Cinema 4D Tutorial - Create a Detailed Mars Landscape Using Octane Displacement

hey everybody what's up it's David Aria of here yet again for I design calm and you know when I come around its octane time so today we're going to be developing a pretty intense Mars environment using sand and rock displacement textures as well as displacement deformers and a bunch of color matching lighting and compositional techniques then next week we're going to be using kit bosch 3ds excellent space colony buildings to add an even higher level of quality to our final renders it's gonna be a long one but I hope you join me the whole way through because it's packed to the gills with content let's get in there and make something cool alright so first off I've got something pretty cool for you guys kit bash 3d and I have teamed up to get you a 15% off promo code so just go to kit bash 3d comm and then when you add something to the cart for instance this future slums kit go to checkout and then enter the discount code Aria of bash and that'll get you 15% off your order so hopefully this will be especially helpful in part two where we're using these kit bash packs a lot alright first let's run through some of these renders that I created using the kit bash 3d space colony first I started out with this moon environment and I liked the lighting that I developed I liked the crater and the different levels of depth in this image where I had a foreground mid-ground with a crater and then a background with this asteroid belt and some nebula action going on but the buildings felt really weird like they felt kind of like miniatures and I couldn't put my finger on it at first but the way they're grouped was really hurting the scale in this scene and at some point I realized that when humans build cities even if they're small space colonies they're not going to spread things out evenly like this they're going to create clusters because we naturally build cities where there are hubs and then there accessory buildings surrounding them and also building on slopes even though I kind of wrote it off as oh there's less gravity here that's just not something we're accustomed to seeing and it looks just messy in this context so you can see in this next still I took out these buildings on the slope and I focused a lot more on creating clusters of buildings and to me this feels a lot more logically laid out like we've got these bigger buildings that are the hubs and then we've got smaller buildings surrounding them kind of here and then this smaller building surrounding it and then out towards the perimeter we have things like these solar that are lower laying and we could equate this to farming an industry like maybe this is where a lot of the work is happening to keep the colony running whereas here maybe we've got the major scientific centers that's all kind of BS but you get the point that this looks a bit more convincing I also felt the craters here made the buildings feel a lot more miniaturized so I brought the displacement down and this felt a little better but I still wasn't totally happy so I ended up using an entirely different texture that I feel like help sell the scale a bit better though I'm still not totally happy with the scale and I feel if I had gone a bit further and added in little lights and maybe people or moon Rovers and things like that that I would have sold the scale a bit better here are some other angles you can see here that I've got a totally different displacement on this foreground than this background and I liked that this texture kind of brought out the building's a bit more and this one really enhanced the craters in the background like here with this texture because we don't have the craters we don't see the buildings getting so buried but in the background we can see these craters and that creates a bit more of an epic moon surface kind of vibe now I wasn't totally happy with this whole setup and I wanted to try something a bit different with this kit bash and maybe see what it would look like if I tried to build out a Mars environment so this was my first still here and I think this is a lot more successful at communicating the scale because we're down in the buildings we see things like this door here in this vehicle so we know how big a human would be and we've also got some atmosphere or Martian dust or whatever you want to call it that's causing this fall-off in depth and making us feel like we're seeing a great distance and here's the final still in this Martian environment that I made where I feel it's interesting seeing this foreground Rover as well as the city in the background with some volumetric light in here as well as the sand texture with a bunch of rocks poking through to break that pattern up and give the surface some variation alright so we're gonna work on building the Mars scene because ultimately I feel like the look I developed was a little more sophisticated than the moon one but if you guys really want to know how I built that space scene then leave me a note in the comments and if enough people are really itching for that tutorial then I'll make it happen alright first I want to highlight this program called PRF which is actually a free download just go to PRF comm and it's super useful because when you drag in images it maintains the source resolution so you can come to any of these and look full res and also zoom out to get an overall idea of what you're going for in the other mode I have it set to is if you right-click and go to mode you can go to always on bottom so when I'm working say I have a window pulled up I can work and then just minimize to see this in the background at any time almost like a desktop background so this helps me get an idea of the color palette that I want and gives me some kind of inspirational imagery like I'm never gonna get something as awesome as what's in the Martian but I'm gonna try to get like I don't know 50% of the way there like this is really cool here seeing these ripples of sand everywhere but then broken up by all these little rocks and things this is real Mars right here these three are real Mars so there are some really interesting cliff formations and I'm pretty sure that this is real as well it's like a stitched panorama and it's kind of amazing what Mars atmosphere does like this blue here is very cool and alien and something that I want to reflect in my render this is my favorite still here even though it's from movie and is probably CG but I love the variation in the ripples of sand and then areas where the sand is collected and we've got these different formations as well as mountains that are off in the distance that have been buried by the atmosphere it can be really frustrating looking at some of these stills because there's tons of detail and and terracing in these mountains and then there are these subtle details like where the sand has buried the rocks and it's clear that it's like kind of eroded and blown over the rocks and stuff like that is really hard to create in CG but we'll see what we can do but again we're just creating something quick and we'll get as close as we can to things like these but just try and let it be a source of inspiration rather than like crushing your soul and making you want to give up I struggle with this personally all the time okay so first we're gonna start with creating the Mars environment and later we'll move on to adding the KITT bash 3d buildings in so let's take a look at some sites that have some really useful assets that you could use to create environments like this but also keep in mind that I'm going to show some techniques in c40 if you're on a budget where you can create rock formations without having to go out and buy things okay so first off this is pretty obvious but polygon comm I feel like I've mentioned this a bunch of times before but this is my favorite site for gathering textures and here I've gone for this ground sand rippled I just searched for sand and then you get all these different sands but this one has a nice displacement map and I like the look of it next we've got real displacement textures calm and under the shop there's a section for packs and we've got this Stones pack which is really useful for scattering rocks on surfaces there's also this Quarry pack here and this one has one of my favorite grounds that we'll definitely be using it's rock ground oh six though Rock oh eight looks pretty good too but here's Rock ground oh six and then quick soul mega scans this is another great site I picked up this rock sandstone as well as some of these cliff faces to play around with and they've got some really cool detailed like volcanic rocks and other extremely detailed 3d scans that you can poke up through the sand and stone and create some bigger features off in the distance next is textures calm and they've actually been adding some really interesting 3d scans to their site as well like this layered cliff is super detailed and cool and so are some other things like this rock based one here this could be your ground or another cliff face and interestingly they've actually got the biggest collection of different sand formations so I would definitely check these guys out and play with some of these assets here now finally I want to give a shout out to blender gurus the rock essentials this is definitely the most expensive solution but you can see there's some amazing stuff in this pack you get a ton of different rocks to choose from and there are even these extremely cool large rock formations which can really help when you're trying to get something detailed from a distance that doesn't look repetitious alright so let's just start with building out the ground I'll drop in a plane and I'll scale it up quite a bit and this is just kind of arbitrary I'm pretty terrible at working to scale but if I make it bigger then I can come for myself it this is a big scene now first I'm gonna play with creating big shapes and then on top of the big shapes will add our micro details so really we just want kind of smooth hills and maybe some slight mountainous terrain but nothing too detailed or else when we add displacement on top of it things will get pinched and weird so let's just start by adding a displacer to our plane here so we'll come down here hold down shift as we add the displacer so it drops right in there and next we want our plane to have a lot more segments and I'll start out with 555 by 555 and you can see how much geometry that's added so that when we add a noise to this displacer we'll get a much smoother result so if we come over to