Create a Landscape using FREE Quixel Assets in Cinema 4D & Redshift

hi guys ross here welcome back to another video i hope you're having an amazing day today we're going to be looking at how to create this landscape using cinema 4d and redshift we're going to be going over how to set this scene up kind of breaking it down step by step how to set the grass up and then we're also going to talk about color user data this is a really powerful technique to essentially be able to control different parameters within your assets without having to keep diving into the materials so we're going to touch on that briefly and i think it's going to be a really interesting one if you do find the video helpful i'd really really appreciate it if you hit that like button hit that subscribe button so you don't miss any future content and if you do enjoy the video leave a comment in the comment section down below to let me know i really really do appreciate it okay without further ado that's enough of me waffling let's jump into the video so in cinema 4d and this is the scene setup i think the best thing for me to do is kind of break down everything go step by step and then we're going to look at rebuilding the grass so let me just disable everything that's also going to help to speed up as it is a little bit heavy um and let's just go step by step so we're starting off with the water um pretty simple water but this time i am doing something a little bit different um i'm using this max on noise now you guys know that usually i will crank the scale up like this so it looks a lot more like elongated and a lot more kind of like longer ripples this time i decided to keep everything uniform so it looks like this and i'm using the turbulence and i think this gives it more of like an ocean feel where the kind of bump feels a bit more randomized doesn't look as linear i think yeah it just helps to break it up a little bit it looks a bit more realistic the next thing i did was i actually used a maxon noise for the refraction transmittance now i think i need to enable the landscape for this to kind of really become apparent so this is a slightly different technique for me and i'm really happy with the results i think it looks a lot more realistic and let me kind of explain uh the differences so usually what i would do is i would just grab a landscape object like this one at the back for example and i would just scatter these throughout my water and kind of just resting them on the surface just intersecting a little bit the problem with this is that if you know if i disable this really quick and let's just drag this landscape down all the way to the front the problem with this is that first of all you can kind of see the landscape where it finishes at the bottom like underneath the water so you get this hard edge which obviously doesn't look great but also you're not really getting any shade variation in the water because there's no kind of like seabed underneath the water so you don't capture that depth so what i've done on this occasion which is probably how i'm gonna set up my scenes going forward is i essentially have created another plane which i then added a displacer object to so here's my little backup version and let me just jump out the camera so i can kind of explain this a bit better i've added a displacer to the plane so i've literally duplicated the water plane and then added a displacer and you then just go into shading and you add a noise and this is going to kind of displace it and add this variation but as you can see we still have areas which go underneath the water as well as bits that go over the water so you're basically creating like a sea bed underneath the water which obviously is more realistic and you can see in the render view we're now getting some much more interesting kind of color variations in the water you can see like really nicely kind of where the landscape is finishing it's giving this kind of like glow around it almost and yeah it just looks a lot more realistic and the best thing about this is that it's all procedural so you can just change the seed of this noise and you're going to get completely different results um so yeah really really interesting way to kind of generate different landscapes quickly so yeah i'm just going to delete that and go back to my original one so yeah here we go this is my landscape object so we've got the water we've got the landscape and let's just dive into the material of the water again really quickly so we have this max on noise which i'm actually going to delete for now this is just the preset water material but then if you come down to your transmittance color i've then plugged in kind of the shade of the water i want it to be so this kind of like nice bluey turquoise aqua color um but if you want it to be like red for example you can do that you can change it to red and it's just going to give you some really nice variation you know the landscape is doing some really nice work underneath here so essentially the blue areas of the water are like the really deep areas and that's why you know you're not seeing the red come through and then the red is the more shallow areas so um you're actually kind of getting the color from the seabed bounce back and then transfer to this red color so you can play with this and get some really nice results um but what i actually did is i used a maxon noise so hopefully you guys can kind of make this out in the video but you can see i've split it up using this kind of blue and green if i change this to like a red you'll probably see it better here we go so i've got this red and blue so that's basically just kind of randomizing the color of the transmittance throughout our water so what i do is then plug that into the refraction transmittance which is the same box we were just fiddling with a minute ago and all that does is just adding some more color variation to the water um you can obviously get really stylized with this by adding some cool colors and making them super saturated but i think this helps to just add another level of detail the final thing i then did was just change the scatter scale to 0.001 all that does is kind of uh smooth out a tiny bit and it also kind of blurs the intersections a little bit as well so that looks a little bit more realistic um and yeah doesn't really make too much of a difference but it's just nice to have if i put it to zero you're gonna see it's not it's not too much different at all really okay cool so that's the water the sand is just a material i built myself very very simple just like this yellow color and then i created a maxon noise like this and plugged it into the bump and that just kind of added like a tiny bit of a sand detail i knew it was going to be covered in grass so i didn't bother kind of spending too much time on it then added these two landscapes in the background with just a plain blue texture on it just to kind of make it feel a bit more surreal just throwing in a random color in there uh also helps to kind of tie it to the water which is nice then we have these rock assets these like i mentioned at