Get Started Generating Landscapes in World Creator & Redshift for Cinema4D!

what's up artists my name's Ryan Talbott and today I'm gonna be showing you how I generated these detailed landscapes using world crater redshift in cinema 4d we'll be using tools such as the redshift material blender and high-quality public on textures to achieve this look let's get started alright so here we are in world creator and the first thing is to figure out how to navigate because that's kind of important so if you hold down alt and right click we can actually orbit around the center of our landscape so that's cool we can scroll in and out with the mouse to zoom in and out we can also use WASD to move around kind of like a first-person shooter and if we hold down right click while we're doing that we can look around and change the direction that we're flying we can also hold down shift while we're doing WASD and that's gonna allow us to move around even faster so that's pretty cool oh also Q&E so q will go down and E will go up and that's part of the whole WASD thing the first thing I want to do is I want to start editing the base shape of this so I'm gonna come down to my custom base shape properties turn that on and click Edit shape and you can see right away we get these diamonds to work with so I can start pulling these up but I don't really feel like this is enough detail for me to work with right so I'm gonna turn up my terrain with up here in the terrain size something like 4,000 and now we have about 4 times the amount of points to work with which is great and now I can start pulling up these mountains and I feel like this is a pretty good size for me to work with and I'm just doing this to add enough variation so that when we start adding filters we have a better idea and a better sense of what we're doing all right so let's say we're happy with that I'm gonna hit done editing shape and I'm going to come over to my filters tab and I'm gonna add a layer and the first layer I want to add is under the rigid tab the small sharp ridges filter so I'll hit OK and you can immediately see we have some nice mountains going on now and if I turn down the general strength you can see what that's doing you know and we can turn that filter off altogether as well cool so the second filter I want to add is a wind filter so I'll hit add and we'll go down here and I believe it's under erosion and we're gonna select wind and we're gonna hit OK and you can see right off the bat that this is covering the mountains evenly and it's sort of just throwing it over the entire landscape which we don't really want so what we want to do is we want to limit this to the concave regions so let's go into cavity right here and instead of none let's select concave and now it's no longer affecting our mountains it's only sort of affecting the base region and the floor which is what we want so I'll turn up the length here to start seeing what's happening and this kind of creates a cool exaggerated effect maybe this is something that you're going for I'm gonna personally turn this down a little bit for this video but you know feel free to experiment and do whatever your heart desires so there's only one more filter that we're gonna do and that's another wind filter so I'll hit add and they'll select wind again and this time I want to rotate it around 180 so that we get it coming from this direction and this direction that way we kind of get this I want to create this nice swooping effect that goes like that in between all the mountains so we're gonna put this one into the concave cavity once again and you can see if I turn this off real quick what that's doing so now if you look at this mountainside right here it's adding that same erosion and it build up along the edges of the mountain just like we have on the left side cool so that's um that's pretty much it for generating the landscape there's not a whole lot to it the next thing we want to do is we're gonna get into texturing this guy so let's go over to our texturing tab and let's add a new layer and the first layer that we want to add is that underlying rock so let's hit add and we're just gonna choose a color that best represents what we're going for because one thing to keep in mind is that we're not going to be using the world Creator textures in our final render we're actually only using this as a purpose to create mattes so that we can completely redo the textures and redshift so don't worry too much about all these tiling settings right here or anything like that this is just for the general color so let's say this is our underlying rock and then on top of that we want to lay down some sand so let's add another texture and I'll choose this one right here and we can see it's covering everything evenly which we don't want so let's just come down into those settings and under cavity one thing you might think is oh I'll put this in the concave cavity and this is technically doing what it's supposed to you know it's adding sand in those dips but the problem is it's not just throwing over a nice sheet of sand over everything and that's really what we want to do so let's turn that off and let's go down to slope select and if we start bringing down this value here you can see we're introducing sand on the floor and as the angle gets sharper that rock starts to poke through and that's exactly what we're going for so you