DMD How To: Model, Texture and Render a Cactus in C4D

hey everybody my name is Noah Bernardi I am a senior here at UConn DMV stores and today we're going to be doing some very basic character modeling lighting and rendering within cinema 4d this is the application that we're gonna be using but you're more than welcome to use any other digital content creation application like blender unity Maya or anything like that start off with a very basic modeling technique by making the base which is going to be the pot of our cactus so there are couple ways would you do that we could stack cylinders on top of each other by going into objects here and do that I wanted to show you this is more advanced modeling technique called a lathe so for a lathe to work we need a profile in which to rotate the profile 360 degrees so I'm gonna start by going by middle mouse into room mouse click here or I could click the window up here in order to split up our four views I'm just going to the front of you and I'm just going to make the base profile of our pot sort of a pot we're just gonna try and make everything a little bit more even we're gonna zero out this base point here and we'll just make everything play nice when we rotate it so I'm just going to set two even values X 30 Y will also do 30 to 45 on this one and this is using a non-destructive or what you call procedural approach to modeling so this is when the operations are connected but not final so allows for operations to be inserted between steps and affect downstream actions this is really powerful technique if you want to make quick iterations so ever profile we just want to drag it underneath our lathe you notice it gets essentially rotated 360 degrees so I noticed that maybe this part of the pot is a little too wide so we can go back in to our front view let's deactivate the lathe object and our spline we can just go in select these two points here just bring them in a pinch and now when we turn back on the lathe you notice that everything is updated and maybe we want to increase the height of the pot we can select the points while the lathe is enabled so we can get real-time feedback of what is actually being effective and what's going on so we have the base shape of our pot but we can go in and add some additional details if we wanted to so for example we can make the pot essentially how they cut out here I could do that by hitting ctrl and have our pen tool selected and we can add to add additional points in here we can drag them down you notice this is not what we want we want more of like a 90 degree angle so we can just select our pen tool again add another cut here and here it's like these enter points drag them down we still have this angle we can easily just select these two points hit T for enabling scale and we can just work in a hit up scale to up here and drag him and hit shift to get increments of 10 percent every time and then zero them up T to Trent to scale there we go now if we go back into our lathe notice oh we missed a spot so we can go back in to pot here and since this this is the area right here we can just delete these guys and we notice okay this guy's I change it too so we copy this value of the Y and just copy and paste that Y value so it's equal and we don't need this point here so we're just going to delete it now if we naval aide great we have a pot with more of a inside that we want and then we can also go back in maybe add a little bit of a taper edge to this pot and give a little bit more visual interest and then again I think I'm gonna bring these guys in just a little bit more that's perfect you can also adjust the subdivisions so if I go to display we have all the different display modes here I'll also have shortcuts that we can use I usually use an F quite a lot this way I can see the wireframe mode of our object and still maintain some of the shading or NB to get have the lights affect the object so if we go into our lathe we can adjust the subdivisions you notice our object becomes a lot more dense so if you're going for like a low poly vibe we can achieve that with this we're gonna bump it up to let's say 32 so you don't see too many of the polygons on our object those were trying to do this as procedurally as we can and maintain an easy way to go back in iterate if we need to we're gonna add some Phillips or bevels to these edges because right now they're completely sharp and in order to achieve a little bit more realism in our model we're gonna add a little bit of a curvature to these edges because nothing in real life is perfectly sharp so to do this we're gonna add in the modifiers type here a bevel the former so it kind of gives you an idea of what's going to happen in this little image and the image in the object here but if we want it to work with this lathe we need to put it in the same group so we can add a null object and this is essentially like like a folder or we can just select everything and hit alt G and it groups it into a null you notice right away the bevel effector is affecting our pot but it's not really getting the effect that we want so in order to just do the edges of the pot that we want we can turn on use angle you knows right away it's working you know it's giving a nice clean edge to these edges and not the actual faces of the pot but right now they're a little too sharp so we can add a couple subdivisions in give it a little bit more curve and this is looking really nice you can just offset so how maybe you want point five and give us a little smaller curvature of the edge here I'm noticing we still see some of the polygons here in a pot and we can go back into our laid object and increase the subdivisions to say 45 and we're not getting so many of those anymore so this is looking really good great and it's also just really good practice to name your stuff in your objects panel here so we're saying this pot name the spline to base form