Cinema 4D Tutorial - Using Kitbash3D Models to Build a Space Colony in Octane

hey everybody what's up it's David Aria of here again for I design comm coming to you with part two of this very in-depth Mars tutorial now today is all about these kit bash 3d buildings and we'll be starting with them in a clean scene where we can retexture them and bring a lot more life to the buildings then we'll be moving them over to our previous environment and integrating them into the landscape as well as doing a bunch of lighting techniques that should highlight the buildings and bring out a lot more mood and atmosphere now to quote anyone who's ever posted a render on the Internet I hope you like it alright so this is kit bash 3d comm and I can't say enough good things about this site and these packs there's really nothing out there that's this accessible for small teams and solo artists and these kid bash packs really open up a whole world of creating sophisticated looking renders that wasn't available before and many of these just have a crazy amount of detail and it's very much like Legos in that it takes out the most painstaking part of the process which would be modeling and just focus on the lighting mood composition texturing even though these all now come with textures you can still go in and add additional details or swap out textures and make them look however you want so we're gonna go for this space colony because I'm trying to create this semi realistic looking Mars as if scientists have just landed on the planet and started setting up camp and here's the overall pack there's a lot of cool crinkly cloth like textures and metal textures already in here but we can probably beat these up even more now don't forget that we've got that promo code running it's Aria of Bosch and that'll give you an awesome 15% discount off of any order at kibosh 3d all right so let's just merge in our space colony here I'm gonna use the FBX file and I'll just frame up on these here now we're gonna want to drop in maybe a floor and add a light so that we can see the textures in a better context that's not so flat so let's come over here and rotate it around our daylight and on the floor I'm just going to create a diffuse material and set it to dark gray in the daylight I'm gonna take down the blue and the sky color and the orange as well okay so first off we can grab all of these and go to materials convert materials and materials remove unused materials so now they're all octane textures em right now all these are set to diffuse which isn't going to give us the nicest result so let's go in and change a few things I like this angle on the daylight a bit better so the first obvious thing to do is change this glass color so here it says glass but it's not so let's just select specular and let's also make sure we're looking at this in path tracing and then set the GI clamp down to 1 and here under fake shadows I'm going to turn that on which will just brighten up the glass a bit all right let's jump out here and deal with something like these textures which are particularly ugly looking right now ok so this is our dark plastic texture and it exists all over the place on these doors and on these giant water containers or whatever these are so in this case let's deal with these first but I want to treat this differently and maybe do more of a metallic texture here so let's zoom on into the store and first I'll just set the mode to glossy and let's rotate our daylight so that we're actually getting some light hitting the surface and let's go to our node editor here and let's increase the roughness so now it's actually catching some light and for the time being let's remove the bump so we can actually do something in the roughness let's just duplicate this texture and put it into the roughness and then maybe play with the gamma if we remove the diffuse we can see a bit better what the roughness is actually doing let's drop in a gradient and make this a bit more extreme so something like that and let's bring back the defuse and let's bring the bump back but not all the way mixed up so let's put this in a multiplied and then drop a float in here and bring this pretty far down and this is looking pretty nice but it's causing some Firefly issues so I think in the gradient we can just set this a little bit above black so that it's never fully shiny and let's go even further with that there we go so that's cleaning up a lot more nicely okay now let's treat this orange material here right click and select material set it to glossy bring up the roughness and I think this could actually work as is maybe we bring down the specular a little bit because it's blowing out so much that works for me though over here this one's got a lot of repetitions that I don't like so if we select this object and hit our scroll to first active you can also just get to this with shift C scroll to first active I've also got it set up as alt s now we can just select this individual material and scale it up here now we're seeing less tiling now if we want we could throw a color correction down here and we could shift the hue and down on the saturation something like this might actually work better in our Mars environment since everything else is orange already this might create an interesting color hit and draw our eye to the city more but we won't really know until we're in context so with this texture here let's select this material and again let's choose glossy and let's rotate around the daylight to maybe a better angle so if we were back at diffuse you can see there's no additional highlights here but on glossy it's a bit nicer but we just need to up the roughness and bring the speculator way down so it's subtle but that adds just a little bit of a sheen to the fabric if we were to go back to diffuse would look like this okay now let's deal with these guys so if we right-click we