Cinema 4D Tutorial - Create Digital Nature Renders Using Octane Render [Part 1]

hey everybody what's up it's David arrived here yet again for I design calm coming to you with a very special octane tutorial today we're gonna be creating happy trees and calming patches of grass and art directing scenes of beautiful digital nature and yes we are going to be creating God rays I'm going to be endowing you with the power to create God rays I'll let you decide what that means for yourself let's check it out [Applause] [Music] so I saw all the cool kids on Instagram making all these digital nature renders and at one point I decided to have a play with it myself since octane scatter and Forrester makes it super easy to do that these are some of the first images I made with it using my default space-based base guy sitting there in the field with this pretty little flower and in retrospect I don't really like how some of these came out because the grass looks way too clumpy and there's like too much variation in the color you can see the individual patches of grass which looks pretty weird to me like maybe you could sell it as an alien planet which I kind of did with these Lorax tree looking weird things so here's another one and then I went off and did this documentary project involving a bunch of octane scatter to create these forest environments in these mountains and this is actually pretty lazy work because it's just one tree scattered several million times and it just goes to show how much you can get away with with this technique and then I did this ridiculous KFC job and again this is just one wheat plant scattered several million times with some noise in the distribution to create those patches that you see and I've also got the shaders dialed in so that it looks like light is passing through the leaves or the pieces of wheat and that totally sells the nature a lot more and the other day I was playing around with creating some more Instagram renders and I think I got to a much better result that now includes a bunch of volumetrics and you can see I've got the godrays in there that are really helping to sell the natural environment and I'll just flip through some of these and you can also see that I've got some glossy reflections on these leaves as well as transmission to let light pass through so the shaders matter a ton and godrays are basically just shadows cast by the Sun into an atmosphere or into some volumetrics of some sort and here I'm playing with more of a stark look that I kind of liked and just to give you a little more context and get you even more pumped for this tutorial let's look at a few of my favorites on Instagram for instance here we've got Joseph Bashara who I think is just one of the best at creating these natural digital environments and he has this like very nicely spaced grass if you compared to some of those previous renders that I did I think he's you know dialed it and even more and you can see there's like all these nice little rocks poking through and this kind of curly wispy grass that I really love like I love this here where he creates areas where you just see the sticks and twigs and dirt and then other areas where it's grass covered and it's not just one type of grass we've got other longer pieces of grass poking through and he's got Ivy on the wall which we won't get into but I definitely recommend looking at the ivy grower plugin which is a free plugin for cinema 4d and here we've got Philip hotus or hood ass as I'm sure many of you know he makes some beautifully intricate scenes a lot of the time with popular video game characters or you know bender from Futurama that kind of thing and here you can clearly see those same kind of glossy highlights with light passing through the leaves as well and of course who could forget my buddy people he just goes and makes the grass all pink and crazy like he does and here we can see that forester also has some amazing wind simulation capabilities that you should definitely check out am finally my buddy alex ness who helped advise me on the shaders for this tutorial and you can also see here that godrays don't necessarily have to be the sun casting the light any small light source can create god rays they're essentially just shadows in a volume so here's another good example if you've got a light beaming through some kind of object like trees you can create these streaks of light and shadow and that's basically the principle behind god Reis and so what I briefly mentioned earlier is this plugin from 3d quakers comm called Forrester it's just the best plugin for nature in cinema 4d so you're gonna want to get this if you want to follow along exactly with me but you can use anything from a content browser to these packs from lab work and there's also this great I called this park with really detailed models of real shrubs real flowers and they also have real trees and real grass so any of those packs will work great but with Forester you've got the control of these procedurally generated trees and so it can be very useful for really customizing the plants that you're using it's also worth mentioning that SpeedTree is an incredibly powerful program if you want to go super crazy with your digital nature stuff this is where you should go because you can customize even more about the tree including the roots and there's just even better wind animation and stuff like that I used to use this program and it's great but the fact that Forester is built directly into cinema 4d makes it even more attractive for