can dial this in to whatever value works best for you I think maybe something like this is good for me that way we have we can see that sand sort of fading off into the rock which I really like and I think it creates a lot of nice detail in this region as well and so you can see this is pretty simple I might go back to my base and edit the shape a little bit more one thing that's helpful to do is raise up the edges of your world and create some dips in the center that way when you sort of come in to render your scene and you fly in here to do your render there's not really any areas where like right here or you can see that it clearly ends we want to raise that up let's see if we can do that from here I might mean to zoom out we want to raise that up that way no matter which direction we're looking there's always an interesting landscape to look at and we don't see it fall off into nothingness so that's one thing to keep in mind and I think that's looking pretty cool actually I'm really liking this so I'm gonna hit done editing shape and there's one more really cool filter I just want to show off so we're gonna add one more filter and this one is under design and it's the path filter so what's really cool about this is that we can customize our landscape even further by adding a path so I've added a path and then I'm gonna hit edit path down here and it tells us all of the hotkeys to create our path so to add a path we're gonna hold down left shift and we're gonna mouse click and we're just gonna keep clicking to draw that path and you'll see why this is really cool in a second so let's say I want to create a path that's sort of going up the mountain side here right and maybe it sort of winds around and it goes up on this side and then it winds back around here and then it ends alright so when we're done we can hit done editing path and we've created some nice ledges here so now this is just another level of customization you know we've created these nice plateaus that weren't there before and if we turn off our path we can see what a difference that is making maybe I'll add another path let's let's add another path and I'll edit that and I'm gonna left click while holding shift and I'm just gonna draw this path up here and I'll make this one extra windy you know so it's just kind of like whines around this mountain until we get something like that and then I'll hit done and look at that so there you go just another really cool feature of world creator so when we're happy with our landscape which I am it's time to start exporting this thing so we're gonna go over to our export tab and we have a few settings here you can see we're exporting a height map I've already selected obj from the list of formats here you could also export a displacement map for example as a PNG or a JPEG but I'm gonna do an obj and we want to make sure that this landscape geometry is optimized right so let's head back over to our surface and our base tab and we want to make sure that our precision is set to one meter and our resolution is 4000 and that's gonna make sure that we're exporting at a decent size that isn't going to crash the number 4d but still has a good amount of detail I'm also gonna select quads to optimize our geometry even further essentially if I didn't have that checked we'd be exporting a bunch of triangles which would essentially just double the number of polygons so the final thing I'm gonna do is export this at half resolution and then I'm gonna hit export and I'll just overwrite that one that I already did and I'm gonna let it do its thing alright so the next thing we want to export if we come over to our texture tab is this splat map right here now remember we're not using these actual textures this is just a representation of our mats so a splat map is going to give us a file that we can then separate into two different materials in redshift in for a splat map I actually want to make sure that this is double the resolution of what we exported for our geometry because luckily cinema 4d can handle really high resolution textures so let's come over to our base again and I'm going to turn up the precision here and you'll see this a little bit better if i zoom into one of these areas right here maybe somewhere like over here and if I turn this up to 1/4 meter precision it's gonna take a minute to recalculate but when it's done you'll see that it's going to add some more detail into these texture breaks right here which is what we want and at this resolution you can see we're gonna be exporting a 16 K map and that's gonna give us some nice crisp detail for our materials so let's go back to our export and let's export that splat map at 16 K and I'm gonna overwrite that old one the targa file and that's gonna take a minute to do its thing all right so we're checking out our splat map in Photoshop and as you can see we have an unholy level of detail here we can literally zoom in and it's still extremely high-resolution so that's exactly what we want because when we're looking at this from a first-person perspective in the world we're gonna need all that extra detail so what we need to do next is we need to separate these two colors from each other so I'm just gonna create a new layer and I'm actually gonna hit ctrl J to duplicate our background so we just have that as its own layer now and let's make a selection so I'm gonna go to select