lathe is just a lathe lathe and bubble is just a bubble it's also good in any digital content creation application that you're using to maintain a sense of hierarchy especially in the cinema where it really does matter so right now the program is essentially thinking that the bevel the former comes first and then the geometry is being created but we want the geometry to be created first and then the bevel the former and this just fixes any issues if we were to animate this some issues could happen with the order of the hierarchy great so now we have a pot now let's make the cactus so for the actual cactus part we're gonna use a sphere I'm gonna move it up hit T to scale it down get it to the general size in relation to the pot I'm just going to bring it down below the pot and put it in its own no objects so we're gonna do that hit LG I'm just gonna name this cactus cool my name is to this cactus so if we hit an F or just go to display and again change any settings so we can see the wire frame of our geometry you notice it has a pole on the top and bottom and this isn't great for creating like a character so I'm just gonna change the type to a hexahedron and get more even distribution of quads throughout the mesh and mitigate any of the poles that we might have so once we have our sphere and we can add a deform er so we're going to add the FFT the former to our mesh so we can hold shift and then click on ffd and that'll automatically make it a child of our base cactus sphere we can adjust the grid point size here I think I'll just leave it on two to two and we can go to the points mode here and middle mouse click and drag to adjust the size of the selection brush and suck the points and just select and move the points to get a cactus shape that we want so I'm just gonna bring these down and bring them in a little bit we do so with these guys here so this is looking really good and make sure to look from all directions not just front direction because we notice looks a little too fat here so we're just gonna take these guys and just Scout on it a little bit so now it's looking uniform which is what we want we can adjust the ffd add another grid points and the Y we can add in should we select all of them add in a little bit of curvature which is looking really good cool maybe scale them in a little bit to go to our top give it a little bit more of a flat space I just want to scale these guys in a little bit great I'm just take the base sphere and move it over a little bit so we get get more Center into the pot yeah and maybe um increase the overall height just a little bit more great looking good so now we have our base cactus we can focus on the arms now so to do the arms because I wanted to maintain like this curvy shape I'm just going to copy the base cactus I'm just going to rename it arm and it's exactly identical to the base cactus I'm just gonna select our sphere resize it a little bit size it I'm just moving into position go back into the ffd let's just turn off by hitting the checkmark the base cactus an FFD and also I'll click and click the stop lights to turn them off so we can just focus on the arm and get the shape that we want so we want a little bit more curvature just maybe a little bit more maybe bring these guys I don't know these guys bring back the main cactus I was looking a little small so we're just gonna select this fear just scale it up a little bit I'm just gonna copy and paste the arm and we are going to go to global coordinate system so now we want to rotate it just 180 degrees it's very difficult to do so so we can just hit it so we use global coordinates and then we can just adjust the hit shift to get equal increments of 10 can a global move it over great let me just move it up a little bit get some variation in the distance or the arm and just adjust ffd so it doesn't look like you copy and pasted the same exact cactus go back to regular shading mode and I'm pretty good so must get the stop lights on the FF DS here also I'm going to take the arms and drag them into the cactus just put the base on first because it's just good to be organized and we're just going to rename one this one is this one's right this one that's left great so we got our first cactus good to go you notice that it does have some issues here we can actually see the polygons and we can mitigate this so there are a couple ways we can do this we can go in and hit this object here which is a subdivision surface and it's subdivides the geometry so if we hold alt and then click it'll automatically make it a child of the subdivision surface so we go back to regulating mood shading mode it gets rid of those topology issues that we had before we can also go in and use a smoothing the former you smoothing hold shift and it makes it a child put it after the ffd and does it do exactly what we want it to do so I think the best option would be using the subdivision surface or we could increase the total segments of our sphere so let's try bring this to 48 yeah it does so but I think the so division surface does a better job of smoothing out the overall profile of the object I'm going to apply this to the arms as well so we get some nice curvature in our shape I'm just gonna rename these accordingly so now we just renamed the cactus to make sure we know exactly is what I also saved the project it's always good to save every now and then more often than not anyway to make sure if it crashes you still have a backup of relatively recent project so now we're going to make a little bit more detail so we're going to do the mouth first for a cactus so we're going to go up here to the pen tool and go to the sketch it'll click go to the right view and just create a base shape for the mouth and the sketch tool is literally where it sounds like you can sketch anything and it turns into a spline so we're gonna kind of sketch a base mouth shape now mine it's not the best