Houdini: Quixel Megascans workflow rendered with Redshift

hello everyone welcome back to the byc collective in this video i'm going to be showing you my workflow for houdini mega scans and redshift i'm going to just jump straight in and try be as quick as possible because there's a few things to go over so this is bridge um i won't be going over any installation stuff or anything like that there's already documentation for it so get it downloaded this is a bridge over here where you can browse all of the nice assets and services and everything that they have you can check out things in a little 3d view here and preview your things so going down to local these are the things that i have already downloaded what we are going to do is just to show you one of the techniques that i used a lot in this image i i posted this to the houdini subreddit and a few people wanted to know how i did this so i said i'll make a tutorial and this is me making the tutorial so one of the techniques that i used in making this was essentially painting a mask and directing all these assets a little bit so just to dive right in and show you guys what i'm going to do is i'm going to go to an image that i created yesterday and on last night and essentially it looks a little something like this nothing too fancy really basic but i'm going to show you the one technique here so jumping into houdini this is what the scene looks like what i'm going to do is just disable everything and jump out of our camera here so what i did was going back to bridge i took this asset and i just hit download gives you you know your texture resolutions and the levels of detail and all of the texture maps that you want i usually just check everything um sometimes it's good to download the high poly source and kwixel just updated bridge so that's also part of the reason why i'm going to show you it this way because their setup within houdini has changed a little bit so all you need to do is go to houdini go to the mega scans tab once you have installed it click on the mega scans plugin and it will give you these options they've also added support for houdini 18 and the usd stage i haven't tried that out yet you know you can import mantra to the principle shader renderman i'm using redshift and um so i'm just going to use redshift material and i recently updated to well upgraded to redshift and you know for me personally i'm not really a modeler so mega scans is an awesome resource for people who just want to have assets on hand and then you can focus on the nitty gritty things like lighting and render settings and you know just working on composition of your final images so with this open what i'm going to do is just import this so you gotta export setting i'm gonna say a level of detail zero and hit export and it says export it to houdini successfully so here it is here um it pops it into a subnet i'm just going to turn off the scatter setup because we don't want that and this is essentially our little uh asset that we've just imported unfortunately houdini doesn't show rich of materials in the viewport i know that there is a workaround to that so that you can see it but for now i'm not really going to worry about that so camera should be in the correct place and essentially what it does it puts it into a sub network and then inside of that so essentially this node within this node it's exactly the same as being in this object context so we dive down here we've got the asset geometry with all of the different levels of detail again this is set up slightly differently they used to be you know like a source and everything but it is a lot quicker and faster so that's good and then it gives you this asset material network and here is our material already set up and plugged in and ready to go so that's really handy and what we are going to do now is we basically want to scatter some grass in between these rocks here so um what i'm quickly going to do i'm just going to keep the camera we already have the camera set up and then what we need is a rs light dome over here and i'm essentially just going to copy this one but what i did was you just take your dome map this is the one that i was using for that nighttime scene and essentially i cranked it so it's like 2.2.0025 so it's basically a nighttime scene right now so i'm just going to save and if we go to the redshift tab let me actually just make sure that i'm going to delete that and in the redshift tab i'm just going to hit ipr and that will actually create new render nodes for us so just while this is loading i mentioned that i recently upgraded to redshift and using mega scans because i'm not a modeler it's nice to have an asset library on hand and with redshift the speed increase is just you can't beat it you know the amount of hours that i spent waiting for mantra to update and calculate displacement uh etc etc it's just it's just a no-brainer the speed increase is just it's so nice that i don't think i can ever go back to uh to mantra so for now so this is our scene like if i let's go to the image viewer say view always on the top that way if i make changes if i take this back to one and one we'll see this is what the asset looks like i'll just for the sake of this i'll just zoom out a bit so we can see the whole thing see how nice it updates let's just disable enable background so this is essentially the asset that i brought in i have noticed that in with redshift and houdini sometimes not with all of the assets and well especially with the previous version of bridge it wasn't really calculating displacement correctly and you'll even notice here in our render we're not getting a lot of really nice detail so let me just zoom in a little bit more so i always find that tweaking your assets in the beginning is quite important um because it doesn't you know i find the closer that you get to objects the more you really have to tweak it because i just find it doesn't quite give you the quality that you really want so as with anything you need to adjust some things and make it make it work for you so going into the um into the material i'm just going to take our normal map and let's just double that and then hit ibr update and we should get a little bit more detail out of this so you can see it's getting a little bit sharper more detail is coming through and you know you can also do like displacement blends and all of that cool stuff and even in here you know like this is your albedo or diffuse texture i see they've got a color correct on here i also found if you do like uh like a change range say i wanted this to be you know even more red but i can do this you know old range new range i can just add a bit of red and a bit of color and you know start taking some of the uh the edge off of the default textures and start playing around another really cool thing in redshift is that it has it has noise but it's got max on noise here so obviously redshift is owned by maxon and cinema 4d but there's a whole bunch of cool noises in here with really simple controls this is honestly like the best noise node that i've come across for houdini so it's definitely worth checking out so there we have a little bit more detail but