Cinema 4D Tutorial - Create a Futuristic City Using Octane Scatter and Volumetrics

hey everybody it's david raf here again for iDesign calm today we're going to be learning two of my favorite tools instead of octane which are scattered and volumetrics scatter allows you to create millions of instances and crazy complex geometry and volumetrics are things like clouds and fog for those hazy moody looks let's check it out [Applause] [Music] alright and this is more the look we're actually going to be creating today this was for Victoria modesta content for my buddy Frederick Duquette who is direct individuals of the show and this is just octane scatter basically scattering all these buildings onto a plane and then I'm using the environment fog to create this really interesting looking haze and then here this is kind of an inception look where I'm just using a bend deformer to bend the plane but all of that stuff comes with it so it kind of looks cool you can see those greeley textures that we generated last time with displacement and then this one it's all just kind of cloned on to the inside of a sphere but again you can see that that depth fog and then this I like the colours in this but I kind of hate how glitchy these buildings get they start popping around but this will actually show you that it's possible to animate the noise that's cloning all of these things onto the planes so that when you actually bend these planes it starts to get all jacked up okay so I'm going to fire this off into octane I've just got this little demo set up and what's going on is I've got 10,000 instances of these six different asteroids in a cloner and the cloner is cloned onto this big torus ring to create this asteroid belt and as you can see it's taking its sweet time to load into octane there it goes so the point of this is just to say there's a much less painful way to do this so I'm just going to cut off this cloner and I've got the exact same setup here sitting in octane scatter so if we look I've got the scatter set to surface distribution on the torus just like this cloner is that object mode and the object is cloning on to is this torus so I'll go up to scatter I'll cut this on again it's got those six instances and you'll notice that here we just get these little confetti looking things which actually really speeds up the viewport so the viewport doesn't choke on all the millions of instances that you can pipe into the so right now I've just got you know ten thousand and I can look around and everything's live but let's go up to a hundred thousand at ourselves a zero here okay cool now I've got 100 thousand instances and I can still move around and check out all this craziness and no problem so let's just go totally insane and add yet another zero and go up to a million and this will take a little bit longer but hopefully in just a second you'll be able to see there we go now this is going to take longer to render because all these bounces and all this madness is being calculated but you can see I'm still live here and if I kind of pull way out it starts to look even crazier like this almost like this fuzzy like ring almost like how you'd expect an actual planetary ring to look alright so to be able to create this look for you guys I'm going to have to start with some buildings and since I suck at modeling I'm going to reach for a pack there's this kit bash pack called mega structures by this artist named Vitaly Volkov so let me go over here and I'll show that to you so it's 96 bucks but these are some of the best models out there for these futuristic cities and this guy is just a God at hard surface modeling so definitely check his stuff out so if you want to do this for free and still follow along I would use video co-pilots free future city pack here and at one point he crowd-sourced everyone to like create their own building and then combine them into this big pack and released it for free so that was super cool and when you download these these are not just for element 3d they're also OBJ's so you can bring those OBJ's into cinema and have yourself a future city party okay so when I open up mega structures it's just this FBX and it loads all the geometry into cinema like this all in one scene and so you can go around and look at all these cool buildings and figure out what you want to use but the thing you're going to want to do first is make sure that each of these is merged down into a single object for instance here this is its own piece and we want to kind of collect the buildings into one and then also reposition access to be at the bottom of the building so that when all of these are scattered on to geometry they're not cut off halfway and the easiest way I find to select a building that you want is so you can paint kind of a selection here so you click and hold grab all of these and then I've got this free plug-in from Nitro 4d called magic solo that if I click it it'll just show me that it'll automatically do all the layers and stuff which just makes things really easy and then from there I would want to right-click and then connect objects and delete and I've got a shortcut for that for me it's ctrl backspace so there I've got my single merged building and then I'll want to come up to my access center dialog here and I want to set the Y all the way down to the bottom and then I'll just hit execute and it'll pop down to the bottom here so I'll go ahead and do this for several buildings that I like the look of and then we can get into octane all right so these are the buildings I went with including some little scaffold structures and I've fired this up into octane and I'm going to drop in a texture environment so you would go under objects texture environment which just loads an RGB spectrum into the texture channel here and then I can just come in here and change this to something darker so maybe around there and immediately you can see that there is some jacked-up looking