and select a color range so I'm gonna select this green right here and my fuzziness is set up up to 200 so it'll kind of feather out that selection based on the color and then I'm just gonna hit this add mask button right here and now you can see we have all of our sand I think that's the sand or maybe it's the mountain we have one of our materials isolated right so this is great because now we can right-click on it and we can go to blending options and we can do color overlay and we can just make this pure white and then all we have to do is make a new layer and make that completely black and since it's a 16 K picture it's gonna take a while so I'll just drag that underneath and now we have our mat so we can take this into redshift next and we're gonna take the material blender and we're gonna blend two materials together so let's just go up the file and I'll export this as a PNG real quick and we don't need transparency and it's chugging along because the file is so freakin big so we're just gonna drop that into our world creator folder and I'll call this splat map black and white boom alright so now that we're in cinema 4d let's bring in our object so I'm gonna hit shift ctrl o and I'm just going to merge in my height map and it's gonna take a minute to load you can see in the bottom left corner it's loading all those vertices and this is why we optimized our mesh before we exported it alright so we finally got our geometry loaded in and we can see we have lots of nice detail in here but there's a couple things that we need to do to fix this up so you'll notice if I actually zoom in here we get a lot of really ugly tearing and a lot of this is actually due to the Phong angle so all we have to do is just select our Fong tag and turn up that Fong angle to 180 and that's gonna smooth out most of those problems but you will still notice at the top we have these very ugly jagged edges which depending on your camera angle may or may not be an issue but what we're gonna do to smooth those out is use a smoothing to former so pretty straightforward we're just gonna drop that in make it a child of our landscape and you can see right away it smoothes it to 100% and the problem with that is that now we have no detail in our landscape so we're gonna we're just gonna find a happy medium here and I'll start with 15% and I actually think that looks pretty good so you can see like in this area especially if I turn this off we have all these ugly Jags but if I turn this back on it smoothes it out pretty good and once we drop our materials on the landscape it's gonna hide all that extra ugliness anyways so that is pretty good to go next we're gonna dive into texturing or landscape using redshift so the first thing I want to do is I want to pull up my redshift IPR so that we can start looking at this in the render view so let's load that up real quickly and then the first thing I want to do is I want to start adding some lighting into the scene so I'm just going to drop in a dome light real quickly and I'm gonna load in an HDR which I got off of polygon so this is just a sky HDR with some clouds since it is a 16 K file it does take a little bit to load the texture in the next thing I'm going to do to set up our scene is I'm gonna switch over to redshift in our render settings and we'll go over into our GI tab and I'm gonna change this to brute force and I'm gonna change our secondary GI to brute force as well and I'm going to turn up the number of bounces to 6 so that's gonna give us a much more accurate lighting model to work with so now that we have some light going on in here we can see that it's way too bright let's also drop a redshift camera in here and real quick I'm going to turn on the exposure override and enable this and I'm gonna change our f-stop to something like 12 and that's gonna help us see a little bit better what's going on in our scene why don't we drop in our redshift material and start texturing so we're just gonna drop in a regular redshift material and drag it on to our landscape delete that default one and it's going to take a second to load because the geometry is very dense and we'll rename this landscape alright next we're gonna jump into our material which you can do by just double-clicking on that material and we'll we'll get this shader graph right here but instead of making this full screen I'm gonna hop over to a layout that I created specifically for this video and that's just gonna allow us to see both of our landscape and a clear view of our node graph in the same screen so we have our material here and the first thing we want to bring in is a material blender so I'm going to drag that in and why that is so amazing is because we can plug in our black and white mat in here that we created and we can duplicate this material right here and I can rename this one for example rocks and I can rename the other one sand and then basically we're just gonna plug these into our material blender so one's gonna be the base color and the other one's going to be layer one and then this material blender is going to be outputted into the surface and voila so why don't we start with building our rock material so the other half of the secret sauce is to just use high quality materials so I found the materials that I'm using for this project on polygon comm I'll just show you the folder real quick so I'm going to be using cliff