the beginning of the video are free assets from quicksort and mega scans so if you download their quicksilver bridge which by the way is phenomenal um so easy to use you can literally export the assets straight into cinema yeah i couldn't recommend it highly enough um but i just went down grabbed this rock and all of these rocks are the exact same one but i've just changed the rotation and the scale slightly um so they do look a bit different so you can really kind of reuse these assets without you know having to add loads of variation in there so all you have to do if you haven't downloaded the asset is you'll get an icon like this hit download and then it will change to this blue export icon hit that and you know i'll show you right now it's going to press it's going to say export to cinema export successfully and boom straight into our scene and it's already going to link all the textures up for you so you know it's really really is a time saver um i then have exported the grass as well so you're going to see when i enable the grass here there we go and yeah same exact thing with the grass so i just got this ribbon grass which is their only free grass asset and i just plug that into a matrix object and then scattered it across the landscape so i'm going to show you guys how i set up this grass because i do use some really cool color user data here which i can just change and basically update the color of the grass without having to actually dive into the material so let me show you guys how i set this up and then i think we'll pretty much be there and the final thing i did for the scene was i added the sky texture and it's a pretty simple setup you just find like a texture online drop it onto a plane of the same dimensions as the image i just put it into the emission color and yeah that's it job done i'll show you the setup very simple texture into the emission color and then set it to two so it's nice and bright and the only thing i did do is i dropped the opacity down to 70 so essentially it's kind of like semi-transparent which means we get a nice blend of the redshift sky and the sky texture so yeah that is the setup and now i'm going to show you guys how to create your grass so let's just delete this quickly delete the cross material and let's go to bridge so we're going to export the grass here hit that exporting to cinema 4d export successfully and yeah by default i think there's going to be five variations which is really useful um that's just going to help to add some more randomization to our scene and i'm just going to put all those in a null by hitting alt g um and i'm just going to drag them out of the view of the camera we don't want those big grass things just plopped in the middle okay so they're there that's cool we're then going to go up to mograph and matrix scatter now if you're not on the latest version of redshift or you haven't updated your cinema you may not have that don't worry all you need to do is grab a normal matrix and then go to redshift tags and redshift object that's then going to give you this particles tag and it's the exact same as the redshift and matrix scatter okay cool so by default we're going to get this grid of clones here this obviously isn't what we want we want to change this to object and then we want to drop in our landscape object just like that let me go into my camera and let's crank the count up let's put it like a thousand and you can see we're going to start to see these squares let's maybe go to like 100 000 just to really go over the top and there you go so by default it's going to give you these spheres again not what we want we want to have our grass in there so what we need to do is go to our redshift object tag and change the mode from optimized spheres to custom objects this is going to allow us to drag in our grass assets and use these to populate our landscape so we're going to select all the grass assets hit the redshift object tag and then drag these in these are now scattering our landscape lovely looking good but they are looking a little bit too big and way too green for my liking so a couple things we need to do first of all i'm going to drop the scale multiplier down to like 0.25 so that's going to turn them into a quarter of their original size really quick way to be able to do that um i had someone mention on one of the videos about the cubes being too big in your viewport so if you want to do it a different way you can leave that at one and then go to your matrix object and go to transform and change the size of them in here and this is going to actually decrease the size of the cubes in the viewport so you can do it either way um doesn't really make much of a difference the next thing we need to do is rotate these at the moment they're lying down so we just need to go here and set this to minus 90. i don't know why um the matrix object works like that um but yeah for some reason they all come in lying down no matter what asset i use so just change this to minus 90 and you'll be good to go uh the other thing you can do is untick a line clone which will fix this but the only problem is they're then facing upwards and they don't kind of face the orientation of the object they're being scattered on so i usually just leave that enabled and just go to the transform and set it to minus 90. okay so we've got our grass in you know and it's looking decent but we want to be able to take it to the next level and just add some more randomization in there and also just talk about a few other things we can do using effectors so i'm going to go up to mograph effector and random effector and by default this is going to send everything crazy and that is because the position parameter is enabled by default so we're going to disable that so that should put them back onto the landscape and the first thing we want to do is go to scale and just randomize the scale of these grass assets just to kind of mix them up a little bit so a bit like forrester you can go in and change each parameter individually so i could go to the y-axis and make some taller than others which is cool but what i like to do is normally just leave those zero enable uniform scale and then set this to something like 0.5 so now they're going to be scaled randomly proportionally which is just going to look a lot cleaner a lot nicer and yet still add some variation in there so you can see some are smaller than others now and it just looks a lot more natural next thing i'm going to do is enable rotation and set the top parameter to 360. you can see if i decrease this or increase it you can see how the clones in the viewport are starting to spin around so yeah i just set that to 360. so that they're all randomly rotated on that axis and then i'll put something like five into both of these so you can see how some of them now are kind of leaning in certain directions more than others so again all just helping to make it feel a bit more natural a bit more randomized and you know it's really coming together so i think for the final render i bumped the count up to like a million now this is my second time recording this