"Halloween" Scene Walkthrough | C4D, Octane, Houdini, Fusion | LNCGT Episode 1

so I just finished the stream and wanted to investigate what caused the technical difficulties we had it's so weird sorry guys really glitchy hope you guys have beer oh my god come on and apparently something changed either in YouTube or in black magic at the mini panel something changed so YouTube forced me to use a OBS to stream this time and unfortunately as it's the first time I'm using that obvious stuff the quality of a screen capture will be disastrous it will be 720p that was a private stream I could decide not to post it publicly at all but I decided to go ahead and publish it like that because I think it will be useful to many of you luckily I'm better at CG that I am apparently in live streaming [Music] Hey okay guys let me know if you see me and hear me fine I think there's a delay on this you can see myself there literally one minute after okay welcome to first closed life for members only VIP party so to say I'm recording this right now and after the stream is done I will edit it and publish it for general public the whole point of doing all of this is a breakthrough of a CLE study that I made earlier and with a kind of narrowed audience with you guys my supporters my Padawans and contributors doesn't matter what level you are at the moment as a supporter to the channel you can see that these streams streams you will be able to ask questions if something was not clear where you want me to go in details about something maybe and I'll be showing that and that's kind of justifying your contribution to the channel which I hugely appreciate by the way I decided that why not to talk about the pumpkin scene because it's one of those works that I like myself and it looks pretty realistic a lot of interesting techniques used in there plus I used a bit of Houdini in there really basic stuff that might be useful for some of you to kind of get started in Houdini maybe I have a separated chat here so I will clearly see your questions ready so I'll start sharing my screen here here we go so we have really cheetah kind of environment just Plains displaced as you can see they're not even like highly subdivided displaced with displacer using just a shader what layer to control the how it's displaced if I would go inside pretty cool stuff if you are doing a really kind of look control look so three of those then the floor is made from two planes because I wanted to make forest four which can consist of different branches branches leaves and the second one will be rocky ground that was the ground as you can see it looks pretty realistic already and that's because we have pretty good lighting in here not that I'm bragging so we have back light like a moon light and we have warm source here next to the wood log let me remove that so that he would be able to see it better figure so for the light guys they're not point lights because there is no such thing in octane actually but here I'm following all the principles that I explained in my unbiased lighting techniques video so if you would look at it what we have like moonlight and then I have a plane with material that is set to pure black pure black no reflection nothing and it serves as blocker so that black panel if you would pay close attention to environment on that black wall it casts a big shadow that's because I didn't want it to be lit the light itself is really small spherical thing because we're replicating moonlight the smaller the source the pronounced the shadows or sharper if you wish the warm light is like a strip light like that mimicking one of those quas are lights that we use on set quite often in terms of textures we all know quick so mega scans and all that goodness but I actually didn't ever do a proper shout out to Christopher who owns our detectors calm so the difference from quick cell is that quick cell limits out on 8k textures while our D texture Rd texture scanning them up to 16 K see my father in there myself David another cool artists they all loving it rocks all that kind of stuff those forest floors and I mentioned I think I'm using one of these in this scene yeah highly recommended Rd textures calm terms of pumpkins I think they're all from turbosquid let me check that's my turbosquid thing I'm buying quite a lot of stuff for work and let's just type in so I think it's one of those I used in this and remember there is no shame in buying assets and even made a video about it so these are background pumpkins but I also needed the carved one yeah here it is so this one 40 bucks just reading your comments what we're talking about there Rafael Silver Wing recommends that identifying which GPU powers your monitors well that's for what I said in one of my first videos ever on YouTube yes 1070 just for those three screens output my system always stays responsive even when I'm rendering tip number one for GPU renderers just use dedicated camera just for your screens and you you're right you can even play games while you're rendering which is cool yeah now that all the monitors and outputs to the atom are from one card it actually died on me right now let's kill it yeah displacement looks great on those rocks because sometimes even mega scans assets they're not as good-looking as our d textures or d textures are significantly higher in quality and I don't know what's the the technical difference but I prefer our D textures take one minute to restart the file restart can I get back to stream shouldn't have updated my ad many I did it because now it allows me to remote control the camera I'll probably do a restart now I'll be back in a sec guys it's unbearable I can't show anything not even talking going into Houdini now guys see me okay render started I will quickly disable that view that's actually worth pointing out because this render was made in CinemaScope in suspect 2 by 