can select object and then hit scroll to first active and here let's just duplicate this dark plastic material and replace it let's jump in here and click get active material and give ourselves more room now I'm going to lose these other two textures for the time being now one thing that jumps out to me is that there's this really hard line here and this is due to the UV mapping and we can fix this so let's go UV transform and projection now the first thing you might do is try a cubic projection so if we go to box here we can lock aspect ratio and scale this up but now we've got these other lines here instead so this doesn't really help us that much the answer to this is try planar so if we just drop in a try planar node here we want to select single texture because otherwise we'd have to connect this node up to each of these slots here and then we also want the texture projection to be try planar so let's scale this back up and now you can see with this blend angle if it's down at 0 we have these hard lines but if we pull it this way we feather them out so try planar is basically just a feather now actually I'm looking to make a metal material so we don't need the diffuse at all but we can still use the same idea with the roughness map so let's drop this in the roughness and we'll just kill the diffuse and bring it down to black and let's bring the index up now this is a lot more subtle and we'd probably never see this but we can still use this same try planar node here so let's hold down alt connect it up and then copy these over and pop them in now we've got it blending a little more nicely though I think we want to scale it up a bit more let's get rid of this or actually maybe we want to scale it down I think I'm good with that and we didn't need such an intense blend angle let's get rid of this too and then in the bump let's drop in a noise so that we start to get this interesting dented metal let's go UV transform let's scale this one up and then we'll combine this with a smaller noise so we want a mixed extra node and let's combine our big noise with our small noise this one will scale way down and on the contrast for the big noise you can bring that up a little bit or a lot to get these more defined features will mix this whole thing down later same thing with this contrast here now it's just blending fifty-fifty so we actually want a third noise that will define where we're seeing the big noise and where we're seeing the small noise so let's just duplicate this put it into the amount and now you can see we're getting patches so let's make this one even bigger and then we really want to boost the contrast on this so these will be perfectly defined areas and let's scale this one up a bit more - there we go I'm liking that a bit better now let's add in a multiply and a float and bring this on down so it's more a little more subtle cool and we can change maybe the specular to more of a copper I think that's kind of interesting right there though maybe this one needs less contrast so I'm seeing a lot of repetitions here so let's select object scroll the first active and then set this one to 300 by 300 rotate the daylight around so we can see what's going on that's definitely better let's select this material as well we can just take this and drag this on top here okay let's fix up this white plastic material this one also needs to be glossy and let's increase the roughness let's ditch the bump for the time being so we can see what's going on and let's bring in another texture for the roughness I'll go to my polygons overlays and this metal grime could be cool let's do this one see if we can see that taking effect let's bring down our diffuse so we can just focus on the roughness pop a gradient in and crunch these down a bit bring this one up if we put our diffuse back on and let's bring them bump back in but let's also mix the bump down because it's a little bit too extreme so I think that's more interesting now another thing we can do with this blue material since we put a lot of effort into this copper bump material we can just duplicate it and we can use it to overwrite this blue material so if you hold down alt it'll fully replace this blue material so that's cool but now maybe if we want to distinguish it and bring back the blue we can just go to our specular tab and shift this to blue maybe somewhere around there in areas like this on the ramp or we're seeing texture repetition let's just fix that select object scroll the first active ok in this case I don't really want to scale up the bump but I do want to scale up the other texture so let's just duplicate this and replace and then come into our node editor and up to transform on the roughness so that works for me and finally I want to fix up these solar panels so let's select object scroll the first active it looks like there are glass panels over top of every one of these so let's duplicate the glass and replace it and if we look at solar panels they're just kind of a bluish material with checkers we're not going to be that close to these objects so it doesn't matter if we totally nail it but in general that's what we want so in this glass let's just change it to a glossy material and let's just put an image texture into the diffuse and now I'm gonna scroll down and find a tiles texture so something like this ambient occlusion map should actually work pretty well so let's just dump that in there and let's UV transform and scale it down and let's invert it and now let's boost our index and change the specular to a blue okay I think this actually works and when you rotate on an angle you see that they look a lot more like solar panels so they call this a kid bash for a reason for instance let's take one of these X joints here and bring it back and then let's grab a hallway from over here one of these hallway mediums scooch it on over and all these pieces are designed