working quickly and working directly with handing geometry off to octane alright let's just start off by checking out a few trees inside a forester and building some shaders for them so I'll come here to plugins Forester and grab a forester tree and let's just throw down a floor for the time being and set this rendering and octane and then throw down a daylight and I'll rotate that until it's a bit more of an angle that let's just check out the shaders so if we come into Forester tree here we can go to the tree library and choose something as a really good base to start with let's just start with this beech tree here so here's our fancy tree and you can see these are physical render materials so we want to convert these to octane materials so let's grab both of these go to materials convert materials and then we'll go to materials remove unused materials so now we're just using octane materials now if you see this happen where they've blanked out you can double click them and if you double click this image here it'll refresh so I'll go also to the trunk here and double click this and now we've got our pretty pictures back alright so the first thing that should be obvious is that we don't have any leaves on this tree so if we go up to our beech tree here and under tree parameters we can see that their viewport levels and render levels this should be pretty familiar for a lot of things inside cinema4d but it's just a little gotcha that in the viewport were only seeing three levels of detail but in the render we're seeing 5 so if we were to send this to picture viewer we would see a lot more detail and or branches and more leaves and all that stuff but I like to see my final result in this IPR here so let's set the viewport levels to the same levels as the render levels and this will take a second to update so there we go we've got some nice leaves on the tree and lots of detail in here so you can zoom all the way up and see the individual textures on these leaves but we're never going to be that close so it doesn't really matter a ton this could be a green color and it wouldn't change the look all that much so the first thing I want to show you is the difference between using direct lighting here and path tracing so right now I'm in direct lighting so I can go to compare store render buffer and then I'm going to switch over to path tracing and you can see this already helps out the look of the tree a ton we're getting a lot more bounce light into those leaves and it's looking a lot more lush so I'm gonna stick with path tracing for the rest of this tutorial but the main thing I want to change in my settings is setting GI clamp to 1 this should really be the default in octane is 1 or less and that really helps clean up fireflies and a lot of issues you get with path tracing all right so the first super-easy thing we can do to improve our leaf shader here is by just going into this node editor I'm gonna give myself a little bit more real estate and all we have to do is take our image texture and pipe it into the transmission slot and let me undo that so we can see the difference here so this is before I'll go compare store render buffer and then pop this in to transmission and you can see now we've got light actually coming through the leaves and it's looking a ton prettier and much more like actual vegetation and if we want we could boost this a little bit further let me just come in here a little bit and I'll go store in your buffer yet again and we can put a color correction in here and we could change the gamma just slightly and so if we bring this down this is a little bit too much but you can see as you bring it down it kind of boosts the light that's coming through a bit more so you don't want to bring it too far or you'll just flatten everything out but it's a helpful control to have so let's go somewhere around 0.7 or 0.8 and again props to Joseph Bashara and Alex Nest for helping me out with the shaders on these leaves all right so let's back out and I'm gonna change this around a bit so I can never get a bit better so this is great for most of the angles that we're gonna have our sunlight but one issue is that when we've got the Sun beaming directly down onto this tree you expect to see some kind of glossiness or waxy leaf coating going on here and we're not picking up any of those highlights it just feels like a completely diffuse material which it is it's completely diffuse so let's blend in a glassy material to try and fix that so we can just take this entire set up here and hold down control and duplicate it and then let's grab a mix material and let's pipe both of these into material one and material two and then the second one we're just going to change the material type to glossy and so we're not going to see any of this until we actually drag the mixed material over top of the previous material and so we can see what we're doing let's just shift this slider all the way down to the glossy material so let's try to figure out which of those this is this looks like our transmission material from before and if we go all the way this way we've lost that transmission so I'm guessing this is the glossy material but we're not seeing any of that gloss we're seeing some little fireflies which are bad so let's check this out first off we can double click this node to get rid of it because we don't have transmission in the glossy slot and let's push a little bit in so we can see what's going on a bit better alright so if you look over here we've got this extremely tight