Create a Landscape using Forester in Cinema 4D & Redshift

hi guys ross here i hope you're all having a lovely day welcome back to another video and in today's video i'm going to be talking about how to create this landscape render in cinema 4d and redshift using forrester now forrester is a plug-in for cinema 4d for anything foliage related so you can create trees grass flowers a whole bunch of different things and today i'm going to be going over some of the techniques for scattering and how i used it to create this render so it should be a really interesting one if you do find it helpful i would really appreciate it if you leave a like a comment or subscribe any support really really means a lot to me i really do appreciate it so thank you very much and let's jump straight into the video so we're in cinema 4d and we have a very basic scene here so we've got some landscape objects we have a plane which is our water we have a plane in the background with a sky texture on it and we have a plane in the sky which is casting these lovely kind of cloud shadows into our scene if you want to know more about that i dropped a video a few weeks ago um so i'll put a link on the screen somewhere now and you can go check that out so let's just dive straight into it so we're going to go into extensions forrester and multiflora flora multiflora i don't know how you pronounce it you're going to have this library of assets here so we've got some grass some wheat and all different types of flowers but we're going to stick with the nice straight cut grass that's going to update our object in our viewport but obviously we want to scatter this across our landscape so we're going to go back up to extensions forrester and multi-clone this kind of works the same as the cloner or the matrix object in native cinema 4d so we're going to have to drag a grass and make that a child and now all we have to do is find the object we want to scatter it onto so let's just take our landscape six scatter this and we can see in the render view the grass is being scattered across that object obviously we want to scatter it across the whole scene so instead of having to make separate multi-cloners all i'm gonna do is just select all these landscape objects connect objects and delete and then drag this new landscape in there so we got a really small clone amount so we just need to scroll down and let's just increase this clone count to something like 10 000 and we should start to see more of that grass appearing i think for the final render i used a value of like 700 000. so it's quite a high amount of clones which does start to slow your scene down um but when you're working on these kind of large scale scenes those are the kind of figures you're working with so yeah i would kind of find like a good amount which keeps your scene nice and speedy and then just crank it up for your final render um i could probably bump it up add an extra zero and turn that to a hundred thousand let's see how that performs yeah so it's not too slow i reckon we can roll with this for now um but yeah let's start to dive in and look at some of these settings so first off i'm actually going to look at this clone size and i'm going to drop this down to 0.5 so this is going to take our grass object and just half the size of it and then re-scatter it so we're probably going to have to then bump up the clone count to kind of counteract this so yeah let's have a look it's going to take a minute to just kind of update that and refresh it and there you go so that's a really easy tool to either scale down or scale up your object um really quick and simple you can just do it through the clone size so let's talk about filtering so this is a really useful tab full of different tools where you can kind of filter how the scattering is working so let's talk about uh filter by height so you can see at the moment it's scattering everywhere and my landscape currently goes underneath the water so you can see how it's scattering the grass underneath the water now this does look quite interesting but for this render i want to keep it purely on the landscapes and one way to do that is to use the filter by height so i'm going to enable that just by pressing the check box and you can see straight away it's already started to cut off some of those clones so we can use this height slider here to really affect how this is working so if i put something like 300 it's basically going to cut off anything below 300 centimeters and it's now only scattering on the top of these landscapes so you can adjust this to get the result you want it kind of works how like a linear falloff would um with a plane so we can just tweak this until we're happy with the look so maybe something like 105 works where yeah there we go that's perfect um maybe actually just drop it down just so some of them are dipping their toes in the water i think that looks good to me so that's a really quick and easy way to just kind of filter it um and we you know now we've restricted it from scattering in the water so i'm going to go up and we're going to look at this next filtering option which is filter by polygon selection so in the final render you'll see that we didn't actually have any scattering on these back two landscapes and that is through using the filter by polygon selection tool so what we need to do first is set up our polygon selection tags so i'm going to select my landscape go to polygon mode make sure i've still got the move tool selected and i'm just going to double click on this back left landscape it might take a quick second but it should select the whole landscape there we go i'm going to hold shift and do the same on this right one and all i have to do now is if i hold v on the keyboard it's going to bring up this lovely little mini menu which gives me kind of quick access to some tools but we're going to go to select and set selection so now we have this triangle icon which is our polygon