shading we'll just add in a default c40 noise you can see that's way too small it's just creating this crinkly texture so let's jump in here and add some ones to our scale maybe even bigger like that and then we'll come back up here and go to our object and just increase the height so now we're getting some generic looking Hills and then I'm gonna hit n/a so that we can go back to the shaded view here okay so now we can create some additional displacement looks if we jump over here we can add this into a layer shader and this way we can add additional displacements that will then blend back with the original noise so we can just right click and copy shader and then right-click and paste shader and we'll have another noise and we can jump in here and we've got all sorts of stuff to play with so let's try Luca and obviously this is too spiky so let's just increase the scale and now we've got something a little more interesting though it's looking too geometric so let's increase the octaves and now we've got something that's more organic looking but this is too high frequency for what we're going for we want this to be handled by an additional displacement map on top remember we're just going for those big shapes and then we'll create the small shapes afterwards so let's try something like maybe Hamma and if we bring down this high clip we can kind of see what's going on though again I think these are a bit too computer-generated looking they could work though I think with all that additional displacement there's no way you would ever notice these straight lines but I still want to try something a bit different so let's go for stupa' l-- and we're gonna have to take the high clip back up here and let's take our scale back down to something like whatever this is 41,000 like this is maybe getting general enough that it'll work but another thing we can do is bring back down the octaves so here we're losing detail but that's actually a good thing we just want the general shapes so let's see how far we can push this before it looks a little too geometric like this is too much so it's gonna maybe let's just try five I think this is good so like if you're down here even though there's some detail you can imagine that each of these is a little hill and there's still plenty of room to add tons of additional detail okay so let's do this again we'll just go copy shader and paste shader and let's try one more noise type na keys kind of interesting though earlier I was having good results with Ober this creates some cool break up on the surface and these kind of look like ravines and you can always change the seed if you want to see something different let's just try this for now okay so now we can play around with blending these back you can literally just take down the opacity here and blend them together or you can use an actual blend mode if you want the effect to get more extreme so overlay get overlay all three of these together and get something totally weird and unique or we could screen them on top I'm liking the way that's looking and this original noise isn't actually doing anything right now so if we drag it on top we could set this to overlay mode and this would actually increase the contrast of our terrain so those bumps are kind of getting added into the mix whereas if we just have this at normal mode and we dial back the opacity this would kind of flatten everything out and water it down versus overlay which is a mode that's designed to increase the contrast basically brighter brights and darker darks if that makes sense from your After Effects knowledge that seems to be working pretty well we could also enhance this by jumping into this noise and playing with the low and high clip to exaggerate it even more though I don't think that's necessary I think I was happy like right about here now let's just store this displacer away for a second and try one more thing so let's turn off these other two noise patterns and set this one to normal and let's make this even bigger so let's just set this to two and now so we can really see what's going on let's just boost the contrast until we've got something like this so a noise pattern like this that's super large and kind of general can really break up the terrain into these large patches so when I increase the contrast there are areas that are white that are causing it to displace upwards like this and areas that are black that are causing it to displace downwards and we can use this to our advantage if we jump back up here say we want to essentially mix this is almost like an octane mix node where we're saying this noise will mix between these other two and designate the different regions of the other two noises and to make this really obvious what I'm doing I'm just going to create a new noise shader that's really small scale and this one is going to be set to this one that we just created is going to be set to layer mask and this will function just like an After Effects where it's referencing the layer above it so if I turn this on you can see this is driving the regions of what noises appear where if I crank this contrast up to 100% you can really see these patches but if we actually pull back on the contrast then we'll start to blend these together in a much more smooth way where here we've got one patch and here we've got another so really I just wanted to show you that you can use this to drive different regions and create more variation in the displacements that you're making here we don't want this really high frequency noise we just want to mix between these two where one is over and the other one is stupid I'm gonna jump back to our first example because I found this a little bit more detailed and interesting but I definitely encourage you to jump in and play with this layer mask thing because you can create all sorts of interesting combinations of noises using this technique another thing we can do is just extend our plane out so we're not cutting off this ravine here and maybe give ourselves a bit more room to play at this point I'm gonna option G group this in a null and call it old and I'm gonna duplicate this out here turn this off and right click and go current state to object so that we've got a bake down plane because I'm just gonna commit to this and use this as the base for my ground and low-lying landscape will add mountains and jagged rocks and stuff like that later the other cool thing about making this editable is now say we had a composition that we liked up here for instance and we wanted to bring in some more foreground elements we could just hit MC to bring up the brush and start moving around our terrain so if I set this mode to normal we'll just be affecting the polygons in their normal direction so either towards the normal direction or if you hold down control away from the normal direction and this way we could just increase our brush radius by holding down middle click and kind of popping out some terrain and giving ourselves somewhere to rest the camera to maybe create some interesting foreground to like we're looking down a hill into this terrain and we can also go to the smoothie mode here and start to even out our terrain a little bit if it's getting too pinched okay next I'm just gonna add in a few landscape objects to block in some mountains so that when we're lighting and texturing we have an idea of the perspective and the depth haze and stuff like that it's just good to have these elements in there for compositional reference that we can go back and then replace with more detailed mountains later so here I'll just scale this way up and we can increase the width and depth segments but we don't need a ton of detail because this stuff's going to be in the pretty far background we might have one poking out of the landscape a bit closer so let's bring this up so we can play with the scale we can play with the height here so that's a little extreme let's take down the scale and there's also rough furrows and fine furrows I don't think we need we can have it be a bit smoother we can also art direct this from the cameras perspective and maybe stretch this range out it's also good if you hit shift V to up the opacity on your tinted border so you can really see what your end composition is going to be so maybe that's cool and then we have some further in the background and we can always go in and change the seed and just hold down control to duplicate and we can always scale these up as well so we're creating something that looks like a mess from this perspective but when we're down in these it doesn't really matter because we're never going to see that it's not joined to the rest of the terrain at some point it clips off so for that we want to hit control D so we can continue seeing what we're doing and we'll just turn this view clipping to large or huge would also work and to me it feels a little more interesting if we have kind of an open space like a path to lead the eye through this image before this middle mountain was just kind of blocking the whole composition so let's change the seat again let's move this back further and just try to give it a layered depth and sense that we're looking at a very large-scale scene all right so next we want to start to texture this landscape so I'm gonna go for a rock texture as the base so I'm going to open up that real displacement texture Rock ground oh six that I showed you guys earlier and remember that you can use any kind of photoscan ground texture here and one really nice thing is that they have c40 and octane project files so that when you load these up all the textures are already linked up in the node editor so if you come over here you can take a look and let's just give ourselves some room to look at this real quick you can see they've already piped in the displacement the normal in the normal map we've got a bump map and here this is kind of interesting they've got a roughness map as well as gloss maps that go into the specular but there are two different gloss maps one that's normal and one that's a high gloss and the high gloss is just more crunched down than the regular gloss and they're mixed together with a mixed texture node at 50% so nothing too crazy going on here just a big time-saver so let's take this and copy it into our other project file bring this back over and then let's just drop it onto this plane which I'll named ground all right let's send this off to the live viewer okay so a couple things obviously we're not getting any textures yet but see these black weird smudges here this is a ray epsilon issue so I'm gonna jump in here and