specular highlight and that's why we're only getting these little fireflies in here not really seeing the overall glossy component come through so if we come over to the roughness then we can crank that up and we should start to see something happening so let's compare store render buffer and go back to where we were before and you can see now we're getting some glossy highlights showing up and it's a little bit subtle at the moment but this will change a lot depending on the intensity of the Sun the angle the camera and some other things so I'll show you what I mean let's bring this back up to a known point eight point nine turn off our compare mode here and then let's just take our day light and bring it up so we can control it a little bit better and rotate it around and so depending on the angle of this sunlight we should see more or less highlights see here we're getting it a lot stronger so that's a little bit more clear and now we want to blend between the two because we also want to see our transmission so typically I just go with around a 50% blend and now we're getting light coming through the trees and we're getting these more intense highlights and also if I drop in an octane camera look through the camera enable the camera imager and she was like a different profile like something that's a little bit contrast here let's flip through these you can see some of these are really extreme for instance if I go to one of my ektachrome presets and boost the gamma you can see this is a pretty extreme example and it's crunching things a lot but you get the idea that if there's a grade on this stuff we'll notice those highlights a bit more I'm just gonna go back to this default here I want to give you a couple more quick things to think about the first is check out what the transmission does when the Sun totally back lights this tree so if I swing this around until we can actually see the Sun let's bring it down to the horizon so we're getting super orangie looks here and then we'll just swing it around until we can see it back there there we go and we'll bring it up a bit and maybe we'll boost its power a little bit so you can really see what's going on when it back lights the leaves we get these interesting variations in color here the other thing I'd like to point out is the contribution from the Sun gets a lot more dramatic if this floor isn't white like right now we're getting a ton of bounce light from the floor so we changed the floor to more of a gray now we're gonna see that stuff show up a lot more same thing goes to with those glossy materials you're going to notice them a bit more when the main contribution of light is from that single source for instance lighting the tree with a single small high-powered area light you really see those glossy shaders coming through and at this point I'm gonna check out a few other trees because we want some variation when we're putting this stuff in octane scatter we don't want just the same type of tree over and over again so let's check out some other trees real quick so let's come back up to plugins Forester Forester tree just grab another one so let's come down and find some large leafy trees like here's a live oak let's try that and remember we'll go back to tree parameters and set the viewport levels to the same as the render levels and in this case the leaf texture it's using is exactly the same as before so if we look here we can check out the image so it's just using this as the overall leaf texture so we can actually go ahead and replace this with the texture we put all the effort into so let's just drop this over top here and there we go that's a lot nicer looking so I can also create another version of the Sun by holding down ctrl and duplicating and let's just rotate this around so that we'll be able to see the glossy shaders a little bit better so here's that version and then this one's to check out the transmission so as we build these we'll be able to check out things a little bit easier okay so here's a potentially faster way to swap out the trees if I just duplicate my live oak tree here and turn the old one off I can just come in here and go to my tree library and switch it for something else so let's try it let's come on down and grab this regular oak tree here and now if we come under tree parameters you can see this one has render levels of 8 so I kind of use that as a guide to figure out where I should put my viewport levels so I'll pop an 8 for that and there we go all right let's try this cork tree here and in this case it looks nothing like the pictures so let's mess with the parameters here in this case I found 4 wasn't quite enough so the defaults don't always work but it's an OK guide there we go that's kind of a neat looking one let's duplicate that alright let's come down to this home sei tree yes I had to look up how to pronounce that and let's set this one to 7 cool and let's do one more maybe this one will do a smaller tree let's try this one out here and let's go with the default levels on that one looks good here's a quick look at all the trees we just selected and then if we want to check out what they look like with that transmission there you go so looking pretty good let's move on to selecting different types of grass all right so this is a super helpful file that Joseph Bashara sent me that shows some different types of grass that he's using to create variation in the forester settings so you can see that some of them are more spread out patches and others are clumpy ER and when you make