that's okay because we could go to the spine smooth run it over it smoothes it out so if we go back into our pen tool you can delete some of these extra points you can also add some points as well this one up we go back and again that's not really when I like so we're just gonna try a different approach maybe using the arc change the end angle to 180 change the radius to enable movement just rotate it because we want our cactus to be happy we want a happy cactus hit C to make it editable or click edible objects up here and we're going to connect these two splines together and boom we have our happy mouth so we're going to take our arc bring it down here I'm going to put it into an extrude operation here so we'll make it a child boom extruding however it's kind of going the wrong way that's okay so if we go into the object mode does a rotate our spine it'll get the orientation that we want it to be in and change the distance to let's say 10 I'm going to go to caps because these have sharp angles we can adjust them in here we're gonna change it to a filler cap and then Phillip can change the radius to one n steps Isles to 4 it's essentially the subdivisions so we're not getting any of the subdivisions here in the corner of the mouth so I might instead change this back to just regular cap a single object check that on alt G put it in my folder mouth and we're just going to drag in a performer again just readjust the hierarchy go to use angle and now we're getting all the angles that we want and we can just adjust the subdivision amount and now I can get some nice curvature on these edges here we can also increase say that to the offset amount great and let's just like the spine and move it into position you notice that if we try to rotate it right that thing starts to happen where it's not in the right direction so we just go to the extrude and just rotate it here go back into the arc and position it right and then we can scale it down and position it wherever you want it to go maybe bring it in a little bit more great good so now we're going to get some eyes on our cactus so for the eyes that's gonna be really simple we're just going to use Fears again prefer to work in hexahedron mode so we don't have any of those poles on the bottom top scale the sphere down and just bring it up into a decent position nice so I just repositioned our spheres and mouth to make them just a little bit more friendlier and again give a little bit more visual interest to our character so now that's good so now we can add some cactus likes so we need a primitive object we needs a cone I'm just going to adjust the overall size of the cone so bottom radius let's try one height let's try two so in comparison might be a little too small so let's change the height to four bond radius 52 just the height again eight that looks pretty good compared to the cactus cool spike put these in the no eyes spike spike so now we want to distribute the spikes along the surface of our cactus and we can do so by using a cloner so this is in mograph cloner and if we drag the spike under the corner nothing happens that's because we need to tell the corner hey I want you to look at this object of our cactus to be the source in which the geometry that's a child of it to is to be distributed on squint changes from mode from linear to object and we'll get this panel here and we here we can drag in any object that we want to be this the source area have our child we distribute it on so we're gonna drag in the cactus nothing happens that's because it's trying to put it on the Knoll but that's not exactly what you want so to fix this we can put it under a connect object so we just renamed us to cactus cloner and now drag in the connect object it starts to work so the kidnap connect object essentially takes all these elements and tells the program to look at everything as one mesh but the spikes are in the right orientation and we can just adjust this by changing the up Vector okay so I didn't work let's try like going into the transform tab and adjusting the rotation manually just go back change this back to none there we go so change this negative 90 and this is looking really good but you might want to just push them out a little bit more cuz they kind of sunk in a little bit she would change back to zero that's okay it looks good I think we want to add a little bit more spike so we can change the count here add in more if you want we can go past 100 if you wanted to like most most things in cinema we can the slider might stop but we can put in a custom value so I think maybe 75 would be pretty good and we can change the seed here so this is just different variations so just kind of scroll through and see which one we like I kind of like this one so we're getting some spikes on the eyes and the mouth which is not exactly what we want so we can add in a effector so we're gonna add in a plane effector you notice everything just kind of shoots out and that's okay it's just changing everything in that y-direction now if your nothing happens just go back in your corner and make sure the effector is in the tab and then the window here we can just drag it in so your factor and we want to turn our position because we don't want to affect the position but we want to affect the scale a uniform scale negative one so everything disappears that's because it's being essentially scaled down to zero so from 1 to negative 1 and we can add a fall-off so we can add a stupe box fall-off so everything where this box fall-off is none of the spikes will appear so this main box is a maximum value of negative 1 or whatever the parameters are set here and then this light pink box is the start of the fall-off effect and we can just adjust this by go to remap change the inter offset so now everything that this box is is gonna be set to negative 1 we're just going to set this to the general area of the face so that way we don't