geometry and normally you'd think this is overlapping polygons or something crazy but if I open up settings here and I've just got it kind of undocked so you can watch this as I mess with settings there's the setting called ray Epsilon and I learned this from a live stream from ash Thorpe and Rafael rau and this essentially has to do with the scene scale I won't get too technical about it but if I up this just a little bit it fixes all of those errors so if you have that issue then this is the fix cool so I've got my buildings here and I'm just going to drop in an octane scatter and again you can get to that under objects octane scatter it's just like a cinema 4d cloner so if I take all of these and put them under the octane scatter that will clone them all but you need to tell it what you want to clone on to so I've got this plane sitting here that's super big and I'll just drop that in there and right now it's going to clone on to the vertex which is probably to orderly for what we want but you can see it's already handling this with ease we've got a ton of buildings there so instead of vertex let's set it to the surface and now we've got way more buildings and from here I can totally up the count and go crazy so say we want 10,000 now we've got this super dense city now the issue here is that it looks so orderly and I'm going to make this a little bit easier to see just by coming here and boosting this RGB spectrum a little bit and see what's going on a little bit better and maybe messing with the gamma so that we can kind of see this scene a little more contrasty and maybe make it a little less magenta because that bugs me we go and up the exposure a little bit okay that looks a little more normal for me still really flat but you can see what's going on so again it looks really orderly now we can do something like add in a random effector so effectors will totally work with our team scatter which is great so I can go to mograph effector random now one caveat is that if you have scatter selected and you select a random effector like you'd expect to the cloner it won't actually add that to the effectors list so you have to do that manually so I did my random effector and you'll see that they'll all get bumped in position though we don't want that since they're already randomly distributed on this plane but rotation would help so what if we do 360 on the banking okay that's the wrong one obviously though that's a cool look in and of itself but you can see how fast scatter is going so 360 on looks like the heading here we'll get a more randomized looking city which is awesome now what if we want them to have random scale as well let's try that let's do uniform scale and then let's set this to say one no it's going to make them giant let's do negative point five okay so that's going to scale them up and down but my issue with this is that they when you come out really far it looks complex but it also looks orderly at the same time because there are no clumps it's just kind of a randomized distribution of scale but we're not seeing any Dead's dead zones or kind of any general structure so it actually looks less random then you would want so what you can actually do is go to your octane scatter here and come down to scale and so they're also these fields for position scale rotation in octane scatter itself so here I could add a default cinema4d noise so if I add a noise you'll see what happens now we get these interesting kind of clumps so instead of the default noise let's try something like I like electric a lot of time so let's try that and then let's also do some low clip to get it to where they're just these islands and then bring down high clip so we can kind of get our scale back we can also increase the brightness overall which will kind of bring it back okay I'm getting some cool results from fbm now we want to make sure that we bring down back down the brightness we want to make sure that we have some areas of black and some areas of white because the areas of black will actually get us that those dead zones and then potentially we could also increase the scale of the texture so what if we go up to 500 then we'll get these bigger kind of super structures so let's clip that down so I don't think I should have used that brightness but maybe the contrast value would actually get us more what we want so we boost that then we've got kind of more of these islands going on and then from there we can go back to this overall shader and say up the scale of each of the buildings to two by two by two and so that'll bring back the buildings and get us this kind of crazy-looking mega-structure cool so that's more the look that I'm going for okay so now I want to make this look a little less gray and horrible the first thing I'm going to do is just get rid of this scatter for a second and I'm going to drop in this greevil texture that we made in our last class here so I'll put that on the plane and that's going to do a lot of work for us in terms of making this city believable that already looks pretty cool okay and then so we'll bring back the scatter our city here I'll let that load up okay so cool now I'm going to do a little lighting and texturing so if I go to options check camera and that will allow me to jump out of my camera without affecting my view here but I can still light things and see updates live so I'll just duplicate this camera for now and kind of come around here and I'm going to drop in an octane targeted area light and then set that target to the camera so if I drop this camera in here it'll be pointed towards the other camera so come around here and back way up I could set this area light as kind of a distant source so it gets set it all the way up here and it's going to continuously point at the camera wherever I put it which is useful and then we could drop down our RGB spectrum in the environment down to something darker so we can see more the influence