sure to include that variation overall your results gonna be more convincing so if we come into the forester settings on one of these you can see that he's altered the grass patch radius so this is just the control that spreads the patches out so we've got some patches that are much tighter like this and others that are more spread out so that's a really simple control and just that one thing will pretty dramatically change the look of your grass overall and then grass size and length are also pretty important so we could make thinner taller pieces of grass and finally let's take a look at these graphs node count and grass per node counts so what does this actually mean let's zoom in here and take a look so let's bring them both down to one and now we've just got a single blade of grass and as we crank this up we're just gonna have a bunch of individual blades of grass all in this circle and they've got this fall-off that kind of tapers down to nothing and that's controlled by the grass node length ratio so if we bring this up you can see that once we hit zero they're all the same height but then as we bring this closer to one they fall off in terms of their height so instead of the node count let's bring this all the way back down and let's do the grass per node count so this one will just increase the number of blades of grass we've got per node or basically a little patch of grass so then you can see as we increase the number of nodes those are the number of minor patches within the overall patch so we get this kind of look here so having the distribution towards a greater grasp per node count and lower grass node count kind of creates more of a digital look that has these obvious spirals in there so I think it makes more sense to reduce this and then crank the grass node count and then you get more of a randomized looking patch all right back in our scene here let's do this ourselves so you can follow along fully plugins Forester now we want the multiflora and let's zoom way in here till we see this little piece of grass now we've also got a library here let's start with that same bent grass and you can see it's not as good-looking as we had on the other scene so let's fix this up first thing let's handle the materials so Forster has created a bunch of these materials but they're not being used so let's go to materials remove unused materials and then with this we've got again a physical render material so let's switch this to octane so we go materials convert materials and materials remove unused cool so now we can hop into the node editor and let's take a look at this this texture is going to be basically identical to what we did before so let's take this pop it into the transmission now we've got light passing through and let's put in our color correction here and take the gamma down a little bit and that desaturates things a touch which is also kind of good because it was looking a bit hyper saturated now let's duplicate this set up and put it into a mixed material pipe these both in and let's go back and replace our material here so we want this mix and pop it over top of this one double-click this if we want this to refresh and back in here we want the second one to be a glossy material so let's switch this to glossy and let's ride this slider all the way to the left so that we can only see our glossy material and remember we want to crank the roughness so that we can see it actually taking effect there we go that feels a lot waxy ER now let's do our 50% blend and now we've got kind of a nice combined shader here so this isn't piped into anything anymore since no transmission exists for the glossy shader so let's lose this and then here we don't need this extra material we can just take the one from here and pipe it into the diffuse so now we're handling everything with one single texture okay the last thing I'm not liking about this grass shader is the color so if we want to alter that we can just pop in another color correction node so we basically want this to be just downstream of this node here and then affecting these three pathways as well so we just want to replace all these so let's pop it in here into this diffuse into this texture here and then into this diffuse and then finally let's pull this into the texture here and it should look the same because we haven't actually done anything so this one will be our color correction and this one's the little gamma boost that's bringing a little bit more light into those blades if you remember so let's take this and let's mess with the hue a little bit you can see this is already looking a lot more natural I was having issues earlier where this wasn't actually changing until I refreshed so just watch out for that it might not actually change color until you do that and now let's just dial in the Forster settings a bit more let's go to our grass and boost the node count and then let's increase the patch radius a little bit here and maybe we can mess with this grass node offset a little bit which kind of randomizes things you can also randomize the grass length we can play a little bit with the turbulence of the grass and finally this grass per node length ratio let's bring this all the way up cool let's just duplicate this and change the settings a bit scooch this one over so we can see what's going on maybe up the count and we can make this one a little bit patchy err so let's maybe increase the grass size a little bit and then decrease the patch radius to make it a bit tighter cool let's duplicate this one more