have any more intersections of the eyes and mouth it's a no-go zone and then our cloner we're just going to name this spikes and we're just gonna put it into an object name it spikes and hierarchy is important so I want the cloner to be first create the geometry and then create that fall-off effect great so now this is looking really good perfect save it now we want to add just a little bit more character to our cactus to do so we're just going to add another sphere scale it down bring it out we're just going to change it again to a hexahedron and bring it in just kind of adjust it here so actually instead of ocean we're just gonna go in to the spikes and just hide this we don't see the box we actually instead of having our mouth be on the outside we want to make it in the inside of the mesh I'm just gonna hide this fear for now so how would we do that well quite simple we're gonna use something called a bool so to get the bool we're gonna go to the tab here click and hold and go to bool so now we can put in our cactus you get a child and our mouth switch the order and boom we have a mouth that is essentially cuts out the mesh we'll just essentially creates a boolean operation between whatever objects the two obviously place in your mesh it's right now it's a subtract B so subtracting the mouth from the practice we can Union them so merge them together we can just do the intersection of those a without B so it doesn't close actual hole which is what we want so what's gonna change the a subtract B and then this is this is what we want and again because this is procedural you can always go back in and adjust that belleville if we wanted to the shape of the mouth or anything like that so now if we go back to our sphere we name this mouth go back to our sphere this is gonna be like our little tongue or a cactus so this is going to be good and we texture it at all look really good just gonna name this great our base cactus is complete and now we can go on to texture it so for texturing in this video I'm just gonna be sticking with the standard c40 built-in materials you can also use octane render engine are non render engine a redshift or v-ray or any other third-party render engine that you might want to use a lot of them have 30-day trials so definitely go check them out because they are industry standards I'll probably also show you a version how to create this in octane just for a quick demonstration so create materials women double click in this window here to create materials so our name this one the base so this is going to be the base material for our cactus so we double click it opens up our material and for the color we can set the base color to green nothing happens that's because we need to apply it to our cactus so we can drag and drop it onto the actual cactus mesh here right so that works or we can drag it on to the mesh here I'm just gonna stick with dragging dropping it on here and this is this is really good great I'm going to put green on the spikes too we want to make these separate ones spikes so we're gonna open up the base material make sure it has base in the name and for the color we're gonna add under texture noise we're gonna add a noise pattern to our mesh here so if we open up the noise we can play with all the different presets of noises that c4d offers when it ships I'm gonna use electric for this purpose I'm just gonna really like it it's quite quite a good material to work with if you want to see what its gonna look like at render time you can hit the render view mode here and this is what's gonna look like or we can hit alt R and get a interactive preview region for our bottle and we can adjust the quality of our IPR here by selecting the triangle slider and dragging up or down respectively so we want to change the scale so it's skewed in one direction to get variation in color to essentially emulate stripes at a cactus might have so we can adjust the I'm just going to turn off this for now can just the relative scale change just the world I should I keep it like that so we'll change it back to this back to 100 because I think it's actually XY and Z so one chain just like a thousand yep great it's a little too much so let's go down to maybe 500 250 to 300 good we might want to just kind of expand it out just a little bit more great now we can go in and just the low clip on high clip so we can just get different areas that we want to to have one even wants to increase this back up to 500 get more striations and our cactus so you notice our cactus has some scenes here in our texture so we go in we can change the space to texture space and it'll fix that but our proportions are off and we can just go in and really kind of crank these up and adjust them you so really it's just kind of experimenting and seeing what looks good and where you can kind of push it and take it so I'm just gonna play around for a little bit more and then I'll show you the settings that I achieved to get the result so these are the settings that I got for cactus here they looked and you can copy them or if you found your own networks better definitely use ends that if you want so we go back out we notice it's still black and white so we want the black area to be like a green for the base cactus you want the white maybe be like offset like a brownish color or something like that great so have that based on let's just create a new material name this eyes we're just actually gonna set this to black material eyes inside of mouth right and then just look at this how I'm gonna name it like I'm actually gonna make a pinkish pinkish reddish color dragged out into the mouth great and then we can add like a clay texture or material to the pot here I wouldn't give it like a clay reddish or great we want the eyes just to be a little bit more reflective and give a little bit more lifelike to our character so actually gonna duplicate this material because we have