Getting Started in Octane Renderer! - Cinema 4D Tutorial

[Music] hey guys this is Eli and this time we're going to take a look at the basic workflow for when you want to create your first octane project in cinema 4d so some time ago Brian from real engineering contacted me to create some nice visuals of the sr-71 blackbird for previous videos I always use the default render engine of cinema 4d and to be honest that looked great already however I've been using octane render a lot lately and it's GPU based render times would give me the ability to render more content which looks better and also renders it a bit faster so let's go over the typical steps I take to create this kind of video content first of all I don't model the airplanes from scratch that alone would blow all the video budget and there is so much room for error and I just don't know enough about engineering and airplanes in general so my first step is finding a good quality 3d model on turbosquid or CG trader I'm very happy with their services so far and there usually are nice deals on both the first thing I look for is the file formats I don't want to go over the hassle of converting the files so I need either an obj or an FBX file or preferably a cinema 4d file format it is not really required to get a model that is already a cinema 4d file but it saves you a lot of time and trouble getting the textures to work for example so if it is available I go for that of course if I find something I like I go through the thumbnails and look for the amount of detail the treaty topology how good it is how sharply textures look and every model is just one solid object or nicely separated in parts so I can close the wheels or move the flaps for example also a detailed description is a good sign of quality and effort and finally I also check the technical info at the site an insane high poly count will make the renders too slow so for an airplane anything above two or three thousand would become suspicious but it depends on the kind of model of course any model that goes above a million polygons will become a bit of an issue quickly so I would avoid that if you found what you like you can buy and download of course so before jumping into cinema4d let's take a look at octane render you could choose to buy it for the expensive price or you can also just go for the subscription model which is a much better option if you're not sure if you need it every month but before buying it straight away I recommend just playing with the demo version first until you're getting the hang of it you can also check the manual they provide with it the only noticeable limitations of the demo are that you get a watermark on your render and a limited resolution but you can still create content save it and use it with the full license later so the first years of working with octane I actually only use the demo version and let it render on someone else's machine that had the full license okay so when you're in cinema 4d you want to know where to find octane if everything is installed correctly you should find it at the top here the life viewer is what you're searching for sometimes it takes a while to open because a plugin is logging into your account so when that's opened up this window will show your render result once you hit the logo icon at left another thing you probably want to do is assigning a spot where this window can sit while working so if you drag this Square dots icon to any place on the screen it will put itself in between the two lines of the other area if you want to get rid of it just click the icon and undock it or close it completely one more thing I'm already going to tell you is that you'll need to create octane specific materials you can do that by clicking creates in the material section go to shader cinema for the octane and pick obtain material and here it looks pretty similar to the native material system but we will take a closer look in just a moment another cool thing you get in the full octane license is the open live database when you open that you get access to a lot of pre-built materials that look very realistic if you find something you like you just right click on it and pick download all right so enough about the very basics let's take a look at the model I bought I just downloaded this cinema 4d version and it's textures because of the large textures and the hyper nerves are smoothing that is enabled by default it can take a while before the model shows up in the viewport so don't be worried so once everything is low you can tell the textures kind of look like crap but that is just the viewport an actual render looks super good already even without octane but let's take a look at what it looks like in octane with the materials as they are right now you get a very similar result but you can see some differences at the windows for example anyway we need to convert in native materials to octane ones anyway luckily there is an easy feature for that so just select the materials go to plugin octane and convert to materials once that's done you can remove the old ones if you want to okay so I'm going to set up the life here again and add an octane camera the regular one also works just as well but the octane camera has lots of nice little features which we will cover in just a minute so let's take a look at our materials everything looks pretty similar just different names than usual and we have this node editor at the top here to be honest I rarely use it because it's just a visual way of looking at what we have on this other window so for more complicated materials it is easier to do it in the node for example but for the simple stuff I just don't go into they're also an important