time let's couch this one over this way again and this time let's try a totally different type of grass let's go in and grab some wild grass and see what that looks like and that should be cool and then let's go and spread this one out a bit and here's another issue you might run into if we duplicate this out and you want to throw something like a flower in there so we go to one of these guys here you can see that none of the textures come in and that's because it's got a totally different set of textures so let's try to start fresh with Forester multiflora bring this over and if we come down to a flower you're gonna see we are still having the same issue where it's found one of the textures but the others are just missing so that's probably from earlier when we removed those unused gray textures if you remember so the quick fix to this is just to start a new scene so let's just hit ctrl N and then go grab another forester multiflora and here if we grab something like those same flowers now you'll see that all the textures load in correctly so then you can just copy this go back to your other scene and paste and now if you want you can replace those grass textures cool so that's the idea but I'm gonna be boring and just stick with grass for now alright here's where things start to get fun so just as a way to demo this quicker I'm gonna put down a landscape and I'll scale that up to some larger scale of some sort that should be fine and then let's get rid of our floor and all we need at this point is an octane scatter so right here or under objects octane scatter and now let's put our three little patches of grass in there until the octane scatter to scatter on the surface of this landscape cool so now I'm getting all these little patches it doesn't look like much until I up the count - let's try 10,000 still looking patchy and weird let's go a hundred thousand okay we're getting there let's just go right up to a million it's gonna take a little bit longer to load but not too bad cool so I'm going to move on in here so we can check things out a little bit closer so if we look closely it feels like there are these weird ripples or patterns that are not natural looking and that has to do with the fact that all of these patches of grass are oriented the same way so we want to just put in a simple random effector to change the rotation of all those patches of grass so let's go to mograph effector random and unlike the cloner it doesn't automatically add it to the scatter so you got to come into the effectors here and actually place it in there and now things have all jumped out of whack so that actually looks kind of interesting a little bit of that might be good so let's go 11-11-11 just to just place things a little bit but we're jumping ahead of ourselves because we're trying to remove that artifacting so let's turn this off for a second okay and let's go to the rotation and then h is the value that we want so let's just type in 360 for a full rotation there so here's the before and after here we've got those digital looking patterns and here things are a lot more evened out and randomized and let's bring this up so that we can see the grass a little bit better so if you want to make the default Windows XP desktop congratulations we just did it alright so the next thing that I think could really use some work is this is all just one solid color and so let me show you how to introduce some more color variation we can go back to our grass shader here so I'm going to show you a couple ways we can do this both of them involve this random color shaders so let's drag this down and the next one we want is a mix texture alright so let's take this and pipe it into texture one and then take the output of this and pipe it into our color correction node and for now let's just pop a float texture in to texture too so much like a mix material we get this blend slider and on one side we should see our original but sometimes things get a little haywire and you need to reload so I'm getting all this white in there even when I'm on zero for the amount so let's reload so there we go so that's just kind of a bit of a bug to be aware of so it should be that on amount zero we're only using this and on amount one we're only using the float texture so if we go to amount one we'll see we've just got a gray 50% float texture in there so instead of the float texture let's just drag in this random color so we can see what's going on with the random color okay there we go so now we're getting different values of black and white for each instance in octane scatter so this is really cool so now if we drop in a gradient we can remap these values of black and white to a couple different colors so what if we chose two different shades of green so let's try this one and then we'll do a darker shade of green so something like that and again I had to reload to see exactly what I was expecting so now I should be able to blend between what we had before which is this and if we just introduce a little bit of that random we're getting a little bit more interesting color variations one thing I want to point out though is if we zoom all the way up on this say we go all the way in towards a blade of grass if we blend all the way to the right here you'll notice that we're blending in a solid color so we've lost all texture so this might not be the ideal solution you're probably never gonna see it from way back there but there's a bit better of a way to set this up so let's jump back out here okay so instead of putting the