selection tag and we can plug this into our multi-cloner into the filtering and just into this little section here and obviously it's not going to do anything because we need to enable this checkbox here so that's going to update and now we should only have scattering on those back to landscapes so really really powerful but we actually want to invert this so we're just going to select the invert polygon selection tool and now we have it on just the four front landscapes so a really easy way to kind of filter your scattering obviously there's a bunch of different tools in here so you can do it by noise by slope or you can actually clip to camera so this is a really good way to kind of um cull any scattering that isn't in view of the camera but i'm going to leave that for now but maybe that's something i can dive into another time so we've got our scattering it's looking really good but i want to talk about how we can add some more variation and make it feel a bit more natural and organic to show this off properly i think i'm going to have to bump the clone count up so let's put it up to something like 300 000 see how the scene copes with that hopefully it won't take too long to load if it does i'll cut it out but um oh it's updated already so yeah still pretty speedy even at like kind of these high values of 300 000 uh it's still coping pretty well so yeah at the moment it's looking very uniform and we want to break it up a little bit so we're going to use the randomization tab which is right at the bottom of the multi cloner so this kind of works how a random effector would work where you can terbalize the position the rotation and the size and we're going to focus on the size for now so at the moment we've got zero randomization of the size if i crank this up to something like 10 it's going to go crazy and you know randomize it to some crazy scales so yeah that's a bit too over the top so let's dial it back down to three but at the moment what's happening is each one of the objects is being randomized in width depth and height so some are going to be stretched some are going to be really tall some are going to be short um and sometimes you know necessarily we don't want that so there's this absolute size button which if we just enable that they're now all going to be randomized kind of uniformly so they're all going to be in proportion they're just going to be either like bigger or smaller so you can see that looks a bit more balanced now but there is some variation in there you can see some are kind of like taller than others or a bit shorter which helps to add some more depth and interest to the render now in this particular render or this particular case i actually just wanted to restrict it to height and we can do that through this really easy checkbox here restrict scaling to y so this is just going to restrict the randomization to the height so some are going to be taller some are going to be shorter but the width and the depth is going to be exactly the same so you can see here some are starting to kind of poke out above others and some are a lot shorter so this helps to give it a much more kind of like hedgy clumpy feel i suppose um which worked well for this render and helps to kind of just break up the grass a little bit the next thing we have is the turbulent scale so this is essentially going to affect the noise which is driving the randomization so if we decrease this down to something like 25 you're gonna see that it's a lot more frequent uh the randomization so you can see a lot more clumps of like taller and shorter graphs now so you can you can play with this to kind of affect how frequent you want that randomization to be so this is looking cool now you know we've got some grass it's randomized a little bit organic but we've got this horrible material it's way too dark way too saturated we just want to make it feel a bit more natural a bit like the color of the landscape material we have so let's dive into the material and just you know kind of take this to the next level so the first thing we need to do is go up to redshift materials tools and convert and replace all materials because by default forrester is going to use just a standard render material so we just need to convert that that isn't the case if you're using the expansion packs they actually are compatible with redshift and all the other render engines but just for the base uh forester plug-in it does use the standard renderer so you just need to update that and convert those materials so now we have all these kind of grass materials um i don't know why there's these extra ones when it actually only uses one but you know it is where it is so we're going to dive into this material and you can see it's a very basic material we just have this diffuse texture which has been plugged into the diffuse color um and then output to the surface so let's just kind of tweak this and add a few more parameters to make it look a bit more realistic so the first thing i'm going to do is take this and plug it into the translucency color and then increase the weight of the translucency all the way up to 1. let's actually drag this out so we can see a bit better yep so just refresh the render view sometimes the material gets stuck um and it won't update so yeah it's worth refreshing it or sometimes disabling the multi-cloner and re-enabling it um just to kind of fix that sometimes it doesn't update the grass i'm not sure if it's due to the clone count or what but yeah just kind of check those sometimes so now we've got a very vibrant grass um if we turn that translucency off and turn it back on you can see it's a lot brighter but it's way too saturated so the next thing we're going to do is press shift c for our little mini menu and grab a color correct and we can just plug our texture into the input and then output this to both of these and all i'm going to do here is just bring the saturation down slightly just to take