of just the light there so we're probably going to want this light to be a lot bigger so something like that is catching along there okay and you can see that this is getting pretty noisy down here so this texture if I go into the roughness I've got this gradient that's pretty harsh and then I've got this super grade texture so if I look at that this is that beep old texture but this is causing all these harsh kind of patterns that might be breaking up those highlights and causing all this noise so I think I'm just going to clear that out so if I clear that and then go up a level and actually get rid of this gradient as well we'll just start fresh with the roughness and so you can see if it's if it's really low on the roughness meaning it's really glossy we get these intense highlights that are not doing us any favors so let's bring that up until it's a little more rough so the blurriness or the reflection increases and now you'll see this is kind of a bit better of a look right here so now we can kind of keep going on with lighting so if I boost this light some more you can see we're lighting up this big portion of our city so that could be cool maybe we'll give it more of this orangie tint here in the temperature and then I can duplicate this light and bring it on over to the other side here so our camera is all the way down in here I can bring this on over to this side and catch some more highlights let's see let's try bringing it on down and an easy way to see it would be to change this one to a blue and then we can boost the power as well until you see it picking up and then I can't see anything there so let's just turn this off until we're actually able to see this light and then another thing I like to do is like really stretch out the light sometimes and now we're seeing some stuff come in so it's looking pretty noisy so let's try over here and maybe let's go higher up there we go so it was below the horizon so that was a big issue and now it's totally blasting the scene so let's go in here and take the opacity all the way down so we don't see it at all and then we can just drop the power of the light and probably also scale it down and then again I want it kind of more coming from the side so we'll just kind of bring it around here until it's catching the side of these buildings kind of like that so let's combine those to see what we get not liking orange so let's just make this like neutral a little bit better if I take down this RGB spectrum further I should be able to get a more start kind of look and maybe we'll do a third light that's more of a front light so let's duplicate this one here and just bring this one over towards the front and up higher and let's make it a little less long there so that's helping some and I can bring this down so that I don't want to over light the scene I don't want to see everything so I can bring this light down until we're just adding a little more detail so maybe something like 35 see how that looks and maybe this one's not blue can be a little more neutral and now I can go back and play it a little more with like the light temperatures maybe so maybe one of these is kind of red and maybe we power this one up to give it some intense light coming from another direction kind of like that and I took out the red light entirely because I think this is a little more mysterious and maybe more what I'm going for alright so let's bring back our RGB spectrum a little bit so we can kind of see what's going on a little bit better and cut off these lights temporarily okay so I'm going to jump back to this kind of lighting context I've got our lights set up pretty nicely where I want them but I want to also look at textures and not just have these buildings be pure white so what I can do is let's start by creating a glossy material again you can go under materials octane glossy material so I'll just put this on all of these buildings here together so I can click all of them right click and then go apply and now if I start doing stuff in this one material it should affect all the buildings all right so let's jump into this texture and I want to create something metallic looking so what I'll do is I'll take the diffuse almost down to black I'll come to the index here which is the index of refraction and I'll boost this up to something like five or seven or whatever something a lot more reflective and then I'll take my roughness up a little bit here and that's looking kind of metallic now I want to pipe in a roughness map let's try this kind of grungy metallic texture here see how that looks and let's see what we're seeing so you can kind of see that in there let me go compare store render buffer and then I'll clear that out and see what that's actually doing so you can see that's adding in all this grunge here so I kind of like that so let's bring that back so again this one and I'll just leave that at default now with the specular say I want these to look more golden I can take the specular up to a golden color a little more orange you like this that's way too much so let's bring down the saturation of that maybe a little more towards orange here little brighter kind of a bronze now bring it back cool that works for me now this is something interesting so if I come into my octane node editor and I'll give myself a little more space so I can see what the heck I'm doing and let's like get active material and pull this open now if I go to my specular one interesting thing I could do is put in something called a random color and then put that in the specular and you can see now we've got all these different colors for specular in our scatter so each building gets its own unique color now if we want to take this further we could put something called a Gaussian spectrum in there and what that will do is it'll generate some random colors and if I pull out the if I pull the width down here you'll see it'll get even more saturated to where we're getting