Cinema 4D Tutorial - Creating Abstract Topographic Renders with Octane Scatter

what's up everybody its David arrived here again for another fantastic octane tutorial brought to you by I design comm this time we're going to be creating some beautiful abstract topographic renders using octane scatter and just a single cube let's do this thing [Applause] alright so here are some renders I've been creating recently with octane scatter it's easy to get a variety of different looks from this kind of volcano looking structure through to these more sliced looks to veins and other interesting nature kind of patterns and another thing I'd like to point out is that I'm using these kind of anamorphic looking bokeh that are vertical and kind of more well defined so I'll show you guys how to create that a little bit later but going through these it just kind of feels like cheating because it's so fun to play around in this world and it's so easy to get really cool-looking results so this style was kind of popularized by this guy named Lee Griggs a few years ago and he did these renders in Maya and Arnold and they kind of blew up in the internet and then at some point Chris Schmidt recorded a tutorial showing how to do this in physical render using the hair module so I realized that this is like very overdone but I think it's in this case a really good way to demo octane scatter and to show some kind of unique features of how this is done in octane alright so here we are in our blank slate cinema4d and octane and I'm going to add in a plane here and scale it up a little bit and then I'll add in an octane daylight which I have a button here for but you can find it under objects octane daylight and then I'll fire this off into the renderer and I'll rotate this around here so that we get a little bit more direct light and then I want to just drop in an octane scatter which I also have a button for but again objects octane scatter and finally I want to create the cube primitive that we're going to be scattering so here I'll just drop in a cube and I want it to be 1 by 200 by 1 so just a really skinny looking cube here that we're going to create over a million instances of so if I drop this into octane scatter here it's very much like a c4d cloner set to object mode so I can choose the surface distribution and then drop my plane into the surface and already we've got a crap-ton of cubes and we can crank this up to let's go up to 10,000 and you can see it updates really really quickly and then we can go up to a hundred thousand no problem and so this is why I like doing this kind of technique in octane because scatter makes it so easy to handle this vast amount of geometry without a hitch and it just renders super fast so the next thing I want you to pay attention to are these position scale and distribution parameters so quickly to demo what these shader parameters do is just add in a default c4d noise here and then it looks as if nothing's happen but we can crank this minimum slider and it'll start to call these instances down based on this noise and then we could do the same thing for position here and again nothing's happened until we enter in some kind of value so I'll just do 222 and now it's bumping all of these up and if I actually take this back down you'll be able to see it a bit better we've got these kind of peaks and valleys here that already look pretty interesting so you can see where this is going and same thing goes for the scale I'll show you what this does though in this case the scale might not be as effective because this is just kind of thinning out the cubes in certain areas and that's not necessarily the look I want in this case but it's definitely useful for for other scenes like when you're doing grasses or like with my city tutorial it was helpful to have a variety of scale so we've kind of seen this before but I'm gonna expand on this a bit too we can also go in and of course change the noise type so we could go to an electric noise and get something a little more complex so I'll pop this into both of these here and you'll see this looks pretty different and then this really comes together even more when we say we crank this to a million instances it's going to take a little bit longer to render but we're gonna get much more interesting look so there you go that's really filling out and you can see kind of where this would be going okay I'm just gonna clear that out all right so I'm gonna take the number of instances back down to a hundred thousand so this should update a little bit more quickly and next I want to show you just one more little useful feature here so if I take a look at this plane here and I'm just going to turn off octane scatter so we're not seeing it and it'll hit see to make it editable and I'll go to my polygons here and I'll just make some kind of selection and then I can do shift C and then enter in set vertex weight so this is just a quick way to get a vertex map and I'll set it to 100% now you can see I've got this vertex map and if you double click this vertex map you can actually get to this paint tool which will allow you to add and subtract from the vertex map so once we've got that we can actually go into this octane scatter here and drop in the vertex map and this will also limit where these are scattering to and you can combine that with the techniques I showed you before so we could have all this stuff going on but then limit it to a certain area or certain polygons which can be super useful all right so I'm just going to clear these out and we're gonna start fresh all right so now I want to use an actual image to drive this versus these procedural noises and I think that any kind of topographic or aerial image works pretty well so I'm gonna go with this hurricane because this is a fun one to start out with and then I'll just take this and drop this into our position here and already you can see this kind of