to line up really nicely then we can even look over here at one of these habitats maybe this for instance and bring it on over and you can see this even comes with a little bridge piece now some of them over here don't like if we look at some of these on platforms let's grab this one and let's move this circular one back so let's just for ease of use let's drop this hallway under this X joint and duplicate this over so you can see this doesn't line up but there's actually a piece right here for that purpose let's scoot this over and let's also move this underneath the X joint and let's duplicate this up as well and let's move this up to the top so we've got all of these three together and let's scooch this over and now we could go and find this piece for instance rotate it 90 actually maybe in this case we need this one and we could scale it up a bit just to cheat it in there and hold down control and duplicate this again and maybe we actually scale this one down slightly push it forward move it up but you can see how easy it is to create larger constructs the same thing goes over here with these pieces there are X joints and then there are turns and 45-degree turns and these corridors also connect up to the smaller ones and there's some really interesting detail in some of these pieces like this large air lock that has cords coming out so with just enough work and some kind of Zen sessions you can build up some pretty big complexes of these tunnels and make your own city take a look at the concept art for this pack for instance there's just networks of these things and this artist went to town in making these little complexes and building up these pretty elaborate looking structures alright so I'm just going to group all this with option G and call it space colony I deleted out the Sun and the plane I'm just going to copy this whole thing into our Mars project file and paste it in and immediately you can see that we've got an issue I kind of screwed up because these two scenes are totally different scale and what that means is when I scale this down to size which I will it'll change the resolution of all of those textures that we put effort into so I'm gonna have to go back and make some tweaks to those textures this can definitely make your life more difficult if you're not comparing scene scale and a good test would have been just going in here and copying in one building to start just to see what the scale difference is and then going back to this scene here where we did our texture work and scaling everything down and then start texturing or if you want you can also just immediately bring all the buildings in here and turn off the stuff that makes this hard to navigate like turn off all these rocks and things and do your texture work in here which could have actually been even better since all of this is in context and in the lighting conditions that we're actually getting used so let's just turn off most of these things other than the sand to see how our textures are doing and let's duplicate this main cam and zoom up to some of these buildings so we can see what's going on so it actually looks like on the whole we're doing okay especially because these big buildings are UV textured so their textures are not ever going to change when we scale things up and down whereas these tanks are the things I was most concerned about I think this is still looking just fine so I'm actually not gonna bother making any changes especially since we're gonna be pretty far back from all this stuff I'm gonna bring back all of our objects so that we can better place these buildings okay and I think the first thing that's bugging me is this blue material is too extreme so let's go to the specular and tone it down and at this point we want to start with a clean slate so I'm just gonna hide this space colony from render and then I'm gonna go and untuck check camera so that we can look around and select buildings and then bring them in one at a time okay so let's start with these large square buildings here and let's bring it out of the hierarchy okay and unfortunately this is like way too slow to navigate so what I can do at this point is make things a little easier on myself and create a new layer a couple new layers one we'll call essentials and the next we'll call extras and so any of these things up here that we don't need to block out the composition we'll just drag into extras same thing goes with all these and when we're dragging in make sure to hold down ctrl so that we get all the children as well and now I'm going to just turn this off from the render and from view okay so let's go back to our layers and turn the extras back on for a second cool so the idea I've just had with this image is to create kind of a downtown or set of really tall buildings here in this zone because I feel like all of these jagged cliffs and lines are kind of pointing us to here and this is pointing us to here as well so this feels like the focal point to me and I also don't want to cover this cool detail of this cliff in the background so I'm gonna cluster those tall buildings kind of way over the hill and I want to bury them in the fog so that they feel really big but then I also want to create some smaller buildings and complexes that would sit down in here and this would give us a couple regions for our eye to travel there's not much going on down here so it makes sense to put some of these buildings here and then our eye would follow this up towards these big buildings and if we want we could even put some guys sitting right here in the foreground or thing like that so again let's turn these extras off for while we're working and I'm gonna uh Nick check camera here and then I'll jump into this other camera and it's still difficult to navigate the viewport so what I can do is just shut this off fully and then it's a lot faster to move around I