then just increase this a little bit and that should go away this is because our scene scales a little bit too big and if you ever see weird artifacts like that just mess around with ray epsilon now the other things going on is if we go to window texture manager you can see that these are all unlinked because I just copied them over so if you go edit select missing textures and then edit relink textures this is actually just a search window so whichever folder you choose it'll search within that entire hierarchy for the textures that it's looking for minor in this my mega assets library folder and then textures and I got a folder for 3d scanned so I'll just hit okay and it goes through and links them all up at once which is awesome okay so at this point the texture is scaled up way too high and we could go into our node editor like we usually do and replace all of these bitmap materials with image texture nodes so that we could drive all of them with a transform okay but the easier way is to actually scale from cinema 4d s dialogue here because this controls the texture all at once whereas here we would have to set up a transform node that's linked into each one of these but these two systems work together you can scale from here or you can scale an offset using this dialog here so I'm just gonna set it down to something like 20 to start and sometimes it gets hung up where it only accepted one of those transforms so let's just refresh okay so there we go but we're actually gonna have to scale this down a lot further so let's go all the way down to two cool so this is a pretty good base and what I'm looking for if you just noticed a jump in the color it's because I had some octane camera settings going on that I'll go over in a little bit but for starters I'm not liking the tearing that's going on with this displacement so I think this needs to be cut down so if I jump in here to the displacement I can just set this to 25 and I think that works a little bit better so now let's add in our daylight here and let's rotate it until we can actually see the Sun there we go okay so now I'm gonna jump into the camera imager settings and enable the camera imager then turn up highlight compression all the way I like this because it gives you a bit more dynamic range and now I can actually see the Sun a little bit better see there we go so I want to match this a little bit more closely to our reference images which if you look here and here something really interesting happens on Mars where the Sun actually appears a little bit cyan and then it falls off to this dusty orangish brown so let's see if we can recreate this with our daylight system if I go into my daylight here and change the sky color to a bit of an orange we get that and then let's change the Sun color to more of a cyan and that's like too extreme so let's take this down and boost up the value so that it's not gray okay let's push this a little bit more towards brown so this is getting a bit closer but it's still kind of money and at this point I really like to add in a custom LUT in this field here so one of my favorite nut packs is called Osiris just Google Osiris Luntz and in here I like to use the REC 709 Lutz because those are meant to go on footage with a normal color profile versus like a log curve which would be a lot flatter so I like the KTX LUT here and you can see that it's making things a bit more extreme but what I want to do is change the underlying colors of the Sun again so if I go back here and change this more to an orange and then desaturate the Sun color and maybe take down the amount of orange here so it's a bit paler okay let's go to our camera imager and continue to play with this you can see what the LUT is doing here let's bring up the exposure maybe and then down on the gamma to add a bit more contrast and then let's go to the post-processing tab and enable it and take the glare power all the way down and then up the bloom so we just get a bit of that haze coming in now I feel like we've lost some of the orange vibe that we need if we look back here at the reference images there's definitely more a little bit more orange going on in some of these so let's boost this up a bit I think it helps taking down the power and maybe saturate the sky a bit more but then we get a bit too orange so maybe we take it more saturation and less brightness just keep going with that let's push this may be a bit more red so I'm liking the look of this sky gradient but now we've lost all the detail down here so if we go back to our camera imager we can just up the gamma and this is kind of a delicate balance but I want to see some blue in the Sun but not in the rocks here so I'm gonna take this back a bit maybe down to like 7% or even all the way down to 5 and now I feel like these highlights are no longer tinted in that kind of gross incompetence and ring in the sky which I like ok and let's also take the bloom a little bit back down so that it's not kind of so overwhelming and here if I want to bring a bit more orange into these rocks what I can do is I can just pull in a mixed texture here and then put this in to the diffuse slot and replace this and then bring in an RGB spectrum which is just a color so I'll pop it into texture one so now it's blending 50% between this white color and the original texture but here we can just set this to a pretty saturated yellow and then dial that in so you can see as we bring this slider back a little bit we're getting a lot more orange here but it's also still too dark so if we go to this color correction we can just set the brightness to two and maybe this is a little bit too yellow so let's take the value down a little bit and like this is looking a bit nicer to me I think we're getting a bit closer to some of these colors and I think the last week I'm gonna make here is shifting the sky color a bit more orange because I don't really actually like the red that much it's getting a bit weird I think this looks a little bit better now all this is gonna change a ton when we add in atmosphere so let's add an octane fog volume now we're gonna need to scale this up really really big so in order to not crash our computers I'm just going to Souths this voxel size which effectively makes the volume super low resolution but I'm not actually gonna add any detail to it like clouds this is just gonna be for the purpose of creating some haze and if I pull back here I want this volume to be pretty low hanging so I think we could just do 500 and then from here let's add some numbers and I'll show you what happens if we're only covering this section of the terrain first so let's make this like I don't know about this big where it's covering some of the mountains but not the entirety of our scene let's jump back now sometimes if a box isn't big enough it won't actually show up at all so I think I need to set this number a bit higher and there we go now we can actually see that we've got a volume and so that's totally blacked out our screen the first thing I want to do is hide the volume in our viewport so we can actually see here and then I'll come into our medium and then jump into the volume medium and take the density way way down now we also want to make sure in our absorption and scattering we've got these set to white and so this is already looking a lot more interesting but the thing that's happening is if you look at the line of mountains here we can't distinguish one from the next because these all exist outside the volume box so we need to make that volume box a lot bigger so let's bring back the visibility on our volume here and in our generate tab I'm just gonna add some additional numbers let's make this even bigger four by four so that's super huge that's gonna get us coverage right there but I'll scooch this over so it's covering everything and maybe even make it taller cool let's jump back into our camera and now you see that we're gonna have to take down the density even further so let's just say 0.05 0.005 cool so now you can see we've got this deeper draw distance and all these mountains appear distinct from one another let's compare store render buffer I want to see what this would look like if we did the same thing in our medium tab of our daylight so I'm just gonna add fog here and this is a bit more of a cheat but it has its own distinct look that I'd like to see so I'm gonna uncheck enable a be comparison so we can see what's going on and then I'll just increase this medium radius until things start to go dark then jump into the scattering medium and make sure both of these are white cool and now we need to drop the density so now if we go to compare enable you can see we've got a lot more control with the volume object and you can pair both systems together like sometimes this can be good for just some general haze on top of your initial haze like here we're adding an even more dustiness on top of this fog volume so that could be a cool look for later and in order to store that I can just duplicate this daylight and turn this one off so this will be the one that has the fog so you can just name this fog and then this one we can just remove the medium here so we're back to where we started okay the next thing I want to try with this volume is the scattering phase so let's go compare and store this again and if I move this upwards the volume will get much stronger closer to the light so some of this is definitely good though at some point we start losing the distant mountains so we can compensate by making this even lower and then pushing the phase up higher okay now the phase is too high let's bring it back now another fun thing to play with is putting colors into the absorption so say we add in a bit more of a blue in the absorption you'll see what happens this is kind of like the diffuse color of the fog and this will be even more apparent if we set the scattering phase back to zero now you can see it's really inheriting that color but really for the distant haze we want more of this dusty Brown or even this orange could work here though I feel like this photo is hyper saturated and not exactly the look I want to go for so let's set this to an orange color maybe a dark brown and we could also try going back to our volume and taking the size of this bounding box a lot higher okay and to bring a bit more lightness back to the horizon let's bring back some of our scattering face not too much let's go a bit further and let's change this absorption color to more of a bright orange and see what happens let's move it even more towards yellow okay I think I've taken it too far