interesting swirly thing we got going on now we can also call these instances on either side to create maybe a more interesting look and again we could take this to a million to see kind of what our final look would be this will take a second to update so that's already pretty neat-looking you can see whether this is going maybe I want to pull this a little bit back and you can see with a million instances it takes a little bit longer to update so let's just take this back down a little bit and then if we wanted to we can also invert these so sad inverted went to see 40 octane here and inverted this we would get kind of the opposite effect where it's looking more like this mountain peak if I pull this in so this is that kind of volcano look that I showed you before it was just this inverted hurricane map and again back to a million so we can see this final look one thing I'd like to point out is that you can't control these textures in here with Octane's node system so we're kind of stuck with layers so right now I've got this invert layer with a hurricane inside of it so in order to control these we can we can still add all the octane nodes but we're doing it through the layer system so I could have a color correction with the invert inside of that and then the hurricane alright next I'd like to create a bit of a metallic material for these instances so I can just go to materials octane glossy material and I'll take the diffuse all the way down to black and then I'll take the index up and give it a little bit of roughness and take the specular to maybe more of let's do a blue color let's do a blue middle here all right so that works there and then we'll drop that on the cube and everything's darkened down so let's boost in a bit more daylight here bring the power up another thing I like to do is go into path tracing mode and that fills in the shadows a little bit so for this I've been kind of gravitating towards path tracing and let's add in our octave camera here and go to our camera imager and maybe up the exposure a bit and then go to our post-processing and add in that bloom that we all love so much and now you can see I'm getting a bit of noise in this area here so if I open up my octane settings and I undock this what I like to do with path tracing is just take the GI clamp all the way down until it totally destroys any of the light we've gotten the scene and then bring it up until it looks good enough so here we kind of want to bring it up until we're not seeing much of a change like after this point we're really not seeing much it would change so I'd say just go until it's flooding enough light in and then call that good and you can see this will clean up a lot faster and better this way all right so this starts to look a lot more interesting when we create a second instance of this cube and a second instance of this material and I'll drop this on the new one and then change the color and see now we're getting different sections colored differently so the reason this is happening is this if I remove this shader and the distribution here we wouldn't actually we would just get a random distribution but the shader itself is actually driving where the different colors appears so say I just alternate between blue and purple here a bunch of times you can see we're going to get this interesting striped look so from here I can create a couple more of these so let's make this one gold drop that on a couple of these here and then let's do a red all right so I'm gonna make one more of these guys here let's do another blue and I'll replace this blue up here now here's a little bit of additional magic if I pipe in a random color node here into the specular if we look up here what's going to happen is we're going to get all these random colors in this one section so in between this I can drop a Gaussian spectrum which will kind of colorize those before we just had black and white now we've got some colors going on and the more I take this width down the more rainbow it's going to get and then from there I can add in a color correction node here and just use this to shift the hue so say I want more kind of blues and purples I can go that away now I can also take this wavelength this way if I want it to be a thinner slice of the spectrum so to just get that to be a little more subtle and then from there I could crank up the saturation even more so I could have them really saturated and then just swing the hue around and we'll get some different interesting looks so there you go there's some kind of Siam and purpley stuff going on and now let's do the same thing for one of these purple guys here I'm not loving how saturated this purple is so let's just go back to our previous node here and I can grab these three right click and copy and go back to the purple one and then right click and paste and pipe this into the specular and then for this one let's just swing the hue to something slightly different so let's go this way and maybe let's take the wavelength up here and let's zoom in so we can actually see what we're doing just bring the width back down and then let's keep shifting the hue I think I like those colors there that's looking interesting to me and now if we crank this back to a million again we can kind of check what this would look like with our high number of instances that's looking a little more interesting I don't love the gold I think I want it to be a little more orangie so let's tweak that so I'll just take the specular here and just kind of shift it a little bit more Orange I think I like that better all right so now I'm gonna try to add a bit more visual interest to the scene I can duplicate this plane and then turn it on and then kind of bring it upwards and now since this isn't the plane getting scattered onto it'll actually intersect with the geometry which is what I want and you can see because we created these metallic materials they're