desert oh for for the rocks so if we open up this guy we can see that we have a color map and we have a normal map which are the two most important ones and we also have a reflection map and gloss map etc so I'm gonna start dragging these maps in one at a time and we'll start with the color map and we want to plug this into the diffuse probably help to turn on the red shift IPR so right away we can see our rock color being applied to the whole thing which we don't want and let's look for that black and white splat map we created so I'm gonna go into here and I'm gonna bring this in I don't want to copy it to the location and I'm going to plug this into our material blender as the layer 1 blend color and now you can see that our rock texture is being restricted only to the areas we want and for the sand I'm going to be using this one which is also from polygon calm and I'll show you what that's looking like so this is our color map we got a displacement which we won't be using and we have this normal map which is going to be very important to creating those ripples so I'm gonna start dragging the color map in first and just so that we can get an idea of what's going on let's just plug this into our diffuse quickly so that we can start seeing what this is looking like so now we have two separate materials and you can see where this is headed so let's start dialing in our rock texture some more the first thing I want to do if I actually come in closer to one of these mountains we can see better how it's mapping and first of all I'm going to come over to our rock material I'm just going to turn the reflection down to zero and if i zoom in on this you know we can see that there's actually some odd stretching happening because of the way that the texture is being projected so what we're gonna do is we're going to reproject this as try planar so we're gonna search for a tri planar node and we're gonna drag that in and all the Tri planar node is it's essentially box mapping it's the same thing as cubic mapping except it will feather the XY and Z edges into each other to create a more seamless transition between the textures so I'm gonna plug this into our texture image X and then I'm going to output the color back into the diffuse and now we have some try planar mapping happening so we need to change some scale settings since this texture isn't a perfect square and from doing this tutorial before I know that these values are point zero zero three point zero three and one although this looks like it's stretching a little bit so why don't we actually change this and that looks like it's looking better next I'm gonna bring in our normal map so here we go and for the normal map we need to put this through a bump map node so I'm going to drag that in and I'm gonna plug that into our input and we're gonna change this input map type to tangent space normal and then we want to also put this through try planner so let's just hold ctrl to duplicate that node and let's plug that into image X again and this time we're gonna plug this into overall bump input alright so now you can see our normal map is adding a little bit of extra detail into our texture so another thing that we can do because let's say we want to adjust the scale of both of these textures at the same time it would be kind of a pain to come into this try player node and adjust the scale here and then come into this one and then copy the settings over so what we can do is we can go search user data and we can bring in a scalar user data node and to make this much easier to understand I'm gonna rename this and this is just going to be scale so now we're gonna plug this into the scale of both of our textures so now you can see we just it scaled it up so big that we can't see anything so we're gonna change the the number here in the scale node let's start with 1 and see what that looks like and now you can see we're back to what we had before so if I want to make this smaller I could turn up the number to 3 and you can see that is scaling both the normal and the color map at the same time so I'm gonna put that back at 1 because I actually thought that looked pretty good and now why don't we do a little bit of color correction on our rock texture because I want it to be a little bit darker and less saturated so I'm gonna bring in a color correction node and let's plug the output into the input of our color correction node and then output that back into our try planner but the first thing I'll do is I'll just bring down the overall level scale and I'll start messing with the gamma bringing that down will desaturate it a little bit and that's already looking much better so I'm actually going to keep that value for now maybe it will saturate it a little bit more make it bring down the gamma a tiny bit until we have something like that and I'm actually pretty happy with that right now so why don't we do the same thing for our sand material now so I'll zoom into one of the more sandy areas of our image and now you can see we have this nice detailed rock texture but our sand is looking kind of blend so the first thing we need to do is we need to bring our sand into a tri planar node so I'm just going to control drag to copy that once again put pipe that into image X and then output that into the diffuse color one more time and once again I'll turn the reflection down to zero that way we can see