let's desaturate this a bit and then finally if you increase the volume step length this can change they look a bit but it'll also really decrease your render times a ton so now it's rendering way faster okay I'm liking this more but now the whole image has gone this shade of orange and there's not enough color variation going on so what I can do is go to my white point and try to dial against that by pushing some orange in and that'll get me the color opposite so that's D saturated things a bit but then I can compensate by upping the saturation so actually I'm finding that if I bring this saturation down to something like one point three here this is getting a lot closer to what I want and lastly we can play around with these response curves and I was finding that this one here adds a lot to the look and now if we flip back to our references you can see that we're actually getting a lot closer to some of these colors we could still maybe up the exposure a bit and then drop the gamma to bring in a bit more contrast and maybe pulling some vignette increate more of a sky gradient here and then back up a bit with a gamma to compensate and if we rotate around the daylight we can see that this can still look interesting from other angles as well just don't push it too far because then it starts to reveal all the weird colors we've got going on and this just goes to show how important the lighting is to creating a compelling image so let's go back to this backlit look okay now that we've got the look dialed in I'd like to point out something if we're a bit higher up we can see that this texture has tons of repetitions because it's just a tiled texture and if we wanted to do an aerial shot like this we need to find some way to fix it so what we can do is we can call this medium rocks and I'm gonna duplicate this set up and also duplicate the texture itself and I'm going to replace this texture and call this one small rocks and then it's just a matter of coming here and I'm gonna decrease the size to one by one now keep in mind that when we scale the texture down it's gonna get a lot spiky err and look more displaced because we haven't actually changed the displacement amount so we want to jump in and change this to something like twelve and we can even go and offset this texture by some amount okay and now let's make one for large rocks so we'll duplicate this again call this large and then duplicate our texture one last time and replace it and here we want this to be let's just do four and again with the displacement now we're going bigger so with the bigger texture we actually want to increase the displacement amount so with this one we had it at 25 so this one we want to be fifty and we can offset this one differently as well now hopefully it's obvious we've got a lot more variation in our surface but if we come up here it should become really apparent so before with just our medium rocks let's take a look at what that looked like so the pattern is a lot more obvious here especially with this rock repeating over and over but adding back to small and a large rocks there's enough variation that our eye isn't going to pick that pattern so let's go back to where we were okay so next I'm gonna create the sand let's just duplicate one of these terrains and hide the others and this one will remove the texture and create a new material I'll drop this on here and I'll call this sand okay let's jump into the node editor and give ourselves some space okay I'm going to take an image texture and if you drag directly onto the dot here it'll automatically connect now I'm gonna look up and find in my assets library here I've got under polygon I've got this sand texture that I highlighted earlier so I think it's under ground sand so here are some different options and the one that I want is this ground sand desert rippled high-rez okay so in this case we're gonna control everything with a transform node so let's drag in this transform and let's scale it down and now let's duplicate this by holding down control drag in our transform node again and then this one will replace with our roughness map and I can find it easily by typing ground sand desert again so I want this gloss high-res and I'll pull this into the roughness an interesting thing with polygon textures is that they use these gloss maps but gloss maps are actually the inverse of roughness maps so in this case we want to invert this okay and we're not actually seeing any glossiness because this is set to diffuse so let's set the type to glossy and now we're seeing something ok let's duplicate this down again and pop in our specular map and you can see it's already saved this so if I just delete this gloss here I'll find a list of what I want so here I want the reflection map high-res and I'll pop that into specular and this one we don't want inverted so there we go that's brought down the specularity a lot which is good okay let's duplicate this again and put on our transform in there and let's grab the normal map this time so I'll just delete this off and come down here to normal high-res and put that in there cool and now we've got a sense of how large this texture actually still is because you can see these sand ripples are massive so let's bring this transform way down so that's more of the scale that we're looking for and a good way to change this texture is if you go to the specular channel if you mess with the gamma you can make this a lot less shiny or a lot more shiny depending on what you're after I think I'll leave it where it was but just good to know and just to prove to you the thing about the roughness map if I uncheck invert you can see just how weird this gets there's just fireflies all over the place and this never fully resolves last but not least let's add in our displacement map drag this down attach our transform again and then let's search for our displacement displacement high-rez and the source on this is 8k so let's go to our displacement channel click add displacement make sure that we're using 8k and then plug this in and so we're getting these crazy breakup patterns all we have to do is change from follow geometric normal to follow smooth normal and now let's disconnect the normal map so that we can kind of see the displacement working by itself so this needs to be increased let's try 50 that's way too much let's go back to 20 okay I think that should be good enough let's add our normal map back in now we can see the contribution that the displacements making and honestly I'm not sure if we need displacement in this case one issue it's creating is if you get pretty close to it you can see that there's still a lot of artifact and going on it is creating actual ridges which is really good but we might be able to get away with just using a normal map in this case one last thing we can play with is this rotation on Z here so if we want the stripes to go a different direction or if we want them to be coming towards us this can be really cool and I'm gonna decrease the scale a little bit more okay so I feel like these grooves are a little bit too intense so I'm gonna reduce the normal map until that effect is lessened so I think that's a bit nicer and I realized one reason the displacement wasn't working too well was I think I selected an 8-bit displacement map rather than the 16-bit and so that was causing some extra artifacts so let's go back and select 8k and follow the smooth normal and then let's duplicate this and pull our transform back in and again let's locate this displacement map here and you can see we've got a bunch of different options for displacement map I think I selected the high res but I want the 16-bit high-res so let's add that in there and already this is looking a lot nicer and I think I actually want to up the scale of this texture not quite that large but somewhere around there might be cool and then let's bump up this displacement map even higher okay cool I'm liking that a lot so let's add our rocks back in right so we're barely seeing any of the rocks and that's because this displacement is set to zero and if we set the mid level to 0.5 it'll drop down the surface okay cool so now you can see that there's a pretty big difference between the color of the rocks and the color of the sand we can kind of get these closer together by altering the color of a sand so let's come up here and let's add in a color correction node and let's try taking the saturation down a bit and maybe moving the hue a bit more Orange and I also think the sand looks a bit better if we drop the gamma so it gets a bit brighter okay so now let's see if we can blend these rocks into the sand better as if they were covered in dust if we look here at some of these rocks this is an actual photo of Mars and you can see that the dust really covers up the rock surface so let's see if we can do something along those lines and credit to this idea goes to Andrew Price who also did a Mars tutorial in blender and went to pretty great lengths to get these to blend we're going to do something a bit more simple than what heated so let's go the large rocks first as our demo because they're the easiest to see and let's just disconnect this diffuse for the time being and we'll pull in a couple RGB spectrums and a mix node and then let's also pull in a fall-off node this is pretty similar to a technique in the advanced shaders tutorial where I created some dust so here let's pop this in the diffuse and let's put these two RGB spectrums in here the first one we'll just make bright red and the second one we'll make bright green so these will stand out a ton as color opposites and then we'll plug the fall-off map in here to the amount now we want to select normal versus vector 90 degrees and this should work as a slope where vertical faces get one color and horizontal faces get another color so let's pull down the skew factor and you can see what's beginning to happen we're getting green on some surfaces and red on others so that's good so we want this original texture to be on the red so let's find where our red is and replace it and now maybe we want a little more of the original texture to come through like this might be a bit too extreme so let's go back to a fall-off map and increase this even further now you can see we're getting our original texture coming through but green on all of these surfaces that are close to the ground so that's perfect now we just have to shift this green color to something that matches more closely to the environment so let's grab our green here and we could even color pick and maybe let's go a bit