to this look now I want to show you how I created this look here and the secret was basically rendering a sequence of this gooey look but then using that in a displacement map so the best way to do that though rather than rendering it like this would be to render a Z Pass and I'll show you how to do that so if we come over to our overall settings here let's scooch this over so we can see what's going on we go to octane render render passes let's enable this and I'll just name this something send it to a folder I'll just save it to the same swirly file that I did swirly Z we've already got a camera move set up we're just doing that slow push into the fractal that creates that kind of organic GUI shape and here under info passes I'm going to twirl down and just take on Z depth here and now down here we can actually look at our Z depth pass now I want to make sure we actually have a background in here so let's put a plane behind our fractal so let's just drop in a plane here and we'll rotate it so that it's facing camera like that and actually let's move it pretty far behind so we get a lot more fall-off and scale it way up so that way it's just sitting behind our fractal and allows us to have white in the Far background now if we go back to our settings here and I'm going to keep moving this around we can play with our Z depth max and this will adjust the values of what's considered close to camera and further away from camera now right now we're seeing something that's pretty flattened and I don't necessarily like that remember how we crunched our bounding box down let's extend that out so we actually get more depth in our fractal and the z-depth pass might make a little more sense if we look at it with the power at a positive number where the objects closer to camera are a little bit darker and as we go further away they fall off into white so I can adjust that with the Z depth max here but I actually am gonna go for this negative value even though it's totally tripping out octane as to what's close and what's far and it does make a whole lot of sense it'll still make a really cool displacement map and there actually is a lot of detail in there and subtle gradations that were not really seeing very clearly here but are actually there now to only render the Z pass what I can do is under my save I can just uncheck this but I also don't want to be rendering out all the samples for our Beauty pass so I can just literally take this down to one so it'll spend the least amount of time on the Beauty pass possible and then here it'll spend 128 samples which is pretty low it should go pretty quick on the Z pass and to save a little space rather than EXR I'm gonna do TIFF because Tiff's make really good displacement maps and I'm gonna set it to 32-bit and that way we'll have the cleanest possible displacement map all right I'm gonna render this out and you can see it's going really fast and under a layer if we select single pass it's gonna look a little crazy we could have avoided this if our settings were instead of linear srgb and tone mapped but in this case I'm fine with it being linear it doesn't really matter to me that much either way this just gives us more leverage and flexibility with it if we treat it and after-effects and to show you that all the values are still there we can just go to our filter here enable filter and then we can bring down the exposure and you'll see that all that information is still there in the over brights this could also be a way to really quickly preview the motion of your Vectron object because it renders so fast and we're seeing the motion really clearly here alright so it looks like I screwed up the settings but I want to show you this just in case you run into the same things so this multi layer file tick box means that it will pack all these different passes whatever you want into a single file and usually that's okay because in After Effects or whatever compositing software you use whether it's fusion or nuke you can pull that in and split out the different channels so in this case it's coming in as this black file and it recognizes it's a linear color space but when I bring it in here if I go to extract err which is the usual way that you'll extract channels in after-effects I'm getting this message no auxilary channels available so I'm not able to recover this here and if I put a curves on it or something like that then nothing happens there's no information there but if I go back to my picture viewer provided that I haven't yet closed this down what I can do is I can save this out and I can go animation Tiff's 32 bits per channel and set it from my frame range 0 to 120 and hit OK and I'll just save it to the same folder call it Z Pass and so that's going to go back through the picture viewer and save out the whole image sequence and now when we bring this into After Effects and make sure we're in 32 bit per channel we'll see something similar to what we saw before let's throw it in a new comp and let's put down a curves and bring down the white point and we should start to recover that detail so we could even crush this down a bit more and try to emphasize that contrasts a little bit and make sure what is just touching white and then we can rerender this but if you're like me and you want to just bypass After Effects entirely and be super lazy I'll show you how to deal