2.37 that's how movies are shot and that effect comes from anamorphic lenses you've probably seen a lot of YouTube videos where people are putting those black kind of letter boxes on their videos that's exactly for the purpose of getting that cinematic look but I'm 1983 renders a la render a lot of my scenes in that aspect ratio and in order to see what I'm doing and in the viewport I'm just going to configure view and bring you our Pope asset II and it blocks everything out apart from rendering area but I'll remove it now because octane is picking it up we talked about where to get pumpkins were to get textures textures are from our D textures so these two HDR ice they are in there but they don't play any significant role because there are Oh big you know reflective serve the reflective surfaces therefore I just is just there this one is visible to render so we can see the black background and this one is actually emitting some light I don't think I did anything fancy with the with the bokeh here depth of field it just animated focus focus point picture not that big it's always important to find that balance in order to try to transmit the perception of the scale of the objects in your scene properly and it comes with practice from real life shooting yeah I didn't even change the aspect ratio or octane real cameras they produce interesting bokeh so the bokeh you know if things are out the focus let me let me show you that so here I've put the camera out of focus and I have lights right here if you can see my these lights they have a slight edge kind of highlight in them you can achieve that these effects and octane quite easily and it just depends what look you want to recreate okay so depth of field is set up quite realistically if you don't know how to how it should look like just take similar kind of size things in real life and if you're you're operating the camera just do couple of reference shots that's a cool practice to do okay that's environment logs are from Rd textures to because they're also selling they're also selling some 3d assets not only Texas let's see am i right I'm not speculating am i logs logs yeah I think I used these and overlaid them with with other textures that's what I did let's look at these late leaves I have here I'll stop the render and I believe I have separate scene for it because these leaves I bought it somewhere too and I have a dedicated scene from which I can just pinch those leaves I didn't even use X particles here because I want a native cinemas for the soft body simulation let's play it quickly so as you can see it's that the the emitter is just to spawn the leaves and then they kind of do those interesting moves they're bending and there there's an air resistance in there that's all available that's probably the most realistic and easily achievable effect when it comes to dynamics in cinema 4d so soft body just maybe use these settings if you need to and the movement achieved by using some turbulence gravity and dragon lift settings so it's just simulating real kind of aerodynamic situation so since I have soft body set up individual elements all shape automatic dynamics on and I assigned the collider tax to the objects I want leaves to interact with but in scene like that I don't need to tax the system by calculating all the collisions collisions with the so leaves are just keep falling can I cheat where's my camera and here I scattered some static leaves for would go back to render so static leaves help me to kind of hide that cheat that the fact that those falling leaves are not hitting the ground plus one important element is missing from the scene which you might have guessed our trees so it's just Forester plugin again with textures from Rd textures yeah these these are low res I think because most of the trees are out of focus anyway and you see the IPR became quite slow straight away in terms of textures by the way I think these guys contacted me some time ago asking to mention their plug-in on my channel so if your textures they are really painful to set up manual you have to import all the textures then connect all the things but this TGS texture manager just google it so what it does is in preferences you can connect your let's say quicks a library in my case like start threading it would say and it would capture all the textures that you have downloaded there so let's say concrete and I can import it here quickly preview what it is that's not a fancy material it doesn't matter and then choose the engine that you need the material and redshift very physical octane Corona Arnold Pro render and click import create material and it would create material as yeah and you see it created the material with all the textures with all the notes properly connected to corresponding channels and all set up and ready for you to use so super handy tgs texture really handy-dandy utility ok trees so I showed you the trees the material not really high-res trees pumpkins pumpkins were scattered just through cloner with some random on them and then I made cloner editable and place them manually so pumpkin main character it's not the same it's not the same pumpkin as those the most interesting part about that is that it's animated how I did that so I just used the pose morph pose morph allows you to record any modifications you are doing to geometry so here you see the pumpkin is kind of sleeping snoring opens the eye and starts evil laughing the general animation of the pumpkin was made and through the Nolan which it sits through here that's its animator so pause morph allows you to switch to edit and you see here if I'll go to let's say point points mode let's select some points if I'll go to pose morph and get back to animate you see that this thing is animating well that was interesting this thing is animating with my pumpkin right i right i right i blink it's called and that's how i