some of the color out and then i'm going to boost the gamma to like 1.3 so this looks so much better so now we've desaturated it and boosted the gamma it looks a lot more natural it doesn't look as saturated and it's dark and i'm much happier with the result now there is a really handy tool in the multi-cloner which is this point color and we can actually use this to drive the color of the grass so i'm going to show you how to set that up so we're going to dive back into the material and we're going to use something called color user data now it sounds fancy i know but it's really really simple we're going to press shift c again and type in color user data and if we output this to the surface it's going to go black because we haven't given it an attribute to look up so if we press this drop down arrow go to objects and object color that is now going to reference the point color in our multi cloner so if i just change this to like an orangey kind of color that's going to take a quick minute to update but that should now reflect the color of that point color there we go so you can really use this to kind of drive the color of your grass but obviously we've lost all the texture from our grass material so we need to mix the diffuse and the color user data now luckily for us there is a really handy node called color mix so i'm just going to search that up into that and let's just output the material again quickly so we're going to put this color correct into input 1 and then the color user data into input 2 and then let's just organize these a little bit there we go then put the color mix into both of these so by default the mix amount is zero so it's still taking a hundred percent of this diffuse texture and obviously we want to bring in some of the color user data so let's try something like 0.75 so there we go now we've got a blend of the diffuse texture and the point color from the multi-cloner so let's just change that back to the green but you can see now that we can drive everything through the point color without actually having to dive into the material so it's really intuitive we'll make the process a lot quicker and we can just you know play with the color of this and we can also play with the saturation and the uh brightness as well so i'm just going to reference the settings i used for my original scene so i believe i used 96 hue 30 saturation and 62 for the brightness so that looks quite desaturated but again i'm just trying to make it feel a bit more natural and organic and also trying to keep it quite surreal for this particular render so this blends perfectly with the landscape and now we have a really nice light grass which looks worlds apart from the original material we had so the point color is really powerful and next to it we have this tab called randomized color so you guys can probably guess what's going to happen if i put 0.5 in it's going to randomize the color of the grass and it's going to update the points in the viewport as well so we can kind of see what's going on and now we have this whole technicolor kind of look to the grass which you know doesn't particularly work for this scene so i'm gonna drop it back down but you can be really subtle with this so maybe like 0.05 it's just gonna give you some like kind of shoes of yellow and orange in there and just have to break up the grass a little bit so yeah now we can see some kind of like yellowy grass in there so you can play with this just to add like some more variation and just make it feel a bit more natural and organic and all i did to add the flowers was i just repeated the same process as i've done with this multi-cloner but when i select my multiflora i just go in here and select one of these flowers so i'll quickly just drag these in so let's just drag these into our scene and i do need to update them quickly so i just need to select my new geometry and i did actually create another selection tag for this front landscape so let me just double click there we go v and set selection and then i used this selection so that the flowers only appeared on the front landscape so let's just select both these multi cloners go to filtering and drop the new polygon selection in and then i also need to make sure that i have the height set to the right amount 105 that should work and let's play this and they should be there there we go beautiful so now we've got our flowers in the scene we've got our grass and i would probably like i said at the beginning of the video bump the clone count up for the grass just so that you're not getting these kind of patches here um like i said i believe i used a value of like 700 000 so pretty much doubled what we have at the moment but you can play with this depending on the scale of your scene so i think that is everything guys hopefully this has been helpful hopefully it's been a useful video this is the basics of the forester plug-in and obviously you know it has the side to it where you can use the trees as well so maybe that's a whole separate video i need to talk about but let me know in the comment section down below if you want to see that but yeah let me know if you found this video helpful leave a thumbs up if you did hit that subscribe button and hit that notification bell so you don't miss any future videos and until next time thank you for watching peace

Channel: Ross Mason

Views: 27,271

Keywords: iamrossmason, Ross Mason, ross, graphic design, ross mason, cinema 4d redshift, cinema 4d speedart, rendering, cgi, cg, 3d, 3d render, motion design, motion graphics, animation, 3d animation, c4d process, c4d tut, redshift, redshift render, landscape render, landscape scattering, redshift landscape, cinema 4d landscape render, 3dquakers forester, forester for cinema4d, forester cinema4d redshift, digital nature, nature renders, cinema 4d redshift tutorial, cinema 4d grass

Id: QtFOTLJLZ9o

Length: 16min 11sec (971 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 06 2022