with this without going through that rigmarole so back in our project here's the other thing I actually want to render a square texture so I'm gonna choose rather than this Instagram format I'm going to do something like 4,000 by 4,000 which sounds like a lot but it renders really fast so it's not that big a deal and this way we get a much larger texture to do displacement with and now in our octane render settings here instead of a multi-layer file not a multi layer and I'm just going to do srgb and tone mapped so what we see is what we get okay let's we render that you can see we're getting exactly what we saw in the live viewer and we can then turn around and use this directly back in octane alright so this is my next setup it's extremely simple and if i zoom out here you can see it's just a single plane with a few different lights sitting around to cast some different colors on parts of the geometry that are going to get displaced and now let's pull this over here so we can make room for the node editor and so what I'm doing is I'm just creating a glossy material let's drop that on here and let's go in the octane editor and let's take the diffuse all the way down and I'm actually gonna start with a blueish metal so let's drag this index up here and let's drag up the roughness a bit there we can see our lights getting picked up and let's change the specular to kind of a cobalt a bit more cyan maybe okay so that's our metal then I'm just gonna drop in a displacement and we'll set it to 4k because that's what we rendered out we'll bring in our image texture and then I'll find my Z Pass and there we're getting displacement from our Vectron render and now I'm gonna set the animation here I think I only rendered out 30 frames so let's go see we've got 33 as the last frame before I stopped it so let's go to our image texture here and go to animation and say the end frame is 33 the frame rate is 24 and now to check that we're getting animation let's go compare store render buffer and let's move to a different frame wait for it to refresh and yeah we are getting animation so that's looking cool now with the fractal previously because it wasn't real geometry and for other reasons that I don't totally understand the dirt no it doesn't really work I think it would have to be a situation where it's like true geometry but at this point we've kind of converted our fractal into geometry so if we just drag this into the diffuse you can see we're getting a pretty interesting look already so what this is doing is if we increase the radius of this maybe invert to normal and let's bring the displacement down to like one or maybe two let's try inverting this image so there you can see the dirt node is kind of bringing in this white diffuse texture which under the lighting kind of feels like paper and then we're getting these metallic blue edges that we could emphasize here so if we go back to our specular let's just make this a bit brighter and let's take our roughness back down and let's take the displacement down as well and if I show you this previous example here these are the settings I used on the dirt node and you can see what happens if we take this down this is kind of just the displacement which is kind of creepy and interesting in its own right but as we bring in this radius we're getting the edges more and more taking over and we could invert normal to get a different look and if I jump out here you can really see what's going on we're kind of taking all of this information from the fractal that had a lot of depth and flattening it down that we could also go the other route and kind of bring it back out and increase the amount of displacement and get something a little bit different and maybe for this we could reduce the amount of the dirt shader going on or we could invert the normal for something different but I think this displacement map in general worked better because if we look at the source you can see there's more gradation in here so maybe let's go back to the drawing board and try a different fractal okay I'm going to increase my samples back up here so that we can actually see what's going on and let's take this vector on and reset and compile and let's see what this looks like as Z Pass okay so I've moved the camera around a little bit I played with the object bounce a bit more as well and here this looks okay but what you can see if I go here to my render settings if I crank up the Z pass at some point we start to fade the back part of the fractal off so right now I've made sure we have a bit more depth in the fall-off of this image by kind of peering over the edge of this fractal as it were so this is the bounding box and I'm looking in perspective down the edge of it so as we get closer this is kind of cool so maybe we do an effect like this and see what that looks like bring in our cube here we could also render a sequence where we just rotate the camera and get something pretty unique that way and I'll increase these bounds so we're not seeing the edge of this cube as we rotate around so we can either push in or we could rotate around a bit I think rotating downwards is giving some pretty interesting tearing effects so maybe we'll do that let's just parent the camera to the cube and we'll just rotate this value here make sure keyframes are linear cool let's give this a try cool so this is