brighter so let's store a render buffer and see what happens if we bypass this whole thing so that's kind of a before-and-after so now you can see this dust coming in here I think we could brighten it up a bit and maybe desaturate it so interestingly the closer we get to white the more these dark shadows disappear and it starts to blend in with a sand a lot nicer and now let's see if we can't finesse it a bit more by increasing this skew factor just a touch cool so that's helping a lot let's get rid of this red color here and we can take this whole chain here and copy it and then go to our other rock textures and paste and just replace what's in the diffuse currently and get rid of the old stuff same thing for the small rocks cool so now we should be able to see how extra dusty this is all looking I feel like a lot of this is too shiny so I'm just gonna swing the octane daylight around and now it's feeling like a much dustier Mars okay so I'm really not feeling these sand ripples enough so I'm gonna go back to our rippled texture and just double the displacement here to 44 I'm finding this a lot more interesting looking the next thing that bugs me about this picture other than the mountains obviously which we'll get to texturing at some point is that it's too uniform if we look at our references here you can see there are big patches of sand as well as other regions where there are a lot more rocks so let's try to mimic that in our render so let's just take this sand and add a displacement áformer so hold down shift and it'll become a child of that as we select it now here under shading I just want to drop in a noise so this is kind of meta because I'm adding this displacer to the terrain that we already created with a bunch of displacer x' and then baked down but what this will do for us if we increase the height you can see that we're bubbling out the terrain in certain regions now this is way too high frequency we want to go in and make the noise a lot bigger so now we'll have patches where they're just sand and patches where there are just rocks and I think this is a bit too high I was just pushing this up to show you what was going on but let's bring this down to something like 10 so they're pretty close but there are regions that are slightly higher with the sand and regions that are slightly higher with the rocks and now it should be pretty clear that there are clusters of sand and clusters of rocks now we can actually do this again by just copying our displacer and let's jump into the shading and change the noise seed and let's add another digit here so that it gets a lot bigger so this is our super big noise we'll just call this super big noise and we'll call this one big noise and now we've got regions where there's just sand and regions where there's just rock clusters and if we come up here this is a much more interesting look to the terrain than what we had so maybe we went too big on the super big noise let's cut this in half to maybe five thousand let's try seven thousand cool I think that looks pretty sweet but the convenient thing is you can just change this seed and basically see it reflected here in your viewport like here we know we're gonna get some sand close to the camera I think that's pretty nice seeing this sand texture here and we can quickly make this more interesting by just pushing close to the ground and then going into our camera imager and bringing up the aperture a little bit and now we want to turn off auto focus and we're gonna run into an issue when we try to pick focus here because we've got this volume on it's seeing this volume object as what it's picking focus to so it's gonna be super close to the lens so let's turn this off for a second and then let's pick focus again and obviously things are looking weird because there's no volume object so let's turn it back on cool so that's better and now let's bring up our aperture and let's kind of get a bit closer to some of these rocks and let's set our aperture aspect ratio to two and our edge to three to get that anamorphic bokeh look and let's bring down our aperture so it's not so shallow in the foreground cool so I think this makes the composition look a lot more interesting because we've got this foreground like we're staring over the edge of this big dune down into this valley okay the last thing I want to fix with this ground texture is that I don't like that in certain patches like with the rocks it's a bit more desaturated than the sand and also if we look at our reference here the sand is a bit more orange in most of these like this one it's a bit more too saturated so we could kind of go for this but I want to add in a bit more orange to the sand so let's go to our rippled sand here and let's just go to our saturation and boost it some so that's too far but we can also bring down the brightness a bit and play with the hue so that's two red so these are really subtle tweaks here but maybe that and then a little less saturated so I'm liking this a bit better but now we've emphasized that difference between the sand and the rocks even more so let's um create a copy of this camera and jump into it and this one will just take away the shallow depth of field take the aperture all the way down so we can back up a bit and see the difference that these changes are making over here somewhere might be a good litmus test for where the rocks are meeting the sand and also here with this displacement we're never going to get this close to the sand so it doesn't really matter but we might be able to fix this with some filtering on the displacement so if we choose Gaussian and set it to something like 2 you can see it's basically just blurring the displacement map but I'm gonna keep this off for now because I feel like it's kind of processor intensive and let's go back to our large rocks into this fall-off map in color so let's change this color to try and get closer to this Orange so obviously that's way too far but now we're getting somewhere it's still too saturated that feels maybe more appropriate that we could also shift it a little more yellow and that's definitely getting a lot better now we could also play with the fall-off map but further we crank this to the left the more the dust overtakes the rocks you can see if we go too far then they just become a solid color so maybe somewhere around here cool I think I'm happy with that let's just copy all of these nodes again and paste them to our other two rock textures and we can right-click here select hierarchy and then delete and paste again select hierarchy delete and this one and this one are two rogue nodes we can also select hierarchy and just sketch this upwards okay so I saved out two frames and comparing these two you can see that the changes we've made really blend the sand into the rocks a bit better a final note is keep in mind we can always dial back on this LUT so here's without it so that's making a pretty dramatic difference but if it gets too saturated in orange we could just cut this to about 0.8 and then we'll have a bit less of an orange oversaturated look okay so now let's start bringing in a couple of those scanned rocks I'm just gonna go to file merge and in my rocks I've got these three volcanic rocks as well as a couple cliffs and some sandstone I'll start with one of these volcanic rocks here so I'm actually going to go with the high quality versus these LOD zero through five rocks which have lower poly counts but can make up the detail with normal and displacement Maps but I'm just gonna bring in the high quality here cool and now let's go to our materials here and go to convert materials and then remove unused materials then let's go to our node editor alright let's pull this image texture into the diffuse and now we want to make sure we're in the image folder 4qi vwj let's go back here here we go let's pull in the albedo it's the same as diffuse and then we'll copy this over and pull in the roughness so there's just a roughness right there and this somehow got swapped around just now so let's put that there and that there and duplicate this again and we'll grab the bump and if we store a render buffer we can see what difference the bumps gonna make so it's just adding in a bit of detail there and then we can also bring in the normal bump which is just a normal map there are also these other normal Maps depending on which level of detail you selected but we just want this normal bump here and if we store that and remove it this side is with the sides without so we're adding a bit more detail in there so just pull that normal back in and we also forgot to select glossy texture so here we also want the specular map so I'll just duplicate this up and pull in our specular right here and now we should be good to go so we'll just copy this whole model over and I'll bring it up close to the camera and let's kind of roughly position it over here okay now so obviously it's way too dark let's pull in a color correction node and let's start with gamma so that gets us most of the way there we could probably shift this slightly away from orange and we could also desaturate it and I think I'm actually gonna move it out into the field here pretty far and scale it down I actually think the orange looked a bit better blends in a bit more and we'll duplicate this up and move it somewhere over here and maybe move this one even further back maybe we'll move this up here to the edge of this mound to create some more interesting shapes along this Ridge I think that's adding a little something okay so I've just gone and done that same texturing process with this other mega scans asset and it's looking pretty good but the bump is causing some issues so I'll compare store this and take out the bump the bump is causing all these weird extra details that I think are unnecessary in this case if we store again and remove the normal this is what it's looking like without the normal but I think the added detail from the normal map is fine so I'll leave that in there so I'm just gonna copy this rock over cool so I'll just position this first before I fire off another render and I think it's a bit too big so I was killed it on down a bit and then we'll just kind of bring it over and find an interesting place for it to rest thinking it might look better a little further into the background well let's try something like that for starters okay so same deal let's boost the gamma and drop the power and then let's put a color correction node in there shift the hue a bit a little bit brighter still and then let's desaturate just kidding on the brightness I