video and i can tell you that that really does slow down the project so i'm gonna leave it at a hundred thousand for now so the next thing i would do for this is add color user data now this is a really powerful tool we can use to kind of speed up our workflow so what essentially we can do is control the color straight from our matrix object as opposed to having to go into the material and kind of change it so we're going to set that up first we need to create our user data which is going to control the color and we can do that just by coming to this user data tab here and hitting add user data now this is available on any object you can see if i selected something like the landscape the user data is there so you can do this for anything pretty much so we're gonna go to user data add user data and we're gonna get this menu pop-up and we want to change the name to cd now this stands for color data and you do have to use a capital c and change the data type to color and you're going to see this is going to change the interface and now we have this color slider so we're going to hit ok and you're going to see that now we have this user data tab under our matrix object now it's not going to do anything and that's because in the material for the grass we need to link that to this color user data so we're going to open our ribbon grass material and this is the material straight from qixel and i have to say they are really good straight off the bat so props to them but we're going to add a color user data node to this so all we need to do is press shift c it's going to bring up our little mini menu and we're going to press and we're going to type color user data there we go and let's just output this to the surface just so we can see what's happening and you can see that our grass has gone black now that's for a couple of reasons first of all we need to type in cd into our attribute name which is then going to reference our color user data on our matrix object we then need to go to our matrix object and go to the user data tab and let's play with the color so this should now reflect in our render view which it is beautiful and you can kind of see how this is going to work so um obviously now we're not we haven't got any of the texture but if we go back to our material and let's plug this into the diffuse and let's also plug it into our translucency color just so that that works as well and then let's output this and there we go we now have our blue grass so this is really intuitive because now we can just go into our user data and just kind of update the color from here without having to keep going into the material of our grass and kind of tweaking things there so this is a really fun way to be able to change the color of objects and there's so much you can do with user data that i'll probably do a separate video on it but this is the very basics of it so the final thing i want to talk about with a matrix object is how we can use an effector to essentially cut off where the scattering is happening so for example if we didn't want to scatter it underneath the water i'm going to show you guys how to set that up so we're going to go up to mograph effector and plane effector now a bit like the random effector it's going to have the position parameter enabled by default so let's just disable that go to scale uniform scale and then minus one so essentially what we're telling cinema is that when this plane effector is enabled the original scale of the grass assets which if we consider them to have a scale of one is now being decreased by one so they're down to zero so we can't see anything right now so if we just disable that plane you're gonna see that come back and then when we enable it they've disappeared so what we need to do now is create a fall off so we can specify where this effector is active and that's really easy to do all we need to do is go to fall off and hit linear field by default it's going to be set to be on the x axis so it's going to be going from left to right so you can see we have all the grass on the left and none on the right which in this case is not what we want so we need to go to our linear field change the direction from x plus to y plus which is going to do this up down effect and then change the length of our fall off down to something like i don't know five centimeters something like that okay so you can see how this is starting to work we've now got all the assets underneath the water but nothing above it and we want the opposite of that so all we need to do is go to the remapping tab and hit invert now this is going to do the complete opposite so now we've got no grass underneath the water and all the grass on top of the landscape which is perfect so we can now drag this linear field up and down so i could drop this down and get more of it to be scattered under the water or i could drag it up so that it's only scattered on the very top of the landscape and this is a very simple setup so you can use all different types of falloffs to create some really interesting results but for this particular case this is the easiest way to kind of restrict any scattering below a certain level so i'm actually going to disable that because i think it's quite nice to have the grass underneath the water adds some really nice kind of detail underneath there and yeah like i said i used a million for the final count so let's just try to do that quickly just to show you what it looks like but that essentially is the setup for this landscape um hopefully i kind of explained everything well um you can see now that there's loads more on there it's kind of quite vibrant so let's just drop that down something like this let's see how that looks it's going to take a minute to update yeah we're getting there so i'm just going to kind of play with that so yeah essentially that is a setup for the scene hopefully you guys have found this helpful and hopefully i explained everything well enough uh if you did find it helpful drop a comment in the comment section down below and if you have any feedback or ideas for future videos and let me know about those too i really really appreciate all your comments and all your feedback i read every single one of them and try to reply to as many as i can so yeah thanks again for watching guys really appreciate all the love and support recently it really really does mean the world to me um hit that like button if you enjoyed it hit that subscribe button so you don't miss any future videos hit that notification bell so you don't miss any updates about future videos and until next time enjoy the rest of your day wherever you are in the world and i will catch you in the next video peace

Channel: Ross Mason

Views: 54,592

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, cinema 4d breakdown, redshift3d breakdown, cinema 4d redshift breakdown, redshift landscape, landscape scattering, cinema 4d water, cinema 4d landscape, landscape tutorial, 3d landscape tutorial, cinema 4d megascans, redshift megascans

Id: 6qKlrc3s5Js

Length: 19min 9sec (1149 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 20 2022