what we're getting in our previous setup animating between two frames here it's moving in the liquidy cool way that it does and also we're getting these areas that are barely displaced that kind of look like line work versus other areas that are more displaced and I like that too okay let's reset and compile this Vectron and now let's look at an entirely different type of fractal here okay so instead of Mandal bulb text let's go to mend your sponge boolean extract and at first this just looks like a weird cube with a chunk taken out of it but if you come down here to the K value you'll see that it can get pretty complex and interesting and almost city-like now let's bring down our ray app salon so we get more detail here and you can see this can get extremely complex and we can actually like fly into this here and let's spin this daylight around so that we can see things a bit better now if we look at our z-pass we're not seeing much but let's bring this Z max up this makes a lot more sense okay so here's the other crazy thing all this is just based on this code and this math and I don't know what any of this means but I do know that things happen when I change it so it's kind of mysterious and kind of weird but say I come in here and just type in to here I have no idea what's gonna happen okay well that didn't work but let's try an even smaller change so let's just go three point one and let's click off of it and that did change the fractal formations now we're getting this even more defined grid pattern here and shout out to my buddy Fabien over hammer aka the dizzy Viper for giving me the idea to change the code in Vectron at all I wouldn't have necessarily thought of that because it's so intimidating at first okay I just changed this value and now all of a sudden there's a much greater erosion that's happened in the fractal and now it's pretty much gone if we change this to zero I wonder if it is fully formed and there we go so this is what controls the boolean that's eating away at this thing so let's just send it back to one maybe go to two use our friendly cube to rotate around here okay that made it get a lot bigger so let's type in five seems to me that's as big as it can get well that's weird I don't know if I like that one okay that's really interesting let's do that in a smaller increment okay now this thing's looking all destroyed and chewed up oh this is cool now we got a fuzzy fractal okay this almost seemed to change the detail now it looks like these weird bricks whereas before at eight you're getting a lot more detail this is like taking away the resolution entirely simple fractal is simple of course Ram salon still has an effect bringing this back to eight bring the Ray Absalon back down okay so somehow I've ended up with this super bizarre fractal that can animate from here using the K value to something like this and if I show this in the Z pass and go back to my options here and change my Z depth max that could be cool and now I'm gonna grab this plane and make sure that it is sitting behind my whole scene here not necessarily cutting it off maybe it's something like that I mean that's pretty neat looking already alright so this might be a cool place to start out with these crazy grid lines take my samples back down to one and so we'll be animating this here start on frame zero add a keyframe for the K value go to the end and let's bring this up until we're looking like this let's try it linear keyframes okay and the other thing we can do at the same time is animate the camera maybe let's pan upwards a bit and maybe let's ease this in so it doesn't happen so abruptly so let's go back to our K value here if we hit this it'll just set this to the shortest length possible so kind of like a linear keyframe maybe this needs to happen a little bit sooner okay that's one possibility let's try a different camera angle switch back over the main so we can see this whole thing it's cube isn't really helping that much anymore let's move it back okay so I'm finding this angle a lot more interesting and the animation when I pull this keyframes easing out is a little bit better where we start on this crazy-looking grid and it gradually unfolds to do whatever the heck this is but when I pause on a frame and let it render it looks really cool to like this infinite staircase or geometric craziness I don't even know how to describe this stuff but it's cool so this could work I think as a regular animation with some lighting and some volumetrics which we'll get into in a little bit but it can also work as this z pass here which starts out like this and then opens up with all these crazy spikes so I think I'll let this one bake out first and then we'll take a look at what it does as a displacement map in our previous context all right so I couldn't help myself and I also rendered out this animation over night of this fractal kind of unfolding I just used one simple specular material for the fractal as well as a volume object and a light that's backlighting the scene and I'll just break this down for you real quick if I go options uncheck check camera and pull out of here I'll show you what the setups actually looking like so let me turn off this plane which is preventing us from seeing clearly here and I'll delete these lights that aren't being used so there's a daylight here that I'll move out of the way