think that's getting pretty close to where it's not standing out too too much but I think we can find a better position for it maybe this is one that would look good close to the camera but scaled down this is starting to look interesting but we're catching the inside of it so let's tip it upwards like that and then to the side so I finally found a good home for it over here where it's kind of jutting out of the sand and I think that's a pretty cool look so I might do that in a couple of their spots it can also be really important with these super high poly models to create instances like this sandstone rock I'm working with is close to 2 million Polly's so for this kind of thing if you duplicate it a bunch it's gonna eat through your vram really fast so let's go up to this menu here and drop down to instance and that just automatically created an instance of this now if we delete the original it'll get unlinked but that's ok because we can just relink it to the same model we only need one copy of the original model and the rest can be instances now if you look closely this is still eating through my VRAM it's almost up to 5 gigs but the thing I haven't done yet is selected all of these and ticked render instance and so now I'm down to three point eight gigs and the scene is way lighter alright let's move on to texturing these mountains finally so I'm going to jump into a new camera and scooch on over to one of these mountains here and I'll create a new glossy material and find this landscape and drop it on come to my node editor punch in an image texture for the diffuse and I'm gonna navigate to this textures com 3d scans and there's one in here that I really like the look of it's this kind of layered rock so I'll drop in the diffuse there and let's UV transform and rotate this so it's horizontal I think it would be easier to see if we turned off the volume and I'm gonna also turn off these other rocks and terrains so things will move a lot faster ok let's just rotate this around now I can actually see it rotating live and we can scale this down a whole bunch now the bulk of the work is gonna get done by the displacement so let's just duplicate this up pop this into the transform and grab our displacement here we also need to click add displacement follow smooth normal and 8k and now let's really boost this displacement height there we go so that's looking a lot more interesting it's still too big and that's repeating too much so let's put the difference so I'm happy enough with that I think it needs to blend in more with this color so let's boost the gamma and pop in a color correction node let's boost the saturation and let's play with the gamma some more we could also up the contrast decrease the saturation let's see what it looks with the volume back on that looks pretty good to me I think it's a bit dark compared to this so let's boost it a bit more that's looking pretty good to me now let's just duplicate that over to the other landscapes so we've got an issue where the textures running vertically on some of these so let's just duplicate our camera again and move over there to see what the deal is so for this we're gonna need to create a duplicate texture and replace it and jump into the node editor and then rotate this if we ditch the displacement temporarily we can see it rotate in real time that's looking pretty good to me and maybe we want more displacement that's more like it I think we want that same change on the other material too now the other thing that's obvious is we want a lot more roughness here because we're getting all these little fireflies so let's go into the roughness and crank that up and now let's just reduce the specular down and let's really crank the roughness all the way so it doesn't look so shiny same thing goes for this other material roughness all the way up specular all the way down at 0.15 okay let's see how this is looking now and let's turn our rocks back on let's create another copy of this landscape and then put our large rock texture on it and let's jump back over here to see what that looks like okay we're gonna have to duplicate this large rock texture because we're not seeing anything and replace it and then go into the displacement here and change commit level down to zero and then for the original texture here let's change the mid level on this displacement to one so that this one displaces less and the rocks displace more because right now the cliff face is overriding the rocks and not letting them come through okay now we can see what the issue is when I put this large rock texture here I forgot to put four by four for the scale that's more like it but I think we could actually go up to something like 10 by 10 and then increase the displacement on this one so let's go in here and up the displacement to something like 200 and that's looking pretty cool by itself but let's see if we can mix the two textures together so we'll call this landscape big rocks and we'll call this landscape striations now let's jump back into our texture and in the displacement let's set this to 0.5 so we'll just bring this up gradually until it intersects with this rock texture let's go back to 0 and see what happens okay so zero is too far let's try 0.3 so you can see some of these rocks are poking through it's good at point two point one and I'd also like to get rid of some of this color variation which doesn't seem consistent with this other terrain so if I just desaturate that's not exactly gonna help but what I can do is mix in a color so let's put a mix down make sure this is texture 2 and then let's grab an RGB spectrum and color pick the ground and so you can see that's looking a lot more consistent I think the color needs to be a bit brighter and less orange and actually a bit darker from that it's looking pretty close and we can also just borrow our big noise from our sand and see what happens if we put it in there and the big noise doesn't look like it's gonna be big enough so let's get rid of that and put the super big noise in there that's more what I'm looking for and let's boost the height to 50 cool so now we're seeing more variations in there let's see what it looks like from a distance okay so all these other landscapes were pretty okay as far as the orientation of that main texture so I can probably just make these editable and right click and say connect objects and delete so we've just got one object that represents all the rest of these landscapes and that helps because now we can just duplicate this single landscape and swap out the big rock texture here and also put in the super big noise okay so we don't get confused let's call this majority landscapes striations and we'll call this majority landscape big rocks so in our landscape striations we need to fix this other texture because right now the displacement mid level is set to zero so if we hop over to this camera we should be able to see that we're only seeing these striations so we want to set this to point one like we did with the other texture and now we're starting to see some of these rocks peek through but maybe we'll take this one even further and go to point two so I think this is helping the mountains blend into the ground here because it's adding in that dirt that we've put everywhere else and maybe it wouldn't hurt to do something similar here so we'll go back to this landscape which is our regular old landscape striations here and we'll jump in make sure we hit get active materials so we're only seeing one material there we go and this displacement let's set it to point two cool and I like that change because the profile of this mountain here we're seeing a lot more of these little bumps and rocks poking through which really takes away the CG feel and if we look at the reference from the Martian you can see the profile on this cliff is what really sells the scale and this kind of thing you only get through painstaking work like maybe sculpting it out in ZBrush or it could just as easily be something that was composited in from actual photo reference of cliffs okay let's bring back our other rock so we can check out our progress and let's reach up the shallow depth-of-field here and I'm liking this a bit better panned upwards which should give room for some nice buildings and profiles against this sky so this is looking really cool but just watch out because I have already almost hit six gigs of RAM so you might want to constrain your scene and not put so many high poly models and stuff like that in there and limit the number of displacement instances you're using like with those mountains maybe just use the striations or the dirty rock texture but not both because we're quickly busting through the limit for 980ti s which is six gigs I'm on 1080 T eyes for this tutorial so I'm good to go for a little bit longer but the scene is getting super heavy one thing you can do to optimize is any texture that's black and white set the format to float and it'll use up less VRAM so I'm gonna go through and see how much V Rama I can save myself by setting all the textures that only need to be black and white to float so that save close to half a gig of VRAM not the best ever but pretty good okay so if you're on a budget I want to show you how you can make some displacement maps without having to go out and buy them this is a tip from Stuart Lippincott aka Stu's or many of you may know the great Stu's or so let's just drop in a plane here and we'll just add a standard C 4d material we'll drop it on we'll jump in and we're gonna set this to luminance mode and then in the luminance texture we'll create a noise and this is where you can get super creative again by putting this into a layered shader if you want so if you remember we did this last time for the general shape to the terrain but this time we're trying to create those micro displacements and one reason we didn't create those micro displacements in the displacer is the poly count would get out of control and it would bog our scene way down whereas octane can handle this image based displacement really easily the only issue is it can't easily convert from cinema 4d system into displacement on-the-fly so we have to bake it out so let's just go into our layer shader let's change this one to something like stupa and then up here we can copy this and paste it and this one will do Lucca and here we want the octaves to be the full 20 and we can scale this up and this one too we want to make sure it's 20 and we'll scale this up as well so if we right-click and go to cinema 4d tags bake texture we can come down here and choose