all these crazy colors and then if I want to kind of mix that back say I like that where I'm getting some interesting colors but if I want to mix it back I can come back to the specular here and take this mix slider of this Gaussian spectrum down so so now we're blending back to that original golden color but we've got some that are also slightly different so it's got kind of a consistent golden vibe but we're getting these different color variations in there too which is pretty cool and finally maybe I'll put an image texture in here into our bump and I can load in our friends super grebe and get some more detail going on and then to actually see what we've done I'll go to compare store render buffer and then detach this and we should be able to see there are some extra lines coming up but they look kind of if i zoom in here and I can just zoom in with the scroll wheel and it'll show me a little piece here they look like they're not mapped properly because they're all skewed so what I can do is let's do compare store render buffer again let's reattach this and then let's make sure that we're mapping this in a different way so if I hit projection here and then get active material that should actually show up as a texture projection node and right now it's set some SUV so we can override the UVs by going to box and now hopefully you can see we're adding in additional detail and I can make this big because you might not be able to see it so we're adding in these additional little details and extrusions in the bump channel from that super grebe texture and it's not kind of all warped out so that's all good let's move on the last I said that was the last thing but the actual last thing I want to do is add in something into the diffuse channel as well so I'll just go to image texture and then here I can also pipe in our super grebe okay and now again the mapping is totally wrong it's a lot more clear here it often helps like if you want to test a texture to load it into the fuse so again projection get active material take this texture projection node and switch it to box and that's adding in some interesting looking stuff here and finally I can take the power of this down so that we are only seeing it a little bit so that's my cool building texture now I want to add some glowing blinky lights to the buildings and only the diffuse material has a black body and texture emission channel so I'll go over here to emission and I'll say blackbody emission and then I'll put that on say one of my buildings here and you can see now the buildings are glowing but they're glowing all over the place so that's not getting closer but it's not what we want so let's come into this here and go into our blackbody emission and here we can load a texture so actually I'll do this in the node editor because it makes more sense that way so let's put an image texture into the texture slot of the blackbody emission so it's come up here an image texture and let's load this into texture and it's making an even crazy brighter but the texture that we want is this tiny dots here so if I open this this is another beepo texture that you can get for free or you can make something like this yourself in Illustrator like I showed you so we'll take this guy in here and this should allow us to only emit light from certain parts of this image so let's bring this power down and actually I'm just going to come in here so we can actually see one of these buildings a little bit better to see what's going on and again it's mapping improperly so projection get active material and then let's take this to box so there we go now we're getting these ordered lights on the buildings which is really cool it's too bright so let's bring down let's go back to our blackbody emission let's bring down the power and then let's make these lights pretty red so that's cool but we're losing our other texture behind it because this one is just overriding it so what could we do here we could do two things the first one is create something called a mixed material so if we go under materials it should be here mixed material which just allows you to combine two materials like as a 50% slider or through use of a texture so I can drop this on here and then we can say what's material 1 and once material 2 so with material 1 we want our emission and then with material 2 we want that complex golden material that we created so let's go back here and drop in our golden material and now we should see I come in here and there we go if I take this slider down to zero we'll have only the first material if I take this slider all the way to one will have only the second material but if I go somewhere in between will be blending between the two so that's pretty good but maybe that's not the best way so that's looking pretty close to what I would want another way could be let's get rid of this mixed material entirely okay and so say we wanted to not have to do that 50% blend what if we took this image texture and also use it in the opacity slot which is essentially the Alpha Channel then we would just get the lights sitting on top of the building now I was having issues with this earlier and it was being unstable and showing me this building is completely transparent except for the lights so instead of doing it this way I'm actually going to do it inside the mixed materials so if I go back to the mixed material and I load this in it looks like this if I hit get active material it looks like this crazy mess at the moment but essentially this is here down here is our black body material and up here is our metal material and it's being mixed by this float slider at half value so basically 50% one material and 50% the other just like we did before so instead of this float texture here which just means a black and white texture what if we use this just like we did in the opacity slot our texture here our dot pattern can use this as the amount so that effectively does