so it's not so confusing and this is the main light that is just casting into the volume you can see I can bring it forward and it's set to a low opacity if I bring up the opacity it's gonna blow out the camera can bring it down and this is just clipping into our fractal and creating kind of an interesting little tunnel effect and the light gets revealed as the fractal unfolds and then my volume object is just sitting here if I bring the voxels down you'll be able to see it better so I just made sure that the edge of it was buried somewhere inside the fractal so that we get some of this haloing of light but not so close to the camera that it envelops the camera and we can't see the surface of the fractal all right let's switch gear move back to that papery looking scene where we can use our z pass alright so I'm just going to replace this texture here come into our file and I'll find our z pass here and let's make sure this frame sequence fits the range so I'll go to animation 280 is not our last frame so let's check this it's going to be 120 and once at the end of the frame range to 120 so now we're getting a pretty interesting effect here and if I crank up this displacement we should see something really cool so let's take down the dirt node which is overpowering it a little bit and this sides looking kind of nice so let's check this out maybe that's too much displacement let's bring this down a bit and we can also invert this shader to get a totally different effect where this is more representative of the original scene we had but it's still kind of compressed and not as deep as before and I kind of like that so I'm not liking how low res this is looking and I actually didn't render it at 4k I think I rendered it in Instagram format because I was focused on the volumetrics look but I'm gonna go back and render this at 4k alright so I actually went back and rendered this at a full 8k and you can see that the detail is just crazy now so we're gonna continue with this and here's another cool thing if I come down to this camera angle and I uncheck this invert here I'm really liking this looking angle here and again this is animated displacement so if we scrub back here we should see where it starts to build on and I'm gonna go ahead and render a bunch of these animation sequences and then come back to you alright so this is the final sequence I came up with I like it it's pretty weird and cool I wish there was a way to get motion blur on it and it does look pretty chattery a lot of the time maybe not quite there for actual production work where everything's got to be perfect and you wouldn't be able to get rid of those artifacts but it's definitely fun to mess around with so as I was recording this tutorial on that actually released a new update to octane 2018 which is 2018 point 1 rc4 and now Vectron has this fancy new icon and I'll fire up this render and we'll come down to Vectron again and there's a new preset that I just discovered called a quaternion Julia whatever that means and at first it seems like it's just a sphere but the second we start playing with these and we see we've got some pretty sweet looking almost hairlike objects now a lot of these sliders are just insane and out of control so I would recommend using these arrows if you want to see it animating or doing some other cool stuff and we can light it and texture it and put volume metrics around it like you've seen before but I'm not going to go through that whole shindig again but yeah you should be able to see the possibilities for animation this stuff is really insane and cool-looking and then of course let's just drop a cube in there so we can actually navigate around the scene I'll just hide it from the render here and then we can spin around and see our weird object and the iteration should be obvious this is kind of like the detail the fractal like we've seen before so it could be something more smooth like this and then don't forget our friend ray Absalon which will just allow us to zoom further and further into this fractal and see more and more detail you see here we lose the detail and then we can bring it back at some point there's a diminishing return because we don't need to get that close to it and it just takes longer to render and here's an example of render I did for funsies using this fractal type and I also wanted to point this out I'm at the genius plugin developer of octane for c40 created this insane fractal because he actually does no coding and can alter the code in an intelligent way I don't really know how to get you guys to this other than telling you to type in this link up here but if you scroll down he posted the scene and the code here so let's just grab this code copy it and we'll just paste it in here and say reset and compile and then if we change the bubble size here he's got some helpful controls we get this pretty awesome unique fractal let's take the bubble size down even more and it's total death star madness up in here like before we get iterations and the scale kind of like it here and this is another really good example of getting closer and closer with ray epsilon so if your ray absalon's here we've got a lot of detail but say we wanted to go really really close actually I'm going to turn off this box right now because it's getting in a way you can see by this point it gets really chewy and