the width and height so in a normal octane displacement map the max is 81 92 by 81 92 but if we do that exact resolution we'll get an issue around the borders where there are some glitches so we actually want to expand it a little bit so let's set this to 81 96 by 81 96 and I'm just going to use a PNG at 16 bits per channel and I'll set this to this folder where I've been baking out other noise types and I'll call this combo noise 1 and here we want to set the mode to luminance and we can see a preview so right now we're only getting the 1 on top so if you remember we can go back here and mix the two of these together so let's try overlaying these and maybe the Topkapi we actually make the smaller noise and the bottom one is a larger noise so that we've got a variation in detail where some are small details and others are super large ok let's head back to our baked texture tag and under options we can hit preview again and we'll get an update as to what the texture will look like and then let's just hit bake cool so now that's done we can just create a diffuse material so let's come over here and click on add displacement then drop this image texture in here and we'll go and grab our combo noise and now let's drag this on to our plane remove this baked texture tag and then let's fire this off and now let's drop in our daylight and rotate it around and our displacement needs to be at 8k and actually we're still getting this issue around the textured border so the easiest way to fix this is by hitting UV transform here and just scaling it up by the tiniest bit and then that goes away so here's our combined texture and it's super detailed and you can basically bring in several more of these and layer them up like we've been doing so say we had another plane and I bring in I duplicate our material here and I bring in yet another displacement map like this over now I can push this one up through and maybe increase the displacement height on this and change the mid level so it goes back down at a mid level of 0.5 if I Solo this turn off the other one this will cause it to stretch from the center whereas at a mid level of zero it'll push upwards and mid level of 1 it'll push downwards so 0.5 is a pretty good starting place so this one's kind of cool by itself but then when we add in the additional texture we get more variation and again if we were to combine this technique with what we learned previously where we put a displacer that has large-scale displacements as a child of the plane then add in a noise and make sure we've got enough segments here and then scale up the noise and boost the height and actually that's too much on the scale and now the height is crazy so something like that and then bring in one of these textures here we need to change the displacement to follow smooth normal and maybe reduce the amount of displacement let's try the other texture here same thing we're gonna need to change this to smooth you can see how these techniques can work in combination where you're controlling the large scale displacements with a displacer and the small scale ones with a texture and now if we want we can put a dirt note in the diffuse change everything to glossy add an a' gradient and change some colors around and then take the roughness up or use an actual rock texture for the diffuse like this but this should give you an idea that you can still make some pretty cool-looking stuff without having to go out and spend a ton of money all right I wanted to talk about one last way you can make these Martian landscapes or beef up your terrains and that's with World creator or world machine I've used both of them world machine I think is a little more well-known and has really powerful erosion features and on the whole I think it's a bit more deep than World Creator but World Creator is really cool and super user-friendly and because it's so intuitive you can basically jump into it without knowing almost anything about the software so let me just give you a quick demo cool so here I am inside world creator and alt and right-click will allow you to rotate around middle-click will let you dolly around and then I think right-click will let you pan I'm extremely new at this program but it's super easy to figure out so let me show you what I'm talking about first off let's just go to this terrain here and we want to make sure we're exporting 8k Maps so we can just come down here to 1/4 meter and now our resolution will be 8k and the cool thing about this program is it runs on the GPU whereas world machine runs on the CPU so you can see all your changes in real time and you can export Maps crazy fast at least 10 if not a hundred times faster than world machine because it runs on the GPU so filters is where you're gonna do most your work and I'm gonna add a layer and I'm not even gonna bother naming this because I'm just gonna create a single layer and do everything in that one layer and just get in get out because I really don't know what I'm doing yet with this software so let's add a Canyon let's do sand covered Canyon hit ok so already that's looking kind of cool we can control the general strength and sharpness here so maybe we want a little less sharp and spiky something like that now let's add another filter and erode it to some extent so let's try there are these different types of erosion but let's just do soft and now we've got some of these cool lines here that add detail maybe it's not that realistic because there's not water on Mars I rode this kind of stuff but whatever if we up the sharpness strength here something kind of cool starts to happen and it feels more like a rocky terrain let's try adding maybe some rocky plateaus and just taking down the strength so just a little bit of that and then maybe we want the erosion to happen after that so we can just scoot that over next to make this a lot more Kenyan like let's add some terracing so let's just go for standard terraces now here if we don't want this to affect the base down here but only the cliffs let's just select a height and bring this up so there we go and we can also bring up the height smoothness to kind of feather this in even more next I'll take down the general strength so it's a little bit more subtle there and we can up the randomness and I'll push this after the rocky plateaus but before the erosion and next I actually want to add a second Terrace and I'm going to use this as the smaller terracing so here we can just take down the strength again and do the same thing to the height so that it's only affecting these cliffs up here now we can take the min size down and the max size down pretty far too and I'll come in here to show you what this is doing let's bring the strength back up you can see this is adding a lot more terracing and they're much smaller so maybe let's take the max size way down to like three and then we'll take the strength down so it's more subtle I'm just trying to create these striations in the landscape and I'll bring up the height smoothness again so from a distance this could be pretty convincing the last thing I want to do is add in one more type of erosion and this one's called wind and if I increase the length here you can see that this just kind of streaks everything out but if we select an angle then we can choose a direction for this wind to come from so it's almost like sandblasting one part of the terrain which is kind of a cool variation so let's bring down the length until this is a lot more subtle and now we can control the angle width and smoothness and also the direction so that's kind of an interesting look they're like the cliffs have been eaten away by this wind blasting and this swirl is pretty fun though probably not going to use it but just thrown that out there because that's kind of cool but the last thing I want to do is probably add in a bit of sediment so I'm going to go for sediment complex and it is more processor intensive than any of the other effects that I've found but for this Mars landscape that's covered in dust and sand it kind of makes sense to have this in there if we go back to our base here we could increase the overall strength by upping this level one these are kind of like levels of detail where we're working from big to small so for these cliffs that are probably going to be in the distance it makes sense to increase their displacement height because I'm going to want them to poke up above the other mountains now there's one more thing here if I go to add under general there's something called zero edge and this is going to do exactly what it sounds like and make sure that the edge of the terrain is flattened and this way if I bring this in as a separate displacement map I can kind of poke it up through other terrain without worried that it's going to bubble upwards and create an issue where we're seeing underneath it and stuff like that and if we want to see other options we can always change the seed under the base this is kind of a cool shape here though it gets a little extreme and spiky so maybe we can bring that down and I think I like that that could be good now if we go to export I'm gonna use TIF 32-bit float because when I use PNG 16-bit I got all sorts of terrible artifacts and lines in my displacement map in octane so hit export and I call this Mars Canyon 0:02 and you can see just how fast this is exporting an 8k displacement map if you've used world machine at all you'll know that it can take up to an hour to export an 8k map so while world machine might be a little bit more powerful this program will save you in terms of how quickly you can get things at the door and just for good measure I'm gonna export one that is a little bit less extreme I might like this better but it's literally that easy now back in octane I'm just going to go and create my displacement map and create my displacement node and drop in our map that we just created let's try at this Canyon 0:03 and let's change our output to 8k and bump up our height and now we're getting a pretty cool looking terrain I don't love how spiky it is in certain parts so I'm gonna take it down a little bit so it would probably be something closer to this and if we want to check the other map it looks like this this one might be cool to try out let's take it into our other scene okay so I pasted it in the plane and scaled it way up though now we want to push it way back into the background I'm only gonna use this as one of these background mountains now keep in mind that if we scale something up a ton we're going to need to increase its displacement height a lot too so let's send