the exact same thing and is a little more stable where the lights are only showing up in the light parts of this image I'll show you this image again so the lights are only showing up in the light parts of this image it's essentially using it as an alpha in the mixed material but not using it in the opacity slot we're using it in the amount for the mixed material sorry if that's a little bit complex to understand let me know if that made sense in the comments I'm going to move on to getting these lights to blink okay I lined there's one little extra tip I wanted to show you so if I come back to my blackbody emission texture the thing creating lights and I want to change the color of the lights a little bit obviously I showed you that I can do this with the temperature slider and right now we're getting different colors in here because the original material if I look at it has some that are these different colors so it's emitting those colors of light and that will be most true when it's at the default value which I think if I reset it will be 6500 yep so that will reflect the original texture right there where we've got some blue and some red lights but if I want to change around say I make it more red but I don't want these kind of green lights here what I could do is I could put a color correction node in between the image texture and the blackbody emission so with this color correction node I could take down the saturation and essentially make this texture black and light and they would all match or maybe I don't take down the saturation and I just mess with the hue and so that's just going to affect those colored lights because that's the only part of the image that has any color in it the rest is just white so I could actually go into this blackbody emission here and set the temperature to be say something like this 12,000 Kelvin to be blue and then mess around with the hue because the Kelvin stuff is only going to affect the white lights whereas this colour correct node change the hue it's going to affect these colored lights so that's kind of cool so I want I think this to me a little orange and then this to be super orange so kind of like that look and then another thing I can do is I can take this material and duplicate it and then kind of place it on several more of these here so say I select these buildings here randomly and then I right-click and I apply this version of the texture maybe I want this one to be a different color so let's go to the emission and make it kind of more blue and then hopefully some of these other buildings will show different colors of light and of course I messed up because I put the black body on here instead of the mixed texture so this gets a little more complex so what's going on is I put the black body on here but I actually need to put the mixed material on there so let's actually undo what I just did and we've got a new black body but we need a new mixed material so I'll duplicate this mixed material as well in this one I'll replace with the new black body so let's do that and then now if I select some random buildings I can apply this here cool and then finally I should be able to go to my new black body mission here and there we go now we're seeing some blue lights and some orange lights maybe that one's too powerful so we can come into this black body mission and bring it down to where those bluer lights are only showing up a little bit and then we're really seeing the orange ones a little bit more okay let's go back for a second and look at my original renders so I made all these cities blink and I'm going to quickly show you how to do that though we're not actually going to do it in the scene because it's just going to take a little bit too much time to even see a result because the scene is getting pretty heavy so I'm just going to show you a quick demo here okay so I've just got these cubes here with a blackbody emission texture sitting on one of them and I use greyscale Gorillaz signal to actually do this flickering animation so signal has a script built in under script user scripts signal scripts presets called flicker and so if I play back and go to the output here you can see it flickering in this kind of kind of animation that we would expect from a flickering light so we want to drive this power down like this right so if I link this power into the signal tag I can just drag it and then if I play back you should see something happening a little bit so it's tricky to see so what we can do is we can up the strength of our main noise here something like 333 and our subtle noise we could take 233 to just boost those values and now it should be a little more parent there we go we can actually see that flicker now we can make this even more extreme if we if we look at the output here you can see that it's never really slamming down to zero because our final output here is 1100 but in our main noise our variation is only 645 so say we take this up - I don't know 1200 okay now when I play back there we go now we can see it slamming down to zero on occasion so this is basically what we want okay so at this point we want to create three more copies of this texture so I'll duplicate this three times and I'll add each one of these to its own unique cube and this is exactly what you'd do with the buildings you would create multiple blackbody emission textures and add each one to a unique building so that they're all flickering differently and then what you want to do is you want to go in and go back to your user script signal scripts presets flicker and we'll create three blank tags because this one is already linked to the power and it's difficult to unlink it I don't actually know how to unlink it once it's lame so here we can go back to our blackbody emission and link these up one to one so I can go this one's power into this one and let's switch the order of this just so it makes sense and then we can go this blackbody emissions