random color shader and gradient here let's disconnect this and let's actually use the random color node for the amount and then we can duplicate this texture and pipe it into texture - and we should be back to square one because it's just randomly selecting between these two which are currently the same but if we alter one of these say we put in a color correction node between here and here let's pop this in and say we kind of pull the hue this away and maybe change the gamma you can see that maybe we've introduced a bit more of a subtle variation and we haven't actually lost any of the texture of these individual blades of grass okay but going back to this previous set up real quick I want to show you how this can create some more abstract and wacky results so if we pull in a gradient nothing should change but rather than just using two colors we can try a bunch of different colors so let's just go crazy here make something truly awful okay and I've been having this issue a lot where I need to refresh so there we go that's disgusting let's try one of these presets instead and reload that's more like it also instead of the gradient another super-fun node is the Gaussian spectrum so let's just drop that in there instead and I'm gonna reload and now let's bring this width down to a really low value all right now we got confetti grass so the lower you bring this width the more saturated the colors are going to get so at some point it also looks like they get a bit darker so that would require boosting things a bit more so to compensate for that you could put a color correction in there and boost the brightness beautiful okay now I'm being serious this time though back to the other set up let's art direct this until it looks a little more natural so let's pull in a color correction node here again and so these are gonna be the patches of grass that are a little more dried out and dead looking so for this we obviously want to desaturate and then I think if we pull the gamma up that will get a lighter color so you can see what's going on here and then we'll also want to shift the hue more towards an orange so let's go pretty far keep on going cool that's kind of the look I'm going for and then to contrast that maybe I'll make the other color a little more saturated so it really stands out so let's just drag in another color correction node and then this one we can just saturate a bit and maybe darken this down and let's really crank the saturation actually let's go up to like two and let's maybe shift it a little more back to yellow and so it kind of like this true green but maybe I want it a little more back to that yellowy green cool I think I'm happy with that but keep in mind that this stuff will get greatly enhanced depending on the color profile you're using so if I drop in my favorite ektachrome here and change it to a neutral response and then maybe put a little bit of yellowy green into the white balance to kind of compensate against that cast that's going on and then maybe boost the gamma there's the exposure and I tweaked these colors a bit more here but you can see just how emphasized this can get with your color grading and with your materials combined so you often want to be viewing through your color profiles so you can make decisions about your materials in context alright so obviously I've been waffling back and forth between these two techniques but I landed on the first one because it allowed me to create a more complex gradient and I wanted to reduce the number of dead patches of grass and have it be more green overall now the other thing I'd like to do is change the grass patch radius on some of these and see if we can get some different looks so say we came to this bent grass one and we decreased its patch radius down to something like 0.8 and then we like upped its length here and we can also come to the multifloor our global and increase its size to like 1.5 and now we're getting a pretty different look with clumpy ER and maybe more wild looking grass I don't necessarily like this as much so I'm gonna go back but you get the idea how just changing these parameters a little bit will dramatically alter the look of your field all right last but not least the lighting is going to super dramatically change this entire picture so I'm gonna bring this down so I can see a bit better and then I'm going to pan the camera upwards so that we're catching that horizon also I just realized I never turned back on the position parameter in the random effector so that's gonna bring a little bit more visual interest into but back to the Sun here so let's just rotate it downwards until I see some orange coming in so that I know that it's getting close to sunset so maybe like right around there and once it's at the height that I want a lot of time I like to come over to North offset which just works in one axis and I can be sure that I'm just rotating it around 360 and not affecting its height so I'll leave it somewhere on here and let the image refine for a bit and now you can really see those glossy shaders at work and at this point the grass is feeling almost purplish in certain spots so for that you could just decrease the saturation of those areas and shift them a bit back to screen and there we go that's feeling a little bit more natural and I just won the sunlight around even more and got this result that really accentuates the highlights on the grass blades even more all right so what if we wanted to break up this grass a bit more and have patches of rock showing through