the same material for the mouth so we're just gonna go in and just replace that mouth material cuz you want to use different materials on those so for reflectance on the screen remove the default specular you notice that white specular highlight of our eyes disappear you can add in our own so we're going to add in a GG X and so that gives it like a metal material which isn't exactly what we want but we can just adjust the adjust this to get the effect that we that we want so I'm gonna add a layer of color to black actually a little bit a grayish color I notice we get these nice kind of highlights in the eyes I might give a little bit more personality and when we add lights in the scene it'll look a lot better when we catch those highlights all the lights on the eyes perfect perfect so now we're gonna add some lights into the scene and then render this guy out so we're gonna add a sick to the background and this is just going to be like a stage that we can use to put objects in and get really nice renders from that so I'm going to use a plane and just stretch it out really long wide both ways I was just want to see the polygons here I'm going to add a bend deformer to our plane go to our object tab and just the strength we're gonna increase these segments let's do a hundred and 100 see makes it editable great in the former so you're just going to delete that and just add another one sometimes it doesn't work like this so if we try rotating it right it'll start to work which is kind of silly but it works in the end fit the parent again you get this nice kind of even curvature of our plane let's bring it back a little bit and we increase the end strength I'm just gonna probably bring the plane back just a little bit more so it's not on the exact curvature so I kind of get this a nice studio effect it's like a backdrop which is really nice save it and now we're going to start adding in some lights and kind of lighting it to appeal for our renders so from all the lights we see the light bulb here click and hold then we get all these different options for lights so if we hit the started line here we can undock that panel and still have access to everything inside we also want to add a camera so I just click and just bring in a regular camera click the little square here and that makes us in that camera view so I just want to zero out these rotations I'm just kind of lining up and adjust the focal length to 5050 is always good to go to so yup typical portrait lens decent lens to just use in general we don't get minimal warping which is really nice and then so that's good to go we can add so if we right click we can add a protection tag to our camera so now we can't move around in a camera and edit it by accident we can see our camera in our viewport here so a cool trick that I like to use is use one view for the camera view it'll click and set another view as another navigation view turn to supply the garage so now we have one via our camera and one view to navigate in which is good for just getting two views at once so we add an area light and we can right click see 40 tags add a target tag and then bring in let's say just the tongue because it's in the center object for the target object and our light will face that tongue object wherever we put in the scene so we can go back into a perspective view hit all our and get a good idea of what exactly our render will look like so in our light we want to turn on shadows so I'm going to add a shadow so he gets in my shadows of our cactus here and lighting is is kind of tricky but there's good rules of using like a three-point lighting setup so we're gonna have a this is gonna be our key light our Akshay I'll run light excuse me okay just make that look bigger so the rim light is really gonna get those nice kind of highlights of our object here in our scene we might want to increase the intensity don't like 150 or so I get those nice licks of light and our character so we don't want our light here to affect our background so we can go into the light here go to project and this is essentially like light linking in Maya we can exclude how lights affect our certain objects in our scene so now it's not affecting our background but it's only affecting our character which is what we want so name this and then this one is gonna reveal key light so with the key light here this is gonna be like that main light giving light to our tower object here and lighting in journals very important because light makes everything look good in the first place and a good lighting system can really enhance models and textures it's just really important to get good lighting so we turned off the rim so we can just see what this key light is doing which is what we want it's also again because we copy and pasted it it's excluding the background but we want it to include the background so we get some kind of shadows there it's a little too bright so we're just gonna turn down the intensity say 75 it's a little too dark so I let's do 115 it's looking really good cool okay so a key light and now we just want to add a fill light because this area here is a little too dark and in general nothing is ever really black in terms of lighting in the scene so it's always nice to have little pools of light and and any scene so I'm just gonna copy and paste this and just name it still turn our key so we just have our fill light and this is gonna be really subtle light let's try maybe 25% I'm just trying to fill in the areas here and let me decrease the scale a little bit of this light so I put all of them together we're getting decent decent lighting in our character here cleaning material added onto the background here great and you notice we get a little bit of noise here in our shadows and you can just suck all of our lights go to our shadow tab and just increase the maximum amount of samples so we can turn this to say 64 then do 256 what turn this