not collecting as much light as a standard material would so this is looking like really blown out and glowy but that's just because this daylight is cranked so high so this is really what's going on in the scene if you if we kind of bring it down like that but what I want to do is maybe leave that there and rotate this daylight around to get a bit more of an interesting lighting look going on so if we bring it around that way and kind of bring this highlight across I think this starts to look a little bit more awesome so from here let's just add in a texture to this plane and I'm actually kind of liking this weird blue glow that we're getting here but what I want to do is let's turn off scatter for a second so we can just focus on this and here I just want to create a simple displacement material using the same image that we used before so let's click on add displacement and then jump into our displacement and drop in our hurricane here and I'll take this to 4k I don't think yeah the resolutions not even 4k so that's fine and let's bring this displacement up okay so this is totally blown out so what we can do is we could reduce the daylight or we could just go to our camera imager which I cranked up before and kind of bring this exposure back down and now you can actually see what's going on we're getting this pretty sweet-looking displacement hurricane thing going on almost like like ice already without even any work we've got some artifacts on the sides that we can clean up really easily by just jumping into our displacement note here let's go to our node editor this time and instead of a bitmap material this is not as controllable let's drop in an image texture and let's just copy this path here if I go to the shader I'm going to copy this path to this and then I'll replace it and so now we've got our texture in an image texture node and I can hit UV transform which will add in a transform node and in the newest version of octane this is locked by default which is awesome and if we just take this up by 0.01 it'll resolve that clipping issue which is an issue with the edge of the picture being treated as if it's like this extreme displacement so if you just take this to 1.0 1 that solves the problem so let's take this diffuse down and then let's change this from a diffuse to a glossy material that's looking pretty crazy though we're getting these extreme fireflies going on and that's because it's a little too glossy so let's just bring up the roughness and you can see this starts to smooth out and catch those highlights in a much more interesting way and then let's just take the diffuse to more of a blue cool it kind of looks like ice right now and then and the index is already good at 1.3 now real water would have some subsurface scattering but we don't need to get into that this is like cool enough for now so let's trim this scatter back on and you can see what's going on now these other materials are much darker in comparison so either we need to bring these up or we need to bring these down too try to match these all in the same lighting conditions because right now these are looking really dingy so let's go ahead and take this diffuse way down to try to match all these conditions together okay and let's bring this exposure back to where we had it before which was like 2.6 or so and this displacement is just way too high so if I jump back in here let's take this down to 55 and also I think that was soaking up a bunch of the light so this is looking a lot more interesting here and now maybe we can just take this plane and bring it up a bit more alright so first off I think let's do a little bit of tweaking I think that I brought this diffuse down a little bit too far so that brings a little bit more nice blueness into this water / i / whatever it is and I still think the displacement is too high and it's causing some ugly artifacts that we can see so what we can do is we can go into this displacement here and I'm going to choose 25 and if we want to smooth this out even more here let me just kind of come on and you can see these weird look in blocks that are probably due to the JPEG compression so what you can do is you can come down to the filter and go to Gaussian and then just kind of crank this up so this is gonna blur the displacement map so there we go you can see that's totally affected it though maybe it's too much let's see what happens it at about 3 yeah we can still see those blocks a little bit so maybe let's go to 5 I think that's good enough and that's keeping the detail that I want so from out here that looks pretty good and I've got the feeling like there's not enough light in this scene we've helped it by going to path tracing so if I go compare store render buffer you can see that if we were in direct lighting here it would be even darker and a lot of this is due to the fact that I've chosen this specular material so if these materials here had more diffuse in them you would see that I would totally bring tons of light in but I kind of wanted that metallic thing going on so what I could do is I could just kind of crank up the roughness instead and that will kind of spread that light out a bit more so let's go compare store render buffer so this is more roughness and if it's less you can see it takes longer for the light to penetrate we get these more intense highlights which is really cool but the light doesn't kind of get into these crevices as much so depending on which look you like more go for whatever you want so another thing I'm noticing is that these are just kind of D saturated feeling so what I could do is just come in here and actually boost the saturation of the specular a little bit to get even more of that orange ii vibe going on and then beyond that i can just play with my camera imager and maybe add in a bit more to the gamma here so that's gonna make it a lot more milky but then i can come into one of my favorite