and maybe even carve a path through the scene to lead the eye so how do we go about doing that okay I'm gonna pause the render the first thing I'm gonna show you is this little technique with vertex maps in octane scatter okay so I'm going to cut off octane scatter and then with my landscape object I'm gonna set the width and depth segments to a thousand each so we max out the geometry on this and we get a lot more detail and this will help us with painting the vertex map so I'm gonna hit C to make it editable and now I'm just gonna create a polygon selection of where I want this path to go so say it goes around like that and maybe we have one section that comes this away and branches off and goes down that away okay now it's probably not a good idea to paint from perspective because then things widen out the further away they get and it's kind of like a projection issue but I don't really care that much I'll just fill in these holes from the top and kind of fix this up a little bit and we can make a bigger brush like this and we can just pretend that it happens to be a much wider path down this away okay there we go perfect okay now I'm going to invert the selection with UI and I'm gonna hit shift C and say set vertex weight and I'm gonna set the vertex weight to a hundred percent so now we've got our vertex map and you can see if we click off it we don't see it but when we click on this vertex tag here we have the ability to continue painting so if we want to thicken this up we can just double click and it'll bring out our paint tool and anything that's red is going to be subtracted so that's a vertex weight of zero and you can see it's a little bit slow because I've got such heavy geometry right now but it'll work and I'll just continue to paint along here and there we go so if you click normally you'll paint with yellow which is 100% and if you hold down control it will paint with red which is zero cool so that's our vertex tag now if we go back to the scatter here all we have to do is drag in our vertex map into this vertex map field and you can see magically we've got this path carved now if we want to define it even further there's this little twirl down here and you can set the limit to 1 or anywhere in between and it'll just kind of widen things out for you so let's fire this back up and see what happens awesome and that looks pretty organic and nice and broken up okay now at this point what if we want to add in some additional variation that isn't connected to this path here we can go into our octane scatter and under the distribution here we can just add in a noise and I'm gonna jump into the noise and then I'm gonna go down to electric though any noise type will work and it's definitely fun to experiment with different noise types and see what kind of patterns you get in your grass and then I want to just use the high end low clip a little bit to crunch this in and then I'll jump up one and things gonna happen until this min slider is pulled up on so this is actually gonna call the instances based on this noise okay and you can see that's way too much and the other thing right now is that this noise is super huge so we're gonna get these massive patches and maybe we want that but let's start with smaller patches so let's take this noise down to say 15% okay and now it feels like we've lost the path entirely so that's not exactly what we want either so let's pull down on this low clip and keep going with this look that's more what I'm looking for is just these little holes there now we can also go up one and put this into a layer shader so say we go down to layer here and now when we jump into this noise we'll have the ability to add additional textures or additional shaders so we can just drop in another noise shader here and this one's gonna sit on top so it's just like any layer system like After Effects or Photoshop and this one maybe we try another noise let's try a Lucca and we'll crunch this down cool and so now we've got some bigger patches but we want to combine those with the smaller ones but I'm gonna sit my small noise on top here so this one's gonna override the previous one and I could use blend modes like multiply screen overlay etc but in this case I think I just want to blend back the opacity so as I take this back some of these will be smaller and some of them will be larger showing through from the bottom so I'm liking this look and I'm gonna stick with it okay the next obvious question is how do we replace this white stuff with something that looks good some realistic looking ground textures some rocks and stuff like that okay and here's the secret sauce this is our D textures comm which stands for real displacement textures if you scroll down here you get this little description that says these are actual full 3d scans of environments that are fully seamless and tile able and they work as displacement maps in whatever rendering software you want so these are extremely useful and totally aid realism when you're working in environments so if we go to the shop here and then click collection there's a bunch of different packs and collections you can get that have a better value as a bundle one of my favorite ones here under pack is called quarry so let's look at that real quick and this pack is fifty nine euro so you can also buy textures individually but nothing really beats the realism of this so I'm going to use this rock texture here and this soil texture and for those of you that are on a bit more of a budget check out polygon comm I'm