animated the pretty cool technique pretty easy easy can be done on anything on point level highly recommend that if you want to know more there's like ton of tutorials on Google so we have had separately to fly it off and then I wanted to put some flame into the pumpkin I was thinking to use X particles at first but then I was into Houdini already and I thought why don't I use Houdini so how how would you watch the workflow between cinema 4d and Houdini the easiest way is Olympic Olympic is good for everything and you will see it later down the line in this video because Olympic is used in post-production and fusion too and it helps me to work between cinema 4d Houdini between cinema 4d and fusion between Houdini infusion and vice-versa really cool so what you need to export a lambic define which elements you don't need in this scene first I don't need environment only moonlight don't don't be the actually any lights don't don't need that I just need the camera and the pumpkin go file export file export Olympic 450 frames and 450 knots election cameras plants hair six refs you can include the xrefs even subdivision surface doesn't matter Alembic egala yeah that one will work alright let's save this to desktop prompt again that's just to show how it's done nothing fancy nothing specific but it's just in this case because the character is really simple the camera is really simple in some other cases you may need to do hardcore baking on things but tutorial about that is coming so that's how we would export pumpkin and then Houdini actually I'm quite often using FBX to transfer some geometric diffusion but Olympique is known as a kind of higher-end format so here we are in Houdini just to prove that 3d Mouse is working in Houdini viewport here you go I am flying but that's super inconvenient I have to really press the 3d mouse to do it that's cool an import file import a lambic scene so if you would go to your object level you have that a lambic archive you can't see anything because fatal error okay I know why here's a tip for actually help someone on Houdini form there's that thing in Windows I don't know where it came from and what it corresponds to that naheem Aksarben kill it if you won't kill it then Houdini will run for five seconds max that's what just happened should I put chat somewhere here for the Edit later so once a lambic imported what you can do is go to right click actions extract contents that gives you camera which was working already but we need to do something else oh it even exported hairs nice so this is our pumpkin if I would dive in there it has hat and subdivision surface node for the main body I actually will extract that too I'll duplicate this let's try that so now we have had on the object level main body on the object level and it's all animated because it's not parented with original note that we imported and now we need to like create some source for our pyro it's just a rough example of what I would do here for all the pyro Sims you would always want something some interesting input that's not horizon where is it here this is just a small so whatever you would just mess with it and then maybe and you made that offset a little bit so this would be your your source input but let's assume you're happy with this source out and then what you would do you would connect main body to that source and there it is inside your inside your pumpkin nice huh so now you can emit smoke from this what I did in the original one I think I just scaled the source from zero to whatever to ignite it right here and the flame started to go out in order to make that and then the reason I wanted happen there because I then modeled just box in there and made that a Collider body is a collider too by the way so you would then go to to your shelves fire effects I mean always do fireball so it would create all them don't cook anything please let's disable so it then created all the necessary notes for you what I did then has introduced some variation here with different modifiers like gas disturbance and regular pyro same stuff let's actually jump into our original one because I don't want to dive into every details power simulations in Houdini is probably the most popular tutorial type on YouTube so there's plenty of that stuff same stuff that I just showed you imported pumpkin it's called pumping by some reason created ammeter created Collider so Collider is just imported body merged with that box this with that one the reason it has trial and I'm not sure why it's connected twice but trails are calculating velocities for me country we see properly but velocity there that's enough for whatever I need to do it for I didn't use the Hat in the end because it had a lot of geometry so I just use the box for Collider and velocity on this particular part so then I converted the 2d DB surface outputted it and down in Paris sim it's here EDB Collider Marge that put it in the solver and then they interacted I mean the the fire interacted with with the pumpkin so then you can bake your sim somewhere here where she can play it back from here that cache and then the most one of the most common questions people have when working with Houdini and cinema4d how do they convert the simulation into VDB because if you're working directly in Houdini redshift for example doesn't need any we DB exports and stuff that supports smokes and different volumes right from Cody doesn't need any export at all but we need to import the smoke into this scene in cinema 4d so what I do in usually is using a dotnet IO to point to my piracy I can visualize it here darkness it exists so that's just visualizer what's this so then I'm converting now called convert to convert VD b VD b VD b VD b funny word and the good thing about this one is that it allows you to select all the attributes that you want to transfer to your VD b so density fuel heat temperature