presets here which is the ektachrome 400x CD and that's going to get way too intense so we can kind of dial these numbers against each other but you can see that's adding in a bunch more contrast and then we kind of want to work against this super orange that's brought in so we can go to this white point here and kind of boost this until we get back to something a little more reasonable that's looking a bit pink so to get it less pink we actually go towards pink counter-intuitively see that is looking a little bit better and let's boost the gamma a bit more and drop this exposure so you can see that this is added more light into the scene and now I'm gonna go back to path tracing and these crevasses will also fill in a lot more once remember we're gonna go up to a million instances so this is going to be more our final look and this is obviously a lot more evenly lit at this point and beyond this I would just change the actual lighting to affect it so you can see how altering the lighting and get totally different looks and if we want less of a harsh kind of contrasting light we could increase the turbidity which is kind of like more of an overcast day and then up the exposure and the power so let me show you before and after real quick so if I go compare store render buffer and then up the turbidity and the power we're effectively reducing the contrast and flooding a bit more light into those kind of cracks so in this case I actually think I like the more strong sunlit look so I'm gonna go back I think that this is looking too rough so maybe we come in here and take the roughness down and bring the diffuse a little bit darker there we go I'm liking the way that's looking and now I think I'm gonna go in and kind of add in more layers of these cubes so the more we do this the more kind of variations we're gonna get and the more striping and to make this less of a painful process I'll bring this back down to a hundred thousand instances and I think I'll just I want to see more of the red and this is the fun of it is getting these dramatically different looks just by a little experimentation in this case I feel like I want to lose the yellow that's looking ugly to me so maybe let's just go in and completely shift this and I think I like the look of this green I think I just want to see more of it there we go that's looking pretty sweet to me I feel like we could potentially reduce the height that these cubes are getting bumped upwards so maybe let's go like 125 and see what that looks like now that's gonna bury itself down in here so at this point we can either move this plane down or this plane upwards so this is the one that's being scattered on so let's just kind of shove this up through there and we could even rotate this around by 90 degrees to get a totally different look so that to me looks even more interesting almost like this crazy whirlpool now one thing that's really gonna bring this together is some shallow depth of field so let's come into our camera imager here and go to our thin lens and just start cranking this guy here this aperture and I want to take it to maybe fifteen might be too much but I kind of like this look because it combines this complexity that we expect to see on a massive scale with something that looks pretty small at the same time because of how the depth of field is now I want to turn off autofocus so I can actually pick where my focus point is because I want to see this Ridge here a little bit better so that kind of gives it this nice split between out-of-focus here and here but not here and to lose the black off the edges what I could do is I could just duplicate this plane and scale it up maybe bring it down a bit and this is just a total cheat to kind of extend the bounds here so that we're when we're looking off the side we're not seeing pure black and now we're also probably gonna want to push in a bit and find a composition in here somewhere I'm gonna pick focus on this Ridge here finally I'm going to boost our instances back to a million because I'm happy with this composition and I'm not going to be doing a whole lot of tweaking past this with the camera now you can see how much more light this brought in by upping those instances so let's come into our camera imager and just drop the exposure okay now I'm feeling like this is actually too many instances because I want to sense those actual cubed primitives and sense that it's being made up by these individual kind of grains versus this look here which is almost too solid so I'm going to take this back down to 200,000 instead of 100,000 and the other thing I'd like to do is I'm gonna totally backtrack and change this to a higher displacement setting so I'm gonna go to something like 180 and because I think I like the dimensionality that this is giving us and now if I boost these planes back upwards here we can kind of bring that water surface back into play and now I'm gonna kind of come around here and let's let's zoom in so I can hold down to and right-click and now we should be able to actually sense that these are individual little guys that are making up a bigger picture which is what I want so that's looking pretty cool to me I think I want to pick focus a little bit further up here and now let's talk about bokeh so if I come to my thin lens tab here there are a bunch of controls for bokeh that will make it look a lot more interesting so for one if we crank this aperture edge all the way up I'll let this refine for a second and then I'll go to compare store render buffer and now I'll take it back down and let that refine so if I do this ad wipe hopefully you'll be able to see that with the higher aperture edge it really defines these bokeh a lot more they look more circular and we get a clearer kind of outer rim with a thinner inner circle and to me that looks more photographic and interesting in many cases and the other thing that I'd like to do here