Revlon isn't really helping yet but there's also this issue with iterations so if we increase the iterations then we'll see tons more detail and obviously it'll take a lot more time to render and then we can just get even closer take down the RAB salon and there's basically insane infinite detail going on now imagine lighting this and putting some volume metrics in and doing all of our sweet tricks like shallow depth of field and anamorphic bokeh and you're creating art also I finally went and rendered an animation of the scene and I'd like to go and break it down for you okay so I loaded the scene and this looks a little different than when I rendered it I'm assuming it's because we were just messing with the right app salon and that carried over so if I bring this back I think we should get back to the original look and that was taking a really long time to render so for the sake of speed I'll just leave it here and it might also have to do with the fact that I updated to rc4 so maybe there's something a little different in the code and how this is being processed but regardless this is close enough to what I had that we can kind of go through it so here I've just got a couple Vectron sitting together and this first one has a really simple subsurface scattering material just like we made earlier in the tutorial and if you look here I've animated the power so that we get some crazy movement pretty simple and I've taken this Vectron and duplicated it and scaled it down slightly normally you're in model mode and if you try scaling this thing in model mode it's actually not gonna do anything I guess we're seeing some little weird changes there but I think that has more to do with the bounding box let's test this real quick so if we're in this other Vectron and we're scaling this up you can see there's no change to the scale but as we scale it down at some point it starts to clip so that scaling operation is really just the bounding box so instead of model if we come to object mode and scale it now we'll see we're actually scaling up and down this vector on shape so basically I just have the exact same vector on sitting underneath it and I scaled it down ever so slightly so it's kind of like an inner light coming from within this subsurface object which tends to create a little bit of an inner glow or just kept it more to the ridges and outside so the whole thing wasn't glowing if it's too big then you get something happening like this where it's just a little overpowering you can see here this is not the effect I wanted now to get them in sync with each other you could do something like go to expressions set driver and then go to expressions set driven absolute so that the one values following the other but it was weird when I tried rendering this I had some errors where the one that had set driven was frozen so that didn't actually work so ultimately I just copied the keyframes over and I'll repeat that process for you here so I'll blow away these keyframes and you would think you could just go copy and then paste but that doesn't work instead there's this option under animation where you go copy track and then you go animation paste track and now if we look at our keyframes they're the same now one of the main things that's driving the moodiness so this is obviously the volume object but we'll cover that in a second let's just turn this off for now and I'll bring this down and I'll create a new view panel here so we can look around the scene let's just dock this up here now this is fairly difficult to comprehend what the hell is going on so let me delete my other cameras out of the scene here you can see I'm excellent at keeping my scenes organized okay so this is our main camera here and icon is huge so let's just take it and scale it down while we're in object mode that's not gonna actually affect anything other than the icon itself and I kind of want to see what's in my camera's view and what's not and right now this is preventing me and I can't really grab this and drag it out if I drag these then it'll change the focal length which I don't want now there's probably a better way to do this but this is how I'm gonna do it which is coming over here to details and taking on depth of field rear blur which just gives us another indicator of how far our camera is extending so it just kind of gives us an idea of what's in the shot and what's not and where our camera is pointing so the lighting setup is really simple this daylight is more of just a fill and the turbidity is set pretty high and really low power if I crank this up will what that could be contributing and this is really ugly in front lit but with just a little bit it's adding enough so that we can see into the shadows a bit I turned it off these areas get a lot shadow here so let's store the render buffer there so you can see that see it's bringing in a little bit of light this light's not being used so I'll get rid of it and this one here is kind of backlighting the scene it's just normal 6500 no real color in there I guess I'd call that the key light in the scene and actually it looks like that's it there's not even another light contributing here from the other side our volume here is doing a lot of the work the voxels are kind of arbitrary I think this is small enough that this voxel size doesn't really make a big difference if you go too