actually want to see these extras for a second just in the viewport so I can make sure that I'm positioning this building properly and now let's just scale this way up and then bring it up as well so that we see a bit more at the bottom of it now if we bring back our extras here maybe rotate this building around something like that this is looking a lot more promising because the fact that this is buried a little bit in the fog means that we're gonna perceive it as a lot bigger and I also like this highlight that we're catching up here and the other nice thing is this focal point here is close to the 3rd line which is another good thing and that creates some more visual interest so maybe we'll have some stuff here and then some stuff over here okay I'm gonna play several more buildings and then we'll come back to check this out all right we're back so you can see I've made a bunch of changes I've placed all the buildings for this kind of downtown area here and I've lengthened a lot of them to make them feel a little bit taller and more epic so I've just scaled them on the y-axis I've scooted this mountain into the background a bit to give it a bit more perspective haze and that way it's not competing as much with these buildings and it's a little bit lower down and then I added in this mountain range as well as the one back here behind these satellite dishes now the satellite dishes I found on NASA's website so if you just google NASA 3d you'll find this page and then in the 3d models here you can scroll down and it's this DSN 70-meter dish it downloads as a blender file though so you'll have to convert it to an obj or an FBX to use it but I thought this out of a lot and it's cool seeing these kind of buried even further in the background these massive satellite dishes now the last change I wanted to make was just this slight shifting the camera I panned it over a bit because this puts the building's more on this third line and I think this is just a bit of a nicer composition okay next I'd like to add just a few little lights to these buildings which I think will help sell the scale a bit more and maybe a bigger ambient light emanating from within these buildings which will draw our eye to them even more and maybe add a bit of mystery like there's some kind of construction project or something crazy going on down in here that we can't see so I'm gonna jump back to our layers here and turn off the extras and I'll jump into this other camera here so we can navigate around and I'm also going to turn off the volume so let's drop in an octane area light and let's find this building here we'll just drop this light underneath this and hit reset PSR and then bring the light back out so here what we can do is under the details of this light we can change it to sphere and then let's just scale it down so I'm just going to create four of these for this building one on each corner now let's see what that's doing from our hero camera perspective and we'll turn back on our volume I think these all need to be a bit smaller so we can scale them all down at once from their own axis if we turn on per object manipulation if this isn't on they'll scale down as a group like that but if you turn this on then each of them will scale down on its own axis and let's maybe move these up let's move them back a little bit and then let's scale them back up because I think we've gone too far and when I crank up the power really high these become a little bit more interesting let's also try shifting the temperature and then in our octane camera tag let's just turn up saturate to white so we get a white-hot center on these now I don't necessarily want these to be casting so intensely on these other buildings so if we go back here we can just untick visible on diffuse visible on specular and cast shadows and now we're no longer getting this intense casting on these other buildings which is good we just want these to show up as little bright spots so I'm going to pause while I go ahead and add these to other buildings and then I'll come back alright so I've added in a few more buildings here couple tanks and a bunch of little lights all over the place next let's add in some more ambient lights in here and maybe some underneath this tank here just to highlight some additional details all right so we can just take one of these point lights and duplicate it and then scale it way up and this one we're going to want the opacity to be zero here so that we're not actually seeing the light source and let's have it visible on diffuse visible on specular and cache shadows and I'll go back to my layer and turn off the render extras here so the things go a bit faster and then I'll just bring this on down somewhere in the middle of all these buildings let's go back to our main cam here you can see that's way too powerful and crazy obviously but let's turn off check camera so we can navigate around and make changes here but see everything from the hero viewpoint let's take the power of this light down to 440 and now let's move it a little further back and see what different effects we get I think I like that but let's see what it looks like at a more neutral color or maybe even a bluish color okay I don't like the blue so let's go back here okay I think I'm liking it around 6000 as this slightly artificial bluish light but not too crazy blue so I'm gonna continue playing with the position so that it's maybe not illuminating this front face as much and see what we can do here okay so that's kind of cool I'm gonna duplicate this and see what happens if we bring it over here as well and that's obviously way too right so let's just scale these down both of them and when we scale these down they get dimmer and they don't cast as far which also helps the scale the scenes so especially this one I want to make small maybe a bit bigger so I like this where there's just a little bit