better what we're doing and then I will also copy our scale and let's pipe that into the input for the scale on our color texture now it's hard to see any of the ripples right now because really all of that detail is happening in the normal map so let's go back to our sands material and let's bring in that normal map once again so I'm going to plug this scale into the scale once again and we're going to output this into a bump map so I'll just copy that over from our other material and we're gonna output that into a try planer node once again and then we're going to output that into our overall bump input cool and right away you can see we're starting to get these nice little ridges happening in our sands one thing I just realized is that our sand map is actually a square so I'm going to go back into these triplane your nodes and make sure that these are all scaled at these same amounts and I do feel like the strength of these sand ripples can be increased so I'll just head into that bump map node and I'll turn up the normal to three and now you can see we have much stronger ripples coming through next I think I'll just start looking for a nice composition here so I'm just going to zoom back out a little bit and that's that's looking pretty nice already let's just try and find a cool cool little render maybe something like that could be pretty cool so I'm gonna jump out of this and I'm gonna jump back into my redshift view so that we can see what's going on again and I don't have everything up on the other monitor so this is gonna be our composition and we got our camera set up why don't we put a little bit of fog in here so I'm gonna drop in a redshift environment right here and you can see this is what's going to allow us to put fog throughout the whole scene so now what we have to do is turn on our IPR so that it loads and once that's loaded we need to come into the dome light here and we're gonna go to this volume tab and we need to tell it to contribute to the volume so we're going to turn that up and you can see now we're just being blinded by white light let's hop back into our redshift environment and let's actually turn down the scattering to a really low number until we get something that we can see better like this and we can also change the tint so let's say we want this to be sand particles in the air we could tint this slightly yellow and that's gonna look more like a sandy desert if you wanted to go for some cool like Bladerunner effect you know you could make it red you could you could really do anything with this so I'm just gonna keep this keep this slightly tinted yellow and I think that looks about good so I'll come back over to my dome light and I'll actually turn down the contribution scale a little bit more until we just get a very subtle subtle effect like that another really cool feature of redshift is the ability to save snapshots so if I click on this plus button right here you can see we've just saved a snapshot of our IPR and if we change something about the scene for example if we turn off the environment and remove the fog we can we can compare that back to our snapshot and see the difference that it's making all right so I just made a couple of quick adjustments on and I took a snapshot so you can see this what it looks like before and this is what it's looking like now so the first thing that I did was I went into the redshift environment and I turned up the phase so this is what the fog looks like at a phase of 0 and when I start turning this up you can see that the volume becomes more concentrated in the right corner where the light is actually emitting from so I think it just sort of sharpens up those volumetrics and it makes them become a little bit more directional so that's the first thing I did and then the other thing that I did was I just brought down the exposure of the sand color a little bit and I just did that using the same exact technique we did to color correct our rocks so I just brought that brightness down a little bit and here you can see the difference there's one last detail I want to add to this landscape and that is some puffs of dust scattered throughout the sand dunes and we're gonna do that with the help of the redshift volume object so we're gonna come down and we're gonna add that into our scene and we're gonna head over to this path right here and I'm gonna start importing some VD bees from the mitch myers mega V DB pack and this is a great pack because it's got a few different categories to choose from so I'm gonna be using the smoke category and you get a nice little preview for each V DP which is also pretty cool so let's load in V DB smoke number two and I'm gonna I'm gonna lock this camera in right here so I'm gonna choose our s camera and that enables this lock icon and now I can jump out of this camera and I can move around while still looking through this angle in the IPR so I'm just gonna zoom in to my volume here and we can see it's really really tiny and all we're seeing is this box right here so to get a better representation of what we're gonna be seeing let's head over to preview and let's turn this on two points and I'm gonna turn up the number of points to something like 150 and now you can see we have a very detailed representation of our volume which is great so I'm gonna scale this up to something like 200 and we'll just move this somewhere into our