low it'll crash your computer but right here it was fine a lot of the time I take the voxels way higher as you've probably seen in other tutorials if we go into the medium here now the volume step length is really high because that allows the scene to render faster the lower you take it sometimes the denser things get and the longer it takes to render though you've got to watch out for this sometimes because high volume step lengths can cause errors where objects in the far distance don't really fade off into the background and into the fog like they should here in the scattering and absorption I've just got blue RGB spectrums and that's creating this blue cast obviously if I selected something different we'd get a really different look and the scattering phases what's creating this directional feeling of the light if this were at zero the volume would be kind of everywhere and a general fog versus a volume that's more focused around the light here I've got several Vectron objects let's just bring these on one by one so obviously these two are our central objects then there's this guy here which is our main weird-looking pyramid thing if I hit compile in this case I actually get access to the controls again sometimes that works sometimes it doesn't I don't really know how to explain that and if I bring down our K value you can see we get more or less of this structure and it's almost like an erosion factor pull back here and take our shallow depth-of-field off you can kind of see this object a bit better again this slider is out of control so let's just use the arrows and that's the kind of thing we're getting it's pop back to our main position here and let's turn this one on so this one's more of a foreground kind of deal and as we rotate you can see it's kind of crossing the foreground a bit let's pull back and take a look at this one and similarly if we hit compile it doesn't actually jump anywhere so that's good and I think the other thing that I've done with these is really constrained the bounding boxes you can see if I pull this out we're getting much larger pieces which could be cool for some scenes but in this case I wanted just elements that felt like eroded pieces of old cities okay and this is the background vector on here and this one I think is pretty large and complex and I'll turn our shallow depth-of-field back on here which is really focusing our eye towards the center and then of course I've got my anamorphic bokeh going on with this aperture aspect ratio of 2 and aperture edge of 3 this octane sky is just a black RGB spectrum which means that if the day lights off we're just filling the space with black it's the same as if I were to come here to settings and then over to environment and change the default environment to black but this way I get to control it with this RGB spectrum here and if I wanted to introduce some fill light in this way I could do so as well though if you don't have a background in there and fill this with more Vectron objects it quickly becomes apparent that there's just gray mush back there so that's not really very good but you can see how it could act as a fill light here in the foreground okay and last but not least the camera move is extremely simple I think I've got a null here in the center of the scene where these vector objects are and all it's doing is tating I've got my key frame set to linear and here you can see the key frame ends but I've selected these key frames and gone to functions track after continue after which is what continues this slope so that wherever I drag this it'll adapt so I could make this really short and our camera will move really fast or I could make this a little longer and it'll move more slowly but I don't have to worry about where this keyframe begins and ends because it'll interpolate the slope no matter what so in general I like pretty slow movement so that's why I've got it over here and this is literally just rotating on the heading axis cameras a child of null and it's like the most basic setup ever but a lot of the time that's all you need for a cinematic nice feeling camera move and if we look at our Vectron texture here let's just turn off our volume so we can see what's going on and let's actually make this brighter so we can see the texture more clearly it looks like i've just created a hodge podge of madness that doesn't even make that much sense to me right now as I look at it but I'll attempt to explain it so blend materials are just like mixed materials except they exist all in one material so in general they're better and more useful and here you can control the number of materials and I've just got it set to three but it could be set to two because really I'm just mixing between two materials now if we disconnect this and put a float into the amount here we can slide this left and right to take a look at each material separately so let's go all the way to the right and here we've got kind of a cobalt metallic blue which is really simple it's just a glossy material with an RGB spectrum in the specular and an index of close to 8 so really reflective and it's got some roughness and now if we take our mount slider to the other side you can see this is where we are getting our rainbow party and here this is actually a diffuse material and in the diffuse Channel I've got a mixed texture node and some noises one