this off to see what's going on okay so now obviously we need to boost the height a ton so let's add in a couple ones there and that's still not enough so let's boost it even higher there we go now if we return to our previous position here let's actually bring it a bit closer and now we'll take the displacement height down by a lot and now let's scooch it over here and increase the height again and drop it on down maybe rotate it okay that's too close but you can see how this could create some pretty interesting details in your image I'm going to scoot it back again okay I'm happy with that positioning but I'm gonna decrease this yet again let's try 6000 and now let's push it back upwards a little bit okay 6000 was too much let's try 7500 okay I'm gonna add in this other one as well okay and I've added in the second terrain back here as well maybe I'll scale this one up a bit and then bring him back to the old 9000 that's kind of nice over here though now it's getting in the way so I'll rotate it around okay this is a more interesting profile for sure but I think it can be moved check this away okay I think I'm finally happy with this profile over here and this one over here now we just need to change the color a bit so it matches this sand texture better this one though is so far in the background that it doesn't even matter okay so what I think I can do is I can just steal the diffuse color and texture from our large rocks here so I'll just copy all of this and go over to this is our plane here we'll call this closed Canyon and we'll call this far Canyon so in this texture here I'll click get active material to just see that one I'll paste and I'll sketch this over but let's store a render buffer so we can see the difference and plug this into the diffuse and you can see that's pretty much solved it okay the last thing is this texture is currently set to diffuse so I'm going to compare store render buffer and let's see if we can get it looking good with glossy so that we can maybe catch some highlights on that Canyon now we're gonna want to take up the roughness because the specular is currently too tight to even see it but hopefully you can see this gives it just a bit more visual interest like some of these rocks are catching the highlights on the side of the canyon so there's the before and after it's pretty subtle but I think it's an improvement okay I promise this is gonna be the very last thing that I show before moving on to the actual space colony part of this thing and getting into assembling the kit bash buildings so I'm gonna duplicate our camera and kind of pull back on this one and for this I'm gonna make more of a vertical composition so more Instagram style so let's bring this over here and give ourselves some room and then I'll set this dimension to 1085 1350 which is the tall Instagram format cool so on this one we're gonna bring in a couple more planes just for close to the camera and so that I can get this done a bit faster I'm just gonna shut all of these off for the time being as well as some of these other landscape objects cool so this makes it a lot quicker to NAV so let's take this plane and just dump it below our camera and reset PSR so it's in the exact same coordinate is our camera and now let's just move it down a little bit and out this away so that's an easy way to get this plane in the same position as our camera and I'm gonna rotate it 90 degrees here and scooch it over so the composition is going to be something like this where we're looking out of a couple canyon walls and I'll actually stretch this upwards so that we cover the entirety of that vertical height and same thing goes with this one cool and we want to make sure these are actually out of the camera's hierarchy so that we can back up and find the composition here so we're gonna find the texture for our striations here and we're just gonna drop that on to this plane and let's call this left wall and this one right wall and let's bring this one forward and in this case the texture is repeating way too much so let's just scale it up let's try 300 by 300 and obviously we're gonna have to alter this and it's I think it's facing the wrong orientation so let's just duplicate this texture here so we can actually alter it properly let's jump back in here let's take down the displacement and this transform let's go to 90 maybe easier to see the orientation if we remove the displacement so let's try that okay that's looking right now let's add the displacement back in and take it further down let's go for T and I think what's happening is we're seeing the wrong side of this displacement so let's flip this wall 180 degrees that's more like it okay now here we could probably boost this up to point two and if we turn this away we can kind of see what the texture is looking like so maybe let's just stretch this plane out a lot more so that helps a lot and now let's increase the displacement let's say 60 see how far we can push it Oh point five helps I think that's a bit too much let's take it down to 75 okay and let's just copy the server for the right wall now the right wall we're also gonna have to stretch scooch this back and let's stretch it out to a similar aspect is the other one this is kind of cool how shadowy this is getting and there's a little bit of weirdness here with this sticking out so maybe we can scale this up slightly that fixed it and then let's drag this upwards so that we're not seeing the top get cropped off there same thing goes with this one now one last thing we can do to make this a lot cooler is that same trick with the displacer in this case I think I want to try a new kind of noise type I'll go to my shading here and add a noise and I'll increase the height so we can see that's working and here I want to try Hamma now let's increase the scale a lot and also we need our plane to have way more segments like let's go 500 by 500 we're gonna have to increase the scale even further so let's try this maybe half that something like that so even though there are these kind of sharp lines here we're not really seeing them because that's covered up with the displacement so we can just change our seed until it looks like something cooler and then let's reduce the displacement height I think that's pretty nice right there so let's just copy the same displacer over and make sure we have enough segments here and on this one again let's just mess with the seed it's kind of difficult to see what's going on here so we can hit nf and then we'll see a bit of a better view now here I think we need a bit more displacement let's keep trying a different seed that looks cooler so if you're seeing these weird artifacts on the right side it's because light is actually bleeding through the cracks of this wall because the displacement is tearing things a bit too much so what we can do is we can actually put this one into a cloth surface so let's go up to simulate cloth cloth surface hold down alt so that it becomes the parent and then we don't need any subdivisions extra we just want a bit of thickness and let's increase the thickness even more and now we're no longer seeing those artifacts so if we bring all the rest of the stuff back in let's check out what we've got and actually this is displaced way too much so let's take this displays our height back down and that works for me but maybe I'm gonna change this noise seed one more time cool that's pretty interesting maybe we'll see what this composition looks like if we go a bit higher and maybe come forward until we can catch a bit more of those rock formations out there and maybe pivot downwards a bit and we could also widen the camera lens and when I decrease these to something like 200 I'm finding I'm getting more interesting results see now we've got more vertical repetitions and I think this is a bit cooler looking maybe the displacement height is a bit too much now let's go down to 50 let's go to 65 and I'll change the seat again on this displacer on the left and don't forget that just by duplicating your daylight and changing the North offset we can get some pretty dramatically different looks so I think this Sun position is pretty cool so I'll save that one duplicate again this one's pretty interesting too and this is pretty interesting too and then it goes to show how well we've matched all these pieces together that we can blast the Sun in here at a higher position and all these textures still look like they belong together for the most part they're not perfect but they're pretty close and by bringing the Sun way down in the sky and decreasing its power we can make it feel like a nighttime scene I had also increased the turbidity which makes the contrast ratio a lot lower kind of diffuses the light a lot more okay but I'm gonna go back to our original sun's position and then call this Canyon cam and I'll call this main cam and for this one we just need to turn back off the canyon walls and set our resolution back to 1920 by 1080 and then I'll dock this back down here okay guys congrats for getting through that entire environment creation process I know this was the longest tutorial to date but hopefully it just goes to show all the crazy detail that you can put into your environments as well as all the different techniques you can employ now don't forget there's that kit bash 3d promo code Aria of bash and that should get you that sweet 15% discount I loved playing around in those cities because once I've got one established I can just fly the camera around play around with lighting and texturing and Composition and imagine trying to do that with turbosquid assets where you're buying each building individually it would just cost a mini fortune so I'll see you guys next week and I hope you enjoy and next week is kit Bosch 3d and more buildings and all that craziness so I'll catch you next time bye

Channel: eyedesyn

Views: 207,722

Rating: 4.9628553 out of 5

Keywords: digital nature, alien planet, planet, 3d planet, octane shader, octane displacement, octane render, otoy, otoy octane, cinema 4d octane, octane kitbash, kitbash3d, kitbash, octane displacement texture, c4d tutorial, cinema 4d tutorial, c4d tut, cinema 4d tut, cinema 4d, c4d, cinema 4d octane render, 3d terrain, eyedesyn, octane planet, octane planet render

Id: LTTLaeJf6CQ

Length: 94min 2sec (5642 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 22 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/whostardis]

Omg Octane Jesus I love you!! ❤️❤️❤️ great stuff dude.

[u/argusromblei]

Just watched your forester and godrays tuts and im a pro at landscapes