sure I've mentioned them before but they've just started hosting actual scanned textures so if you look down here you'll see photo scanned these are legit same kind of displacement textures so very similar idea super high-res up to 6k textures I think this one here would be a great candidate for that ground there's also some forest paths that would be super useful mossy ground and this forest soil looks really good as does this clay so let's cut off our octane scatter here so I'm gonna open up a new scene real quick and show you what the deal is with these so let's go file new and I'm going to navigate to my quarry pack here and let's look at soil 12 so really nice they actually set up octane project files for you already so you don't have to go to the trouble of loading in all the textures so we can just come in here and hit render and it should be all ready to go so there you go there's our photo scanned sweet looking rocks they're super detailed and insanely fast to load and mess around with now if we navigate to the node editor we can see what's going on a bit better and the main thing you're gonna want to modify is this displacement here depending on how you scale the texture right now it's scaled for the height that it really was when they did the photo scan so if you mess with this you're gonna break the reality of it like you can see here this doesn't look as realistic but if we're scaling this texture up and down for instance it's going to change how the displacements reacting and when it's larger we're not going to see as much displacement so we're gonna have to compensate for that so we'll just eyeball it here let's go around 200 and this is close to where it was before so you get the idea okay so I've brought in a couple of displacement textures here and now we can check these out so let's just take this one that we saw before the soil one and drop it on this landscape and we're seeing it come through but the displacement is totally off and also this blue is distracting me so I'm gonna switch my son here and just change the sky color and desaturate it there we go so let's double click our material here and jump into the displacement and let's just crank it to you 1350 cool that's looking a lot more appropriate we might want to make it a little bit smaller I feel like this is a little bit too big for the displacement so let's go in here and just change this to something like 25 by 25 okay and now the displacement height is way too high so let's go down to 650 though it kind of looks cool and a weird Martian sort of way okay cool so that's looking pretty sweet to me so let's see how this is working with our octane scatter so let's turn that back on and turn back on our patches of grass cool so this is already looking great one control that can help a lot is just under displacement there's this mid level and so this controls basically whether the displacement is just placing out or inwards so you can see if we mess with this here say we take it down that brought the rocks way way closer so obviously not we want and then if we bring it up now the rocks are a little bit lower if we kept going we'd see them kind of fully disappear at some point so I'm just going to stick with 0.5 and by that I mean what we had before which was obviously like point six though this is a cool look to okay I'm gonna turn off the grass again now one thing that can sell this even more not that we're seeing repetitions but if we had a much smaller version of this texture we would but a lot of the time it can help to combine multiple displacements and I'll show you what I mean I can just duplicate this landscape and in the second one I'll drag this other texture I've got here which is a different set of rocks and not as brown and soil II as this and I'll turn off the top one so we can see what's going on cool so this is a different look and in this case I think I'm actually gonna scale it up to 50 by 50 because I'm gonna go for these bigger stone slabs for this one and then I'll jump in here and maybe increase the displacement to something like 750 cool so now let's see what happens when we combine it with the other displacement this is a great way of adding additional details and rocks like this that are looking kind of low res they're just gonna get covered up anyway by the vegetation so I'm not too worried about it so let's pop these back on so now we've got these interesting stones buried in the grass and if you want to do something like this without displacement textures you can also use the forest or rock here and scatter this as well alright that's it for part 1 in part 2 we're going to be adding those trees and finally exploring how to create godrays as well as adding an H to your eyes and dealing with larger scale scenes for some aerial views and finally looking at a new feature that allows you to add some custom Luntz into the camera imager to really enhance the natural colors and create a ton of interesting variation see em part 2

Channel: eyedesyn

Views: 249,554

Rating: 4.9716582 out of 5

Keywords: digital nature, nature renders, octane shader, octane render, otoy, otoy octane, cinema 4d octane, cinema 4d octane tutorial, octane nature, octane trees, forester, octane scatter, octane forester, displacement maps in cinema 4d, c4d tutorial, cinema 4d tutorial, c4d tut, cinema4d tutorial, cinema 4d, c4d, cinema4d, learn c4d, eyedesyn, vertex maps, cinema 4d trees, cinema 4d grass

Id: DLHFA-nFFm4

Length: 46min 20sec (2780 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 28 2018