power into this one and it's blackbody emissions power into this one so they're all linked up like that and now when I play back they should all flicker though this one is the one with the stronger values so let's get these values to all mimic each other so on these three we had 333 here and we had 1200 for the variation and then for the subtle noise which is just a second layer of noise we had 33 so theoretically now they will all flicker and they're actually doing it in sync so what we can do is the reason they're all in sync is because they all have the same seed so if we come here and select all the tags at once cancel and select the seed and type in n um that will pull the objects index so this one's index is 1 this keeps index is 2 3 etc so they'll all get a unique seed so this one is seed 0 1 2 3 so there you go now if I play back you should see that they see that's the issues that I had subtle noise selected so if I come back to the main noise and do the same thing come to that and go numb now if I play back we should see these all flickering at different rates so that's essentially the process for creating those randomized flickers alright let's come back into our city and turn on our lights again so let's take our RGB spectrum back down to black so now we should see nothing but these lights and then let's cut our main lights back on and that looks a lot cooler I think now interestingly I can actually use this RGB spectrum a little bit as a fill light so if I bring this back up to some kind of gray value that'll actually bring in some additional kind of fill so let me show you that real quick so if I go back to 0 and I'll let this refine for a second right about there is good so I can go compare store render buffer and then I'll bring this up to I don't know 20 percent let that refine as well you can see what that's bringing in is it's bringing a little bit of fill in here and also making the sky look a little more interesting like there's some bloom happening in the background so I definitely think that look is dramatic and cool so the next we're going to do is finally bring in this fog that I've been talking about so there are two ways to create volumetrics in octane the first one is called the environment medium or the environment fog and so in any environment tag-on an HDR eye or on the daylight system or on this texture environment we've got this medium tab so if we go to medium we can just click add fog and everything goes away so the first thing you want to do is jump into this scattering medium and bring the density all the way down and I learned this from another YouTube artist called John burdock he had all these values that I'd never seen before that were really helpful so he actually took the density all the way down to point zero zero one and real quick let's go look at his YouTube channel just because I want to give him a shout out so this tutorial specifically how to project an image with lights and octane cinema 4d you should definitely check this out he shows how to get this really cool projector look and I just kind of borrowed the values he punched in for the fog to get these light rays so I set this to point zero zero one on the density and from there you want to add a white color to the absorption so I can just go cinema 4d octane I'll do a float texture which is just a black and white so I'll set this up to one which is white and then I'll actually just take this and drop this in the scattering as well so they're both white and now we can jump up a level and mess with the thickness so if I bring this thickness up you can see at some point we start getting this awesome fog coming in and let's just keep going until we see a change so maybe at this point here there we go so I'm looking for when I can see a difference between the foreground which is really dark and then the background which falls off into this foggy kind of zone here so this is exactly what we're looking for so it's really about playing with this thick and then also playing with the density so playing with the density may actually allow you to obscure the far background a little bit better so let's see if we can get it to where we are not seeing these buildings in the background so let's go compare surrender buffer just so we can kind of remember this state and then we'll move this out of the way for the time being now if it gets too dark we can always increase the power of the lights to compensate so there's a bunch of things that we can do but for now let's up the density until it's crazy and volume step lengths in this environment doesn't do anything from what I can tell but later when we get to actual clouds it definitely has a huge impact but here we don't need to worry about the volume step length and then we can pull down on thickness and there we go now we're really obscuring those background buildings a lot more so final control that could be helpful in certain circumstances is if you go to the scattering you can actually boost this value above one so say we made this two everything's going to get a lot darker so maybe we we could compensate by adding more light so maybe let's add a little more light here there we go and then we could take down either the thickness or the density now as the difference between the thickness the density and adding more in the scattering medium don't ask me I just play with the values until it looks good I have no clue with science behind all this it's pretty hard to understand another interesting thing is if I actually add in an RGB spectrum instead of the float texture here for absorption then I can change the color of the fog to something totally different like cyan or green or I don't know purple and the same thing goes with the scattering and you can get some pretty funky effects doing that so if I add it in an RGB spectrum here maybe I change this one to a different color and then because I lost my greater than one value this is taken