velocity or no lack access including all of them will increase the size of the files of the VD bees themselves but depending on what you need to do you may want to include them all like i did here the star sign is to include all the attribute or you can just stick to density and that well the files will be lighter and that may be the only thing you need depending on what you do all other stuff can remain the same and then you put file specify your location when you're where you want your video beach to be saved and then you just play your animation through while i'm in this if also like this now does an output it will start writing files straight away in EDB if you would look at the time here here it goes into rights as it go as it reads the cash it rewrites it to redeem each so that's that that's the fanciest part I'll show you in Houdini for now discard and quit then back to cinema 4d words are seen why did it go cool we're back to cinema so if you don't know how to import it go to object octane objects octane V DB volume and just load your video be here cool I did this in this layer whatever node here this we can see that it does pick up some information like resolution which is relatively low in original video this sim there that's significantly C significantly higher resolution it's not what I just showed you and what I baked what I like about octane is it's quite easy to shade your flame absorption and scattering is only knee I think this one will look terrible because as I mentioned original sim was much higher resolution yeah as I suspected the shading of this volume is off so what we can do is try to increase density increase density ten times here we go let's try ten more times yep probably something like that it was but with much more details lights covered ground cover tree's leaves pumpkin render render render settings and passes we need to cover let's do this so rendering and CinemaScope Full HD no 4k for this one can you show the way you use the leaves on stage yeah I can repeat that think you may have missed that have a regular cinema 4d emitter in here what planes planes being leaves obviously see their landing they're hitting the objects the leaves are actually bending yeah saw that one Bandon terms of settings kernels so it's path tracing nothing fancy 1284 samples depth set to 16 16 8 ray epsilon that's not really doesn't matter for this scene so I believe this scene was rendered without on the octane that that didn't have the noise err I think that's why it's not enabled here do you could enable the noise arts doing pretty amazing job I wouldn't if you're using the noise I highly recommend using static noise then highly recommended maxing out your parallel samples and Max tile samples unless you're doing Network rendering because if you are then it will tax your network and renders will be performing slower adaptive sampling that's that's it all the settings then the more interesting part are passes so octane render render passes let's enable this and see what we have alright let me talk about path passes finally please that's our main one diffuse direct diffuses indirect that's why I thought there's a subsurface of going on its diffuse indirect that's just just how light is emitted so reflection direct a reflection indirect now there is a bit of transmission in this material ha thought so there that's so volume emission that's just my noise pan passed just in case speaking of noise replying to that question always always always always work with passes because you have all your elements forming your look and separate passes and the truth about CG stuff is that noise is generated by particular things like refraction like depth of field actually if there is refraction in depth of field that's what will be noisy and then when you were compositing your shot you can remove the noise from particular passes that the mids know is the most so if it's volume you will just the noise volume so I have lights separated moonlight have z-depth IDs ambient occlusion and post which doesn't work because I'm not in the camera here this so all this of course linear flow linear watts and camera imager neutral response so all rendered linear I'll leave this opened if you guys have any questions about this scene let me know in there in the chat and I will jump to fusion I won't go in deep into multi passes workflow because and linear workflow because I have dedicated structured videos about this on my channel let's just load up our final result disable lot and here this our final result so obviously did some comp original render had some indirect diffuse problems you can see so that's why it's important work to work in multi passes because you can see almost every pass modified by me the tip I mentioned a lot of guys are asking how I'm doing my breakdowns so he would look here so ambient occlusion and I have connection with gamma that transforms linear to us RGB and output output says that it's rendering steps here we go step one and then the next node will say step two step three step four so whenever I finished my comp alongside with main export I will have all the steps saved and I'll just compose it on top in After Effects or whatever where it's fancier to do those transitions I'm doing so volume emission it's not that noisy at all no Asian this particular scene was generated by something else diffuse direct so here this it's terrible terrible red diffuse indirect so I had to remove it diffuse indirect is quite noisy so I would consider the noising this but I didn't and reflections are clean all of them actually z-depth but you can can't see it but if they would go to color character here you always have that data so don't be fooled by white renders z-depth is always there most of the times it's there transmission for Sun leaves white pass one moonlight light pass three are side light I think this one is clear yeah this