difference is the drop-down at the top here you can pick a diffuse material that's a pretty simple one it mostly gives you a flat and rough result the glossy material is the one you will be using the most it can be tweaked to the most realistic results in my opinion the specular one is what you will be using for anything that is glass or water for example metallic can be used for anything metal but I personally prefer faking it with the glossy material and finally you will also find a toon shader if you want to so let's stick with glossy for now and go over what the different channels do the diffuse channel is what originally was the color channel and so in here you define the main color or the image texture notice how every image is put into an image texture node of octane to avoid later issues you should stick with that method another quick tip is that you can add a color correction node on top of that to quickly adjust the texture without having to go into Photoshop for example the specular channel defines how shiny the material will look right now that is defined by a texture but if we disable that and adjust the float slider which basically goes between pure white and black you can see the difference the roughness slider is quite straightforward you often need it at least at some small value so it is not super reflective we can skip any cell therapy I've never used that before machine layer is also an overlooked one but it can give you that extra fake highlight that separates the object from the background so it can be used wisely the bump channel is just usual stuff same for displacement but it is much better than the native one and then the last one I want to mention is the indexed channel that one defines how reflective your material is so a higher value is almost a mirror finish and for some reason a value of one is also a mirror I don't know why okay the materials actually look pretty good as they are just the glass needs a bit of work in order to get a correct result we need some kind of environment so it can reflect and refract so I created an AGR environment and load in NHGRI which I downloaded somewhere so that looks better but I don't think the real windows look that see-through so I rather start from scratch with a new octane material I can then already just drag and drop that new one on top of the original while holding alt on the keyboard that will automatically replace it and apply it to the correct objects I could go with a metallic shader for this one but that just doesn't work the way I wanted to so I take the glossy one making it more reflective with the index value and darker in the diffuse channel a bit rougher as well and maybe not as reflective as this right now but it can still be fine-tuned a bit with the specular channel at the moment we are relying on just the hgri sky for the lighting but it can also be combined with the octane daylight so when you created that you can rotate it and then its settings there's also much more to do of course we have the power but also the sky turbidity which makes it look more overcast also the Sun size is something that is overlooked try to pay attention to the shadows a small Sun gives hard shadows and a large one gives a smoother result personally prefer a smoother shadow lately you can also notice how the HD right background is gone you can blend the two light sources together with the checkbox at the bottom here another interesting thing you can do to figure wade through everything is adding a different HDR background that doesn't affect the lighting so I make a duplicate of this environment and set the type to visible environment so let's change the color so you can see the background is different but the light remains intact okay one more lighting trick I want to show you is the octane area lights you can also use a targeted light which is nice in this scenario this area light is way more position and angle dependant than the native one basically think of it as a real-life light source when I'm working with this kind of stuff I like to have the life you locked but still be able to move around in the viewport you can do that by picking another of the four viewports changing it to perspective and putting it in a mode you prefer I often like to put a rim light behind the object the power doesn't need to stay a hundred on such a large light you often go somewhere between two and twenty if it's up close with the temperature slider you can tell how warm the light will look or not you can also tweak how it effects the objects for example only having it reflect without making everything brighter or only making it brighter with no reflections another important thing to do is sending the opacity to zero so you don't see it in the background of course all right you probably get the idea by now of how simple it can be to work with octane let's check out some of its kernel settings as they call it you can find those by clicking the COG wheel first of all let me mention this window is extremely annoying when scrolling with the mouse wheel just don't do it because you'll scroll through different settings instead of moving down so I recommend enlarging the window an important thing is the render mode at the top here there's different ones to choose from people often prefer path tracing or pmc for the most realistic results but I find it to be rather complicated and especially slow to render so slow that it serves no use for my animations so I prefer to stick with just direct lighting but that is just me in here you can still choose between the global illumination modes for scenes that are in the open sky with few objects that cast shadows ambient occlusion is just fine and it's super fast and you