thing that's obviously happening is at some point we've got this texture which is this weird thing and that's got a coat correction in it which I'm not sure what this is even doing if we disable this compare store in your buffer and enable it again you can see it's not doing anything so let's just delete it I love how I'm doing detective work on my own mess here so this is piped into texture one and then in texture 2 let's solo this you can see I've just got some stacked noises to create different weird breakup and I'm using this for a couple different things so here both of these are relatively similar scale but just a couple different noises and then up here they're being mixed by this so this one's really really contrast you have slammed the contrast all the way up to a thousand and this is giving me big patches to mix between different noises and create a more complex noise overall so when when we look at this result all together we're getting something a bit less repetitive though I don't even know if that would have been really that much of an issue here because there's so much complexity in the Vectron object that it's not really that easy to see repetitions but in general the theory is the same from my advanced octane shaders part 2 tutorial which was just going through how you can create variation and scale with certain big forms and then smaller forms and the noise to create a more complex noise so in our mix texture here if I solo this so it's basically creating some areas where we're just seeing this which is a black and white noise and other areas where we're seeing this pathway which is our rainbow party now before instead of this float slider I was also using this same texture in our amount which is what was doing the mix between this texture here and our metallic blue so lets unsolo and now we should be able to see the final look here which is really just combining this metallic blue in certain areas and then the rainbow stuff in other areas and if you remember this shot from earlier let's take a look at this scene too and I'll do another quick breakdown so the texture is exactly the same as the previous shot so I'm not going to go over that and the Vectron objects are what we saw earlier which was meander sponge boolean extract with some slight tweaks to random values in the code until I found something interesting and here again the scene is really simple we've just got that same volume object though it's not all the way up to the camera so that the foreground is a lot darker if it were enveloping the camera then we'd get a lot more fog everywhere in the scene and I wasn't liking how this was flattening everything out so I preferred having a bit more of a cutoff here in the foreground so that we get some of those darker shadows now there's a separate vector on here for the foreground let's see if I can find that this guy and you can see if we scrub over this way this foreground Vectron has some pretty cool repetitions that feel like a tunnel so I thought this would be a fun path for this little dude to kind of enter the scene and then exit and come right up to the camera now I could have just easily keyframe the focal depth here but instead I've got it set on the object to a focus object which is this null here and the null is inside this model here so that wherever it travels the focus will track with him at the same time I also animate down the aperture because here with the same value of 1 the depth of field gets so shallow that it's extremely distracting and we can't see any of the rest of the scene but out here I liked it at a value close to 1 now if we look at the top of the shot the lighting setup is super simple again this side light here is a little bit more on the warm side and because of the lot on the camera as well as the settings and our volume object this is coming across more green than yellow if this were set to a white then we get more of the true color of the light but I liked it green and if we look over here this light appears to be more blue and you can see it's just default 6,500 so pretty simple and without the greenish light we get a different look which is also dramatic and interesting all right so that was a lot of stuff but I hope you picked up a bunch of tips and tricks along the way and I hope it inspired you to pick this weird and nifty tool up and start experimenting with it yourself I bet there's a lot of other weird things you can do with it and this is only the beginning for Vectron there's gonna be a lot more art director ball controls in the future and hopefully you saw what is possible by looking at films like guardians of the galaxy and those other tools and other programs like unity etc anyway I'll catch you guys next time bye bye

Channel: eyedesyn

Views: 111,173

Rating: 4.9736347 out of 5

Keywords: vectron, octane vectron, octane 2018, octane tutorial, 3d fractals, fractals, abstract 3d, abstract render, octane render tutorial, cinema 4d octane, octane cinema 4d, octane c4d, cinema 4d octane tutorial, c4d octane tutorial, c4d octane, octane 2018 tutorial, octane render vectron, octane fractals, octane 3d fractals, octane 3d, octane render, learn c4d, eyedesyn, c4d tut, cinema 4d tutorial, c4d tutorial, mograph tutorial, mograph, david ariew

Id: VoURMYmfUH8

Length: 79min 33sec (4773 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 13 2019