one is quite noisy could be could be the noise but I didn't again and our post path so you see I'm doing something with each light each pass so light pass I just changed the temperature transmission didn't do anything reflection brighten it up and all of these small steps in each layer helps you to achieve your final look which in my humble opinion in this particular case is quite cool so here in this tree what and what happening so it's reading out that's what it is the benefit of using Fusion is that it's a tool 3d software so I imported or imported some sparks members so you can see so it's comped it's not generated in 3d I actually don't know why I did it this way I just use polygons to mask it on one because what I could do is as this is a true 3d environment I could import my Olympic or something so you see I have a hat shape here so we have a lambic that have all our geometry so I could obstruct those embers with black blacked out geometry and then use a blending mode here so let's burn it down to the max turn our head to black and see it hides it would hide the emperor's under the pumpkin surface if that makes sense and then I added some smoke I believe oh it's not smoke it's dust when the pumpkin lands on on the ground final step I did try to do some lens distortion does it do anything yeah a little bit stretches the edges instead of introducing like chromatic aberration stuff that a lot of peeps are doing I used lens distortion because higher end lands on which you would prefer to shoot higher in production doesn't have that kind of artifacts on them that much those are characteristics of cheap lenses so I prefer jiz distorting to chromatic aberrations I do add some chromatic aberrations from time to time but so the last step I did despite this shot being noisy instead of removing the noise I actually added the noise how crazy is that huh well you probably won't be able see especially in the stream but this is the version without the noise this is the version wet and there is a tiny tiny grain in there what it helps me to achieve is better results in web when I upload this kind of stuff as much the more noise I have the better quality will be on YouTube if that makes sense just because CG renders have that tendency of really kind of flat and playing shaders colors and stuff and that data got really heavily compressed and then you have a heavy bending on your videos on YouTube I think noise deserves a special video special dedicated video because sometimes you need to get rid of noise sometimes you would leave it if it's a higher-end camera and sometimes you wouldn't reduce it like I did here and as you know as a CG artists were hunting imperfections in our shots noise is a perfect tool to give you one of the strongest and perfections in the shot sometimes people are overusing chromatic aberrations that release if it's overused it really tells you oh no that's not real it doesn't bring any more realism to your shot it just spoils it really so use everything in little little portions I think that's it for the scene really do you guys have any questions can we have general questions not related about the scene see yeah you can where it's private it's a private party mate we can do whatever we want how was your day it was amazing to be honest I was preparing for life and I updated my camera I updated this panel which I regret doing now because I have to use that broadcasting software whatever to stream and previously I was able to use this as a webcam that directly in YouTube or I'm just a dingus and I doing something wrong and then my day got spoiled by that these crashes in the beginning of the life we wasted like 40 minutes just trying to make it work is the 3d mouse thingy worth the causative I feel like I can't move faster in the viewport with the default old mouse shortcuts well let me demonstrate you sir so that's that's how you navigate with 3d mouse mate you can go to any point with quite big precision and yeah in general it really speeds speeds things up and I'm really sad that this Mouse doesn't work in Houdini on the same level as a dozen cinema 4d because I can go to crazy angles if it's architectural project I can dive into any room I want so yeah 3d mouse is highly recommended who recommended me okay see you guys thanks the guys are telling me that it was useful and they enjoyed it unfortunately we had some technical issues in the beginning but yeah that stuff happens in life I encourage you guys at the moment we have like 56 members on the channel if your fancy to be part of this community join the membership doesn't matter what level you will be able to record these sessions live with me once again the benefit of that is that as I'm breaking out the scene anything I'm talking about you are able to ask me any question any moment you didn't understand life and I will try to explain it more in depth so you're basically guiding me in terms of what I'm talking about so consider joining the membership hope you guys liked it and I see you in the next one peace [Music] how wide is that monitor on the top this is the LG whatever I made a review about it on the channel by the way it's pretty cool it's Productivity monitor so as you can see here usually I'm sitting like that and just I can see everything can put a lot of windows in here whatever video internet references and work on this screen on the main one so it's pretty cool

Channel: Andrey Lebrov

Views: 44,938

Keywords: lebrov, cg, vfx, tutorial, how to, learning, filmmaking, step, up, master, LNCGT, CG TALKS, 3D, walkthrough, breakdown, flame, pyro, houdini, simulation, fusion, octane, alembic, convert vdb, compositing, multipasses, bake geometry, C4D to Houdini, C4D, Cinema 4D, Volume, shading, textures, lighting, trees, environment, DOF, course

Id: ey3IhfWkGyU

Length: 48min 58sec (2938 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 21 2020