is I'm going to take this aperture aspect ratio to two and this is from Yan ercel I saw his stream the other day on learn squared that you can make these anamorphic looking bokeh by stretching the aspect ratio to two to one and if you've ever actually seen an anamorphic lens it has an oval-shaped aperture and what that does is it stretches out the bokeh to this kind of elongated vertical look and we're used to seeing this in really high-end films we're used to seeing these kind of stretched out bokeh and if you've ever seen any JJ Abrams film you know the bokeh are stretched and there's also these obvious anamorphic lens flares because of some other property of the anamorphic lens that it stretches out the flares like this so we intrinsically are used to this look and we like it so I think it's pretty cool to be able to take this look and place it into our renders so you can kind of see these bokeh are starting to get stretched it's subtle now if I want to make this even more overt I'll just bring this way up and you can see how elongated this is starting to get so we don't want this much but to gives us this really nice subtle look another thing we can do though is if we want we could take the bokeh roundedness down to zero and now this bokeh side count will take effect where we get these hexagonal bokeh I'll crank up the aperture edge so you can see this a little bit better but now that this bokeh roundedness is down to zero this side count will take effect and many lenses have this kind of hexagonal aperture so to see this better I could just duplicate this daylight for a second and rotate it around until it's kind of blasting the camera a bit more and now here in a second we should be able to see these kind of take shape a bit better okay so I've zoomed in a bunch and brought the camera around to a different angle so there should be a lot more obvious now with these hexagonal bokeh but I'm gonna go back to where I was which was here and I'm gonna go back to my favorite anamorphic bokeh change the light back to where it was take the book around in this back up to one and the aperture aspect ratio back up to two alright so let's do a quick aside about rendering this with adaptive sampling so if we look right now I can set my samples to something like 5,000 for instance and I'm just going to speed this up and let this render all the way to 5,000 samples so we can see kind of a base example of what this image would look like in terms of the noise without adaptive sampling so we're just gonna let it brute-force up to 5,000 samples and it says it's going to take about nine minutes all right so I've slogged through this nine minutes here and we've hit 5,000 samples and so this is 5,000 samples across the board it's treating every pixel in this image equally and if I were to render this same image in the picture viewer at 1920 by 1080 it would take at least twice this time so we're looking at least 20 to 25 minutes per frame at these settings and if you look this image is still pretty noisy in certain areas so I would never be able to truly clean up this noise you can see if i zoom in here we've got some noise in these shadows it's not too bad and for an animation you know this amount of noise would be fine but 20 minutes per frame is kind of absurd and I'm on to 980ti right now if I were on my rig with four 980ti s that would be half the time so it'd be maybe like 10 or 12 minutes per frame that's still a lot so we can actually improve this with adaptive sampling let's go to compare store render buffer so we kind of keep a memory of this state all right so let's turn on adaptive sampling and I'm going to start with a really high noise threshold and right here we've got the minimum samples of 256 that means it's going to go through 256 samples treating every pixel identically and that's kind of like a safety so that we know that everything's getting at least treated to some degree with samples but past that it's going to use this noise threshold to determine certain parts of the image are clean and certain parts are still noisy and it'll just focus on those noisy areas so if you see as we're past 256 some of these areas are going to start to go green and once they're green octane is saying don't focus on this anymore we're going to focus all of our samples on the parts of the image that are still noisy so this whole water area which is much less detailed then all these little individual kind of cubes is gonna go green first because there are a lot fewer bounces to calculate and there's a lot less intricacy going on in there so we're gonna see this all kind of getting taken over by green first and then octane is going to ignore those areas because we've set this threshold so high this is going to quickly all go green okay so we haven't even hit 5,000 samples and now it's done at two minutes now the question is are we actually cleaner than before so if we can able our a B comparison and the answer is no this is actually much noisier than before because it hit that threshold which was too high so we want to kind of bring this down if we were down at zero this would be back to our original model it's as if that wasn't on at all but if we're around say point one let's see what happens I'll refresh this render so we can see okay we still haven't hit 250 now we're starting to see that green take over much of the image and so octane will be able to focus on just these really noisy parts but because we've set that adaptive sample a lot lower you can see that now it's actually focusing much more tightly on these areas in here and in the bokeh that are really noisy cool so it's already done at 2 minutes and 13 seconds and it blasted through the rest of those samples now let's compare it to before getting closer still not quite there let's try to bring that sample noise threshold even lower let's go to 0.05 and I'll refresh okay now it's got a much bigger chunk that it