scene where it would be seen by the camera even though it's within the camera's view we're not seeing anything because there's no material applied to this volume so we need to create a new volume material so we'll come down to materials and we'll add a volume material and we're gonna drag this on to our volume and you can see we're still not seeing anything because we actually need to jump into our volume and start setting this up so I'm gonna head over into my node layout and we got our volume material right here so the first thing we want to do is turn our IPR on and I'm gonna lock my camera in one more time and then under the channel right here we're going to select redshift volume and density and that's just going to tell it to look at the density of our VDB object so I'll zoom in real real quick and I'll turn on our render region so that renders a little bit quicker and right now our volume is looking a little too dense but before we go any further with that I'm going to go to my render settings and I'm gonna turn up the resolution of my scene here so that we can see this volume a little bit better so there's two values that we're going to be manipulating here and the first one is the scatter coefficient and the second one is the absorption coefficient the absorption is essentially the density of our volume while the scatter is the overall brightness of it and these values go hand-in-hand with each other meaning if you reduce the density you need to reduce the brightness of it to compensate for that so I'm going to reduce the absorption coefficient to something like 0.01 and once that updates you can see our volume is a much thinner now but because of that it's way too bright so we're gonna come to our scatter coefficient and we're going to bump this down to something like 0.05 that way it's just a little bit brighter than our absorption and that gives us a nice smoky look so I'm going to turn off our render region real quick and I'm gonna move this volume over so we can see it a little bit better it shows up much better when it's in of the mountains and you can see that's kind of what I'm going for so that's all for setting up our volume material I'm gonna jump back over into my redshift layout that way you can see what I'm doing and we'll turn on our IPR once again all right and let's lock that camera one more time and now I'm just gonna art direct this a little bit and start moving this to a place where it would look cool and we also we want to keep in mind where these puffs of dust would realistically be in our scene so they would be sort of coming off of the edges of our sand dunes you know they wouldn't necessarily be like in the middle of this rock right here where there's no sand so let's start moving this around until we find something that we're happy with and I want this first one to sort of be in the foreground maybe coming off of this ledge right here I think would be a cool look and now you can see we got some cool dust puffs happening in the foreground so now I'm just going to duplicate that volume and we'll come into our volume object and replace it with a different VDD so this time I'm gonna choose smoke number five and you can see this is like a much bigger dust cloud so I'm gonna select that VD b open that up so let's move this farther into the background and that actually looks kind of cool I like the idea of it sort of coming off of this Ridge right here so I mean maybe I'll just move that down a bit and rotate it around and that's looking pretty cool so let's duplicate that again and maybe I'll move this one back even further so that it's sort of like coming around the mountain and I'll scale this down so that they're not all exactly the same let's try a fifteen and really just have fun with this until you get something that you're happy with now you can see we just ran into an issue where our HDR I suddenly got brighter this tends to happen whenever you have multiple DD bees going in your scene and I'm not totally sure why but I find that usually the problem can be solved if you just quickly turn off all of your volumes and then turn them back on and now our HDR is looking normal again one more trick to add some variation into these VD B's is to scale up one axis more than the other and that creates more of a sweeping wind effect so when I'm placing these VB B's what I'm doing is I'm adding depth to areas that we couldn't really tell existed before so for example if i zoom in we can see that this rock face here is clearly cut off from the background because that VDB is behind it whereas before it looks much flatter and we can't really tell if there's any space behind this rock same thing right here this kind of just looks like one flat rock face but when we turn on that VDB oh we can see look there's a little Ridge right here that we couldn't see before and so we're keeping that in mind when we're placing our V D B's and I think this just adds that extra level of detail that we're going for so that's gonna conclude today's video thank you for watching I hope you enjoyed the tutorial if you have any questions or feedback please feel free to leave a comment and I'll see you next time

Channel: Digital Melon

Views: 43,826

Keywords: Cinema4D, Redshift, World Creator, Tutorial, VFX, Landscapes, 3D, CGI

Id: v-l4fVvo3YU

Length: 36min 31sec (2191 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 26 2020