off and actually render out this window you notice a lot of the green cleans up but it takes longer to render because it's more samples being calculated I'm also just going to bring in the background just up a little bit more you notice how you can notice because we put a bevel on the pot here we get a nice kind of highlights of our lights here as well and then reflections and eyes also really important to give it a sense of life you can also go in and look online for textures of like a clay pot and put it in the color channel and the bump channel to give it like a sense of depth yeah so that's that with the regular c40 standard materials and lighting now I'm gonna show you how to do it in another third-party render application in this case I'll be using octane render engine so I just turned off the materials kind of reset the scene but I did keep all the lights in just because we can actually use the same lights because octane is built into engine so a lot of the similar functionality works throughout the program but in order to do so we just need to select the lights and add a octane tag I'm going to add actually octane light tag so it recognizes the hey that these are octane lights so now if we go to the octane tab and open up the light viewer window say real quick because it tends to crash sometimes it opens up and if we render it right we got a cactus little happy cactus but everything is really too bright because these values in our tags overwrite the actual values in the general light setting so I'm gonna start with the rim light and we want to project it from the background and to do this and we also see in the viewport we want to turn off camera visibility and then go to the background we can add in a paint object tag right so if we want to sable it from the background can change the light pass ID - something different than all the other ones for example we'll just use two in this case and then go into our light pass mark enable and turn off - and now because they're both being recognized as number two it'll affect the actual geometry but not the psych background that we have created and we want our base lighting because right now our base lighting is kind of like this neutral tone but we want to change that to be completely black so we can add in a texture environment make sure to change its primary which is already is go into the texture tab here and just change the color to black now if we add a rim light now I can just see our room light being affected on our object here now we can go in to our key light way too bright so I turn it down let's do 17 see how that works looks pretty good fill light fill light needs to be super subtle someone justice - maybe - to a half even one simply I'll turn them on looking pretty decent but we need to add some materials to our scene so what's really nice about octane it uses the graphics card on your computer however you need to have a NVIDIA GPU in order to use it and it's also a unbiased render engine so actually couch calculates every photon that's being emitted from the light sources so to create octane materials we can go to the octane live your window open it up again materials and here we have a whole bunch of materials that we can use I know like really dislike the diffuse materials are quite popular now an Instagram that you can use so we can do something like that which I think we might try and go for and I'm just gonna dock this writing the squares up here there's docket to the side so we can see our viewport and our IPR here and for a camera we want to add just the octane camera tag so it recognizes that it is an octane camera so we're gonna name this base cactus and I just like assigning that colors so I know what exactly it's applied to right these cactus pot I'm gonna change this to a clay ish color down on the pot spikes here I'm gonna name this eyes but we want the eyes again to have some kind of reflection because it gives a little bit more lifelike in personality character so we can change the material type here from diffuse to glossy and it gives it a nice specular highlight let's change this to black I'll give a little bit of roughness and eyes right so right away you can see we're getting nice specular highlight from our eyes here and the lights that we have and then one more for the mouth or the tongue rather we'll change this to like a pinkish color so we have a general shape our colors laid out here which is really nice we can increase the amount of samples here so right now it's on direct lighting if we change it the path tracing it calculates the secondary light rays we're going to keep on direct lighting for now and maybe turn up the max samples to 512 so it cleans up just a little bit more turn up the fuse depth because we have diffused channels and turn down specular depth include harmony glassy materials in our scene great save it and we're going to add some stripes on our cactus so we go to the node editor this might seem a little timid at first but I promise it's not it's quite easy once you kinda get the hang of it so we're gonna add in a noise and just pipe it into the diffuse Channel and right away you can see our noise is being displayed we can change it to different types sorry pearl in turbulence circular tips I'm probably needs turbulence actually please hurlan gonna increase the game a little bit and increase the contrast I'm gonna we want to adjust like we did the c40 material the scale that's being projected on so we wanted to warp and stretch in one direction so we can add a UVW transform node and we can turn off lock aspect ratio and adjust that stretching well you notice similar to the other one we can see the seams in our cactus here and it's not looking too great so to fix this we can just go to projection and just change the projection mode to box and that'll fix it up and we can fix that stretch in here in the actual projection mode and it's not working