down the amount of smoke so I'll just come back here and add in some more density and there you go now we can get some really weird-looking stuff going on I'm going to go back to where we were I kind of liked this look here alright and the last control I want to talk about is phase which unlike density and thickness is the control that I actually understand so phase affects how the light is passing through the fog whether it's getting directed more towards the camera or more towards the light sources at least I think that's what's going on so if I go compare store render buffer here and I increase the phase you'll see that I get this really interesting look that really brings out where the lights are so if this light is up here and I really ramped up the phase you can see now we've got this like intense cluster around the light source which could be a super cool look like really dramatic and awesome I'm not going to push it that far because it seems a little bit extreme but say I go somewhere like this then I've got it's almost like I've got this floating ball of light here that's affecting the entire scene which I think is really really cool and finally maybe I want to change the composition and get more of a long lens look so I could just right click and zoom when and change my focal length dynamically here to something much longer which will really compress the buildings and maybe I back up here and get close to I want some buildings in the really near foreground so that I've got this kind of like stacked depth here so something like that maybe and then if I right click and hold down 3 I can kind of rotate my camera on the banking so maybe something like that now at this point I think I want a little shallow depth of field so I can come in and lose my aperture a little bit and you can hold down control and middle-click to big focus or you can use this so I could get this in focus here and have this out or vice versa so I'll try to get a little closer to here there we go something like that could be interesting but you can see if you do this kind of dolly move so I just animate it from the start here to the end and I just kind of reveal at a keyframe here and I'll also make sure that this is all linear so I'll change these to linear but you can see how cool it would be to reveal the city with this kind of tracking move to have these kind of foreground buildings crossing the frame I think it's a cool look alright so now I'm going to show you the other method of creating volumetrics which is actually creating clouds using the fog volume so right now I'll just so what I can do is I can just duplicate my sky here and in this one I'll remove the scattering medium under the medium tab so now I can just turn this top one off and remember octane will read the top environment first so I can just switch this on and off if I want my fog and turn it on or if I don't want my father I can turn this off so I want to put in a fog volume that's under objects octane fog volume and you'll see that this little box has appeared in the center of the scene and I'm going to take it and drag it over towards my camera until we're able to see it I'll rotate it into place and I might have to reload the scene and then I'll just kind of position it up into place here until we can see it and there we go now we can see this box I'm going to turn back off check camera and pop back up here okay so this is an actual volume object essentially it's like subsurface scattering it's basically a subsurface scattering box but it can be controlled by a noise so if you come in here the easiest way to set it up is to click on this cloud one and that will load a default cinema4d noise and here it starts with Nike and Nikes pretty good and you can try any of these noises that you like you'll get some really interesting crazy results I typically gravitate towards electric for whatever reason I see like it makes nice-looking clouds and so what's going on here is we've actually got a box of voxels which are three-dimensional pixels and you can kind of see them here in the viewport they're represented as little squares it's easier to see if I come back to my volume object here and go to my I jump up here and go to my generate tab and then increase the boxes as you increase them this is actually making it easier for octane to process taking less vram and you can actually see the individual kind of boxes that are represented here so as you bring it down we're actually getting more and more dense and more and more detail along the edge of these clouds but it's also much more likely to crash your computer the other thing that will crash your computer is if you scale this box up too much you'll notice that the noise actually stays in place and we're adding more and more voxels and it's getting slower and slower so if I wanted to encapsulate this whole scene in a box right here it would be impossible with the amount of VRAM I have on my GPU so what I need to do is I would have to hit ctrl D and then go to my scene scale and do something like scale project down from 100 to 1 and then bring in a new volume or cut and paste the same volume essentially so that would make this bigger in reference to the scene basically so this is really dependent upon scene scale but for my purposes here I only need this small slice and having a smaller box actually allows me to have much more detailed clouds within that small box so I'm going to keep it as is and start to tweak it from here so the first thing I can do is I can bump up to octaves which will increase the detail in the noise and then I can mess around with the global scale if I want smaller clouds I could go to something like 222 here and we also have high and low clip which are really important if I bring up low clip that will kind of crunch the noise down so we'll have fewer clouds which could be helpful and then one of the biggest controls here is actually under medium and then we