thinks is noisy so it's going to take a little bit longer but just on this section so this is kind of an optimizing process figuring out where to put that noise threshold that you're going to get the most bang for your buck essentially okay so now something interesting has happened it's hit this max samples and this is as much as it's cleaned up so if we go back to main you can go back to our compare enable a/b comparison and now we should see that these two results are pretty comparable but we're only at 417 versus the nine minutes from before now here's another thing we can do because we ran out of samples we can just boost this say we boost this to something crazy like 25 thousand this is gonna keep rendering but it's going to continue focusing on just these small areas so these will clean up and it's going to blast through these samples a lot faster so let's let this run for a second now with just a few more seconds it's really cleaned up these areas and it's no longer even focusing up in this Ridge up here that we were looking because it's considered clean and it's just getting these last few little bits that are really noisy and you can see we're plowing through these samples at a really really fast rate so at this point I can't even see the little bits that it's focusing on but it's gonna finish at about five minutes and 30 seconds and that's gonna get us an extremely clean result and a much better result than the one we had before all right so now I'm going to show you how I would get that kind of sliced look so we want to change this from surface distribution to vertex but the issue is that I'm cloning on to a plane that's been made editable and I did that because I was showing you some vertex map stuff but I want to use a plane where I can control the segments easily so I'm just going to bring in a new plane I'm going to drop it underneath the one that we're cloning onto right now and I'm going to reset the PSR and we'll just use this instead and now we want to scale this plane up we got the position right but not the scale so at this point we want to add in the maximum number of segments so I'm just going to max this out on one of these axes here and now you can see that we're getting this kind of interesting sliced look in this case I don't think it makes sense to have this whole cut out so let's go back to our octane scanner here and reduce this and then we can bring this up too so we're not actually using this image to remove any of the instances now if we want an even more intense kind of slicing going on we can just go back to our plane and maybe give it 50 segments and in the case where it's not updating properly you can just tick off octane scatter and then turn it back on and there we go so let's widen out our focal length here and maybe reduce the amount of Shalott up the field so let's go to our thin lens here and go down to 5 and this is kind of cool here maybe we could also try switching these numbers around so say we do 55 and max this one out and again just jog this so it updates properly this is kind of another interesting look here and maybe we take the plane that's being cloned on - and bring these up out of the water a little bit further so this plane here and we can rotate our daylight around North offset here until we get a different look and then maybe just also rotate it by hand okay now we're getting some interesting backlight but it's too high I want it to be more on the horizon so we get that kind of orange II light coming in there we go see now that's starting to feel a little sunset II now maybe we can just play around with the North offset here and bring it around to the side so that it's just kind of backlighting this whole setup here and to me that looks a little bit more interesting and I just came in here and found a slightly different composition that allowed me to see the individual building blocks a little bit better and now maybe I feel like I want to put this back down into the water a bit more and then actually boost the overall displacement essentially so let's take this up to like 250 and then drop this down further we could do a really long lens look by holding down to and right clicking and then pull way out and then we're gonna have to adjust the focus so let's make this super EXTREME and now you notice that everything looks like it's in focus because we've gone so far away so at this point we're gonna have to compensate with the shallow depth of field and probably crank this up a lot more so there's 25 on the aperture and let me move my little gizmo for the light in here a little bit more and we can make this even lower in the sky till we get something pretty like that and I don't like how much red there is in here so I can kind of just mix these up and totally change around the distribution okay so I'm liking this but I'm not loving how the colors are so what I can do is I can just duplicate these like crazy and just keep on going and you can see it gets thinner and thinner up top until I've got a lot more different colors okay and I can just move around and get a bunch of different interesting looks this way maybe all reduce the amount of shallow depth-of-field at this point I think I'm liking this composition a little bit better I like having this around the outside it's pretty interesting but now I've lost that light so I can just probably swing this around until we pick it back up but now the issue is I don't love how much it's blowing out the scene so maybe I kind of raise it up a little bit so at that angle it's a lot more subtle and now again if I just rotate it on the North offset I can kind of play around with where that's hitting the water liking those little sparkles in there and then I could probably just take down my gamma a little bit or the exposure and reveal that a little bit more and maybe we'll give this a lot of contrast like this but then a lot more bloom all right so here's