great there we go we can use cylinder and it cleans up quite nicely so it's just trying to figure out which one works best for your model and kind of tailoring it to that save it now we just want to add some color into it might want to give a little bit more contrast or gamma we can turn up octaves a little bit more detail turn down Omega and that's essentially how twisty and turny a pattern is so for color we can use a gradient node drag it in and drop it and essentially it'll remap the colors from this noise into whatever colors you put this gradient to so the blacks we want to be a green and then the whites we want to be like like a brownish color we don't see it too much so we can just go back in maybe decrease the gamma now we can see it that's really good we can see a little bit but not too much that's not distracting from the image maybe for our spikes we want to add a little bit of glossiness to it so we want to change the material type from diffuse to glossy we can see some nice hits of light the specular highlights from that rim light in the back hitting that maybe just increase the roughness good and maybe we want to just increase increase it to be just a little bit lighter great so now for the pot we can go in and just add a little bit of detail to that so we can use another noise texture we see the seam that's okay we can just change the good the other one the projection type let's see if box works note we can still see the seam so let's try cylindrical great Alex look that was looking a lot better in this adds color variation which is really important because variation really sells the image at a gradient node I'm just gonna remap these colors you can also add the noise here to a bump channel if we wanted to and this is the power of one of the benefits of using a node editor so we can sort of copy and pasting it into the different channels you can just click on the node here and just drag into the bump channel and you notice we get a little bit of bump detail here which gives it some surface deviations we can add in a color correction node to our bump and increase the contrast so now I can really see it pop but we don't want it that much so let's tone it back a lot great we might want to see what looks like if you use glossy material add a little roughness nice we get those nice highlights here and then run back looking really good for the background let's give it like a gray gray material you try and make it a little bit more wider seventy it looks fine and if we wanted to we can adjust it we can put in fill lights here to increase that or make the background just a little bit lighter I feel like this is fine for now and what's really cool with octane because it is a unbiased render engine and uses the GPU it updates really quickly it also has a lot of really cool features that we can play around with and really get a nice result inside the program without having to go into Photoshop or any other post-production software to fine-tune our image so we can go into the camera imager enable that turn on a vignette if we want increase the saturation they may be too is good saturate to white if we wanted to just helps with a little bit more color accuracy then lens so this is use if you want nice depth of field so quick I'll duplicate this camera please the protection tag right so if we want to like a up close shot we can go into here turn off auto focus pick the focus picker here maybe you want to focus on its eyes and have the pot be blurry from depth of field turn the f-stop down right we can get a nice depth of field shot really quickly and really kind of experiment and play around and get really fast turn around time iterations with that can zoom out a little bit look he looks a little blurry use a pic focus to fix that right up perfect save it I have a couple of different cameras here so we didn't switch back and forth between them motion blur if you're doing animation post-processing is really nice add some bloom if we wanted to just a little little tiny bit I suppose and then we can add in different custom Luntz which is a lookup table if we wanted to so there's presets in here we can add in our own and this can drastically change the image by essentially changing the values of the colors so let me find my left folder right so this is the alien blue just go through some here right so it really drastically changes the image by just remapping the colors essentially I have some cool black and white ones if we wanted to that was really nice to play around really quickly within the software and knock out different iterations quite quickly and this is the power of a lot of the third-party render applications that are industry standard great something's going to go through and just kind of clean up this image a little bit more I'll do a quick time-lapse video showing exactly I'm changing and we'll see how that goes [Music] okay and here we are with the two images and I rendered out of my cactus if you have this window open you can just go to window and then go to picture viewer and it'll open it up and in here if you want you can maybe adjust some of your saturation or contrast settings or anything like that and then export it or you can bring it into Photoshop or After Effects or any other photo editing / manipulation software that you want and color correct it there so I hope you enjoyed this tutorial hopefully it wasn't too long for you guys to watch and definitely hope you learned a lot and get started in this journey of what is 3d there's always something to learn and I hope you guys just keep on learning and experiment and try new things see you next time

Channel: UConnDMD

Views: 2,163

Keywords: 3D, cinema4d, C4D, Octane, Octane Render Engine, cactus, modeling, lighting, texturing, rendering, digital media and design, uconn

Id: zJPDW_4sux4

Length: 70min 24sec (4224 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 25 2020