of blue casting from on the ground behind this building let's try duplicating this smaller light around two different areas like maybe down in here and another one on this side and this kind of thing is an interesting detail that brings out the shape of this a bit more though in this case maybe I don't like that it's casting so much here I like this detail so maybe we'll change this from a spherical light to a rectangle and that way we can just point at the direction we want let's bring it a little bit closer here to this tank and it looks like I pointed it the wrong way around so let's flip it 180 and I'll turn it slightly this way so it's not casting here as much maybe I'll lengthen this out actually so that it's hitting the back of this building as well and then we're probably gonna have to reduce the power on second thought I don't love how hazy this is getting so let's just do one light for here and one light to try to accentuate this edge so let's bring this back place it behind this thing and then we'll duplicate out another one and maybe elongate this vertically so I think that's kind of an interesting little detail though this one is still maybe too bright let's see if we can do the same for this bigger edge here see now that's starting to look kind of cool so I'm gonna go through and do this process to the rest of the buildings and find little areas that I want to highlight and I'll come back to you in a bit all right so I've added in a bunch more lights and brought out as many of the details as I could added in this additional building and put this room light on it and let's take a look at what we've done so far so here's without any of the lights that we put in so here's the before and after so that's adding in a lot of nice little details there alright next I'm going to go and add in a bunch of little buildings down here all the lower-lying type buildings you okay so here I'm just going to make sure that the ground is always touching these so that we've got the proper contact shadows and so that these habitats aren't buried in the ground so I use MC for that and then again I want to make sure I'm on normal mode and it's pretty tricky because we actually have four planes that are creating the ground so unfortunately I don't know a better way to do this but I'm just gonna have to go through and make sure each one is pushed downwards to reveal the habitat you so I just found another composition that I'm liking a lot and this makes these background buildings and these satellite dishes feel a lot more massive and this could be great for adding in like your little people's people or whatever spaceman or Mars rover you want alright I'm going to keep adding more little details to the scene you so there's also of course a ton of cool stuff on turbosquid that you could pick up if you've got the budget for it all these are pretty sweet I've had this one for a while and I'm just gonna remove the guns and drop that in you all right so I've added in those sci-fi vehicle and now I'm gonna find my space dude and add him into and if any of you are wondering this is the model here that I used on my space music video a couple years ago you all right so I've got my astronaut dude in there just plopped on down and I've got these other little astronaut guys back here interestingly I had to boost his texture because he was looking really gray but weirdly when I did that these guys blended into the background so much you couldn't even see them so I split out the texture so that they could stay darker and this guy is lighter and the other really obvious thing was he was super out-of-focus so I took down the shallow depth of field and then I realized that the scaling on the sand texture was a bit too large so I brought it down to half size and now it's looking a lot better cool so now let's take a look at her composition from up high between those canyons alright here's where I got with this composition I changed the scaling on the cliffs so that there's more detail and I also boosted the noise displacement here and changed this one away from Hamma was causing some distortions into a regular noise which just gives it more of a curvy kind of flow now I've also gone and placed a bunch of extra lights down in this smaller colony area here and I don't necessarily like it that much with this strong sunlight on but remember we saved out a nighttime look earlier so let's navigate over to that so this scenario took a lot longer to render because it's a bunch of little lights in a dark environment and that's kind of a nightmare scenario with unbiased rendering but the results are kind of worth it in this case I think this is a really interesting and different look and this kind of setup is where you can really go to town with your lighting and emphasize tons of little shapes and edges and the more you put into it the more complicated and interesting it ends up looking alright congrats you guys you got through it and I hope you really learned a lot and as always feel free to tag me if you do any kind of Mars or kit batch 3d render using these techniques I love seeing what you guys build with this stuff and one last shout out to the Aria of bash promo code if you want 15% off definitely enter that in so that should be a sweet deal for you guys and as always keep calm and render strong something like that that's that's maybe an expression right see you guys later

Channel: eyedesyn

Views: 88,275

Keywords: kitbash, kitbash3d, digital nature, alien planet, 3d landscape, 3d planet, planet, octane shader, octane displacement, octane kitbash, octane tutorial, cinema 4d octane, c4d octane, c4d octane tutorial, 3d lighting, octane terrain, terrain, cinema 4d tutorial, c4d tutorial, c4d tut, cinema 4d tut, eyedesyn, mograph, motion graphics, 3d render

Id: 391GLrmLRjM

Length: 38min 9sec (2289 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 29 2018