our final result with this but here's what's so fun is that I can just switch this back to surface and we get our other look with this same lighting setup and composition and focal length and all the stuff that we've done we could even play with cranking this up past a million instances for this angle now and get a totally different interesting look so here's where this gets really fun is when you just start trying out different images you've got the whole thing rigged up but you just want to pop in a completely different image so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use some of these maps from our friend the French monkey so if you look he's got these landscape kits TFM style calm or retina pack so retina pack is the one that I'm gonna use and they're these just grayscale maps from world machine that he's generated really really pretty stuff so I'm gonna go and grab those here all right so let's try one of these like this one and this is going to totally redistribute the way that the colors are sorted so we'll see that here in a second there you go and let's just drop this in to this one as well and for these I think I'm gonna lose the water surface so let's see which plane this is on so it's on plane three let's just get rid of the water surface for the others cool and so now we've got this very unique world to play around in if I tilt down and kind of see into these valleys here maybe for this one I won't make it so displaced so I could take this and maybe set it down to a hundred so that's looking pretty cool right there and maybe I don't want this to be a ridge maybe I want it to be valley so I could just go and invert this see 40 octane invert okay so this is going to totally change our setup here so I think that looks pretty awesome and I could maybe widen the camera lens by holding down to and right clicking you can see our overall structure we've got going here and now we can kind of pull on in and bury ourselves in this and now obviously we want to pick focus on something and now our shallot of the field is too much so let's take it down to five let's pick focus there cool that's pretty interesting let's mess around with the lighting real quick and let's take this back down to a hundred thousand so it's not bogging down so much there we go now let's rotate our daylight around maybe let's just try messing with the North offset first see if we see anything coming in there we go we've got some red light beaming in let's boost the power and then let's just start to rotate it you you all right so I've found a camera angle that I like and now I can just kind of play with the lighting here so I'll rotate around this daylight and now we can get some really interesting looking shadows almost like the Grand Canyon I could boost the power and now I just want to rotate this around until I'm seeing this really strong high light coming in and if I don't want it to be so blown I can increase the turbidity which will kind of decrease the contrast of the scene a little bit so maybe that's nice I like seeing this kind of rim off of these structures here if I wanted to I could change the Sun color to be less orange and then we get more of this kind of brighter daylight look though in this case I kind of like the orange and if I want to see maybe some bigger patterns and bigger stripes I could reduce the numbers of these cubes this worked for our previous scene but in this case we might want some bigger patterns maybe I want a blue one on top so let's kind of play around with this let's try green or we could try one of the purple ones which actually has one of those random color nodes in it so we'll get a bunch of different colors on the top and see now we've got all this color variation on top which is kind of interesting all right let's try a totally different map and see what we get all sorts of really cool stuff to choose from here let's try something like this one and sometimes it's fun to just let another an entirely different map drive the color patterns so here we've got a very different looking image just because we're driving the color with this other image here so I'm gonna pop this in here and see what we get and this is why I love this so much because I didn't do anything except switch the image and now we've got this crazy-looking stuff going on here this is why it feels like cheating to me all right so I saved this frame out but let's move around the scene and see what else we can find and just by rotating down we're getting a ton of prettiness here let's maybe reduce the shallow depth-of-field down to something like seven there we go I think I'm liking that more so already this is another super nice composition so there are just so many different shots we can find in here I really enjoy this process because it feels like creating a set and then going out to this other world and being a photographer and finding different pictures and compositions within that place all right just for fun let's try one last one let's go for something like this and now we're getting these beautiful vein-like structures and the sun's hitting it at this really nice angle so that about does it for this technique I hope you have fun going out and creating your own kind of renders with these weird scatter compositions so we've learned in a lot more detail how to use octane scatter how adaptive sampling works and some tricks with shallow depth of field and bokeh thanks a ton for watching and I can't wait to see your creative take on this technique

Channel: eyedesyn

Views: 171,406

Keywords: octane scatter, cinema 4d octane, octane render, otoy octane, topographic map, abstract, cinema 4d octane scatter, c4d tutorial, cinema 4d tutorial, c4d tut, otoy octane render, 3d render, 3d animation, cinema 4d, maxon, c4d, cinema 4d scatter, david ariew, eyedesyn

Id: F_PYh9Py8Zs

Length: 50min 18sec (3018 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 03 2017