can't tell the difference from the diffuse mode but let's say you're doing something indoors or with a lot of objects that are close to each other you will start to notice the difference basically the diffuse mode gives a more realistic result because it calculates the light bounces nicely while ambient occlusion just fades that another thing to mention is the amount of samples go higher to get less noise in the shadows but it will also take longer to render of course a simple way to figure out how many samples you need is using the render region tool just draw a rectangle over the part that it's noisy and look at the sample count right below it at 700 I found it to be decent in this case so change your amount of sample student but that's the samples on the whole thing we don't need that many on the bright parts for example so it is a good idea to enable the adaptive sampling - and there you set a minimum amount it has to render but it was still refined in noisy areas great so now we can go to one of my favorite parts which are the camera settings make sure you click on the tag and not the object itself for example you can add a motion blur but it would be careful with that so maybe it's better to add that and post actually under the thin lens step you can increase the aperture for example and get more depth of field and with this F I come in the life here you should be able to click anywhere in the viewports and define where the focus is at the moment it doesn't do it precisely but it should be fine in most cases ok I'm going straight to the post-processing tab this is a fun one and here you can get a bit of a softer and dreamy look with the bloom and glare options the reflections will get a nice glow you can also adjust how the glare spreads in my opinion adding a bit of both makes the scene a bit more convincing good let's go back to the camera imager tap and enable it here you have some basic controls again like the exposure of your shots oftentimes you will crank it up a bit but you can compensate with the highlight compression so some parts don't blow out as much there's some more simple controls in here as well like vignetting or saturation and we also have the hot pixel removal here in this render it doesn't look like we have any fireflies or white pixels but if we decrease the amount of samples we will get some so here on the wing you can see some bright noise going on if we decrease the hot pixel removal you will notice it actually gets blurrier and smoother but if you want to keep very sharp detail on your render you may want to keep it at a higher number then finally my favorite part in this step is the response you can see it as a filter overlay so every time I have my basic lights that going on and everything is set up I like to scroll through this list of filters to see what kind of look can be achieved it's not necessary to do this but it can help you figure out some weaknesses of your current look now to wrap things up I want to mention some tips on how I achieved the animation for this video of real engineering one thing I figured out is that when you're using an a GI sky as the actual backgrounds you can't pan the camera it just looks fake when it is moving around because the background doesn't move at all so you're better off only rotating the camera an alternative is to move the object while rotating the camera that looks a bit better than just panning another thing I usually do with the airplane animations is adding a vibration tag on there with a tiny bit of vibration on just the position and rotation but you have to keep it very subtle on the values depending on how large the aircraft is of course to be honest my end results all still have a bit too much wiggle to be realistic maybe one more thing I want to mention about animating the camera if you want to rotate it smoothly around the subject you want to use a target tag I recommend targeting the camera and a separate null and not the actual object that way you can freely move to null in order to get everything in frame you can also animate that null to change the center of attention okay so that is most of the stuff I wanted to cover so when everything is done you want to render this of course and it's really pretty much the same stuff as you are used to all you have to do is set the render engine to octane of course and all else just works the same one thing that I did notice though is that rendering in the picture viewer is a lot heavier on the computer compared to the render queue for example so if you still want to do some other stuff while it is rendering you may want to go for that option it also comes with some other benefits such as being able to queue multiple projects overnight continuing our render where this left off when everything crashed for example and you still get the info on how long it takes to render your frames alright so I know this was a lot but I wanted to make sure I covered many basics to get you started without learning the whole thing from scratch let us know if this was useful to you and a purpose your back in the next [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: MOBOX Graphics

Views: 26,484

Keywords: mobox, tutorial, motion graphics, motion graphics tutorial, C4D, cinema 4D, octane, render, otoy, maxon, beginner, starter, demo, cgtrader, turbosquid, airplane, hdri, animation, camera, settings, diffuse, ambient occlusion, fast render, making of, how to, materials, node editor, lighting, realism, realistic, photoreal, 3D, production, octane renderer, octane renderer cinema 4d, octane renderer tutorial, octane renderer 2020, Real Engineering, octane sky

Id: 2EosiAYlGHk

Length: 16min 30sec (990 seconds)

Published: Wed May 20 2020