jump in the volume medium we've got volume step lengths in this case it does a lot so if I bring this down to one you should see the clouds super beefed up and you can actually go past one to get even more of an intense look so that's really darkening the scene down now from here maybe we don't need such high density to bring down the density and lighten things up a little bit they'll actually think I want to keep that density and the other thing that I can do is in the absorption here I can bring this a little bit brighter and that brightens our clouds and in the scattering as well maybe I want this all the way to white and that will further brighten things up so if I take a screenshot here so if I go compare store render buffer and then come back to my generate tab and take these voxels down to say - we should see a major increase in detail so let's wait for this to refine a little bit and you should be able to see we're seeing a much more defined outline we're seeing much more of the noise pattern in there it's not kind of so boxy and another really great control is this voxel multiplier which has in parentheses render so this will actually give you more detail in the clouds upon render time it doesn't work in the live viewer here it only works when you send to picture viewer so if I were to increase this to two essentially nothing would bog down here you wouldn't really see any change in the live viewer but as soon as we go to the picture viewer we'll get even more detail out of the clouds which can be super helpful to kind of bypass the choke point which is really cinema and it's viewport okay and finally I'm going to make these clouds even more dense to show you one more little feature here so if I make these really really thick and really detailed like this you'll notice the difference in the absorption and scattering a little bit better so if I change the absorption here Samak it brighter you'll see that the absorption is kind of the body of the cloud so blue on the inside and then maybe I want the scattering which is kind of you'll notice that more where light is passing through because they're less thick so say I wanted that to be pink let's go in here and mess around with this until we get a really pink color and you can see now we've got kind of blue at the core and pink at the edges and as we pull down on the density now you'll see these clouds become really semi-transparent so so I bring it down to ten this is a pretty unique interesting look of its own and finally I want to show you that we can still combine both systems so maybe I will make these clouds a little more sparse and then increase the size of them let's go for 1222 here and then let's bring back our absorption back to white and same thing with our scattering and in this case actually looks like we want the absorption a little bit darker and then I can kind of I can go make this a little less crazy on the volume step length and maybe even more dense so something like that might be cool and now I can actually combine the two systems if I turn this old octane sky back on you can see that we've got both the fog volume sitting here and our environment fog okay and I just brought the camera wide and got this result so you can get some really cool looks combining these two systems alright one last quick note is that you can actually animate these clouds using the animation speed parameter and you can see I've been playing around with this for a future tutorial though it looks kind of wonky because it's animating the noise and so clouds will kind of spawn out of nowhere doesn't necessarily move how you would expect clouds to so say I set this to zero set a keyframe came forward and then set this to 1 this would totally work it makes no sense that you have to do this but the issue is that it would accelerate into that and get faster and faster so the way I do this when I want to actually have animation in the volume the same thing works by the way in octane scatter if you were to put a noise in the scale for instance and you wanted to keyframe this it's the same deal so I would start it say I wanted it close to 1 I would go to the beginning so the keyframe at one go to the end and set a keyframe at 1.01 and that way as we play back you can see it's animating at a consistent speed so it makes no sense that you would have to keyframe this parameter but there you go and finally if you want to render an alien abduction in your scene you should check out the bro graph luminous plugin my bro graph buddies actually created a plug-in for octane so kind of a plugin for a plug-in but what it does is it creates spot lights in octane which octane cannot do by default and it has all sorts of interesting controls like custom go you can load in fall-off to get some kind of feathered edges targets cone widths all sorts of stuff in there so really good plugin that they made and today we're offering a discount for people who watch this tutorial so if you want to get a 20% discount on the burr graft plug-in type in lights 20 into the promo code so that's lights 20 all right so we learned a ton of stuff today an octane from scatter to volume metrics to creating a sci-fi futuristic city some texturing lighting all that good stuff and again if you want that plugin for 20% off the burger a luminous plug-in type in lights 22 the promo code alright guys see you next time

Channel: eyedesyn

Views: 231,796

Keywords: octane render, otoy octane, octane tutorial, cinema 4d octane tutorial, cinema 4d octane render, cinema 4d octane, cinema4d, c4d octane, octane scatter, octane scatter tutorial, octane volumetrics, octane fog, octane fog tutorial, octane lighting tutorial, cinema 4d octane lighting, cinema 4d octane scatter, cinema 4d tutorial, c4d tutorial, eyedesyn, david ariew, octane for cinema 4d, c4d tut, learn c4d, learn octane

Id: X9Z2xhIKh-M

Length: 53min 28sec (3208 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 15 2017