again this asset i'm not the biggest fan of so for all intensive purposes let's go back we'll just say this is our asset let me undo a few things and get our camera okay so there we go so what we want to do is go over to bridge i'm just going to go to my local and i'm going to take this thatching grass here and i've already downloaded it and i'm just going to export that to hoodie export successful and it should pop up here soon cool so here we have our thatching grass that's been imported all of the textures and everything have already been brought in which is nice uncheck and the scatter option is right over here so again it's a little bit different now i'm just gonna disable these so that they don't show up and we're just going to go into our scatter setup okay so right now it's currently scattering on a grid that it brings in so what i'm going to do is go object merge and i'm just going to select our sandstone here asset selected level of detail and just wire that up so here you see it's now being scattered onto our asset which is really nice there's also um uh so inside of this scattering node there's a whole bunch of options so like density noise distribution p scale rotation uh it's very cool so say we wanted to take a sphere and scatter this onto a sphere it's got to be polygon just for this to kind of pick up and essentially like the slope distribution here you know the tighter you pull this ramp the more centralized it gets to the top of the object and as you pull it down you know it's calculating the slope of this and instancing on top of that um so you know at least for this case we'll go back to our object here and you'll notice that it's quite clumpy like it's clumped together i'm just going to take our p scale down and that is due to the density roughness if you if you bring down the roughness and say bring down the turbulence as well and let's just change our seed okay that's actually the overall seed if we just you know change the offset here we get little clumps all over because that's essentially what the noise is doing um so if i amp up the roughness it starts to spread out a bit more like that so up there up roughness up the turbulence let's add some more on this so let's just say 500. cool so now uh what i'm trying to show you guys is that to art direct this a little bit better what we need to do is hit tab and type paint and there's a paint attributes node throw that down and now with this hit enter and we get a little brush so holding down shift you can do the size of the brush you know soft edge you get a whole bunch of things here and what i'm going to do is let's just go to our camera and i'm just going to start painting where i want these little grass assets to kind of go so let's get it up here let's get some back there and i don't really want them on the rock so what i'm going to do is with my brush selected i'm on a wacom pen here so forgive me if i get this wrong but i'm pretty sure it is right click hold down your right mouse button and start painting again and it will remove the mask area so let's do that let's get rid of some of this here this is essentially how i started art directing these assets in that other image so we won't get too fancy just paint like that okay there we go so now we've created this attribute it's called mask and now what i'm going to do is inside of the simple scattering node i'm going to right click and say allow editing of contents so you see at the bottom it hasn't taken what we've done into account so what we need to do is we need to jump inside here if we go down to where it says density it's just an attribute vub this is essentially the scattering tool in here you can start manipulating things like we're doing now so i'm going to create an op attribute verb and let's just call it mask density and this is also a good little exercise for those of you who have followed on from the houdini everyday tutorial series on the website i go into vox this is just a nice little example of how to use it again so inside here we don't really need anything but we have two attributes right we have density which is driving our scatter of the objects and then we have our mask so what i'm going to do is go bind bring in a bind we need two of these so i'm going to hold down alt click and drag now we've got two and we need a bind export so essentially we're bringing in two attributes we're gonna like merge them together and manipulate them and then export it back out as density so these two need to be density so if you select them both you can type density and then this one here we need to grab our attribute called mask and now we are going to multiply it together and we'll take these two wired in and go out mask and you see the points automatically update so if we go back to our setup there we see it here so i find like sometimes when you jump into these nodes and around uh it will only show you the points like we did there so if you just hit this little pin icon there now we're pinned to this um to this viewport so now i can jump inside and you'll see that you know if i just take density and out density it goes back in and now we are multiplying the density by the mask so just to jump back up uncheck this go to the attribute mask again so you see like i've painted color here and color is a representative of a value so what that advap is doing it's it's essentially just reading the values where this purple kind of color is that's zero and where the red and all of these other colors are it's essentially a fall off but you you will remember so where it's red it's one where it's purple at zero and if you multiply anything by zero it becomes zero you should remember that from uh elementary school i only really fully understood that later because i suck at maths anyway um so that's essentially what this is doing you are multiplying something by a value range of zero and one and that is how you paint and start art directing these other assets so this is this is essentially what i did for this scene um and i'll jump into this scene soon so another thing that we did what i'm going to do is just for the ease of it i am going to take the satching grass that we had already done uh just so that i've got it all dialed in like that um you know what i did was adjust some of the p scale i see the mask there you know the scale distribution four p scales so you get a nice variance of uh taller grass and shorter grass you know you can play with the rotation as well there's also a secondary rotation you know with offset angles so you can start rotating these guys it would probably be on the y-axis so you just get more random rotation and i'm going to disable um so yeah i just played around with like p scale density values here's the roughness distributions all that good stuff so then another thing that we did was um so i'm just going to enable both of these because essentially that's what we've done and then what i needed was a light so we have our dome light um and then what i did was i just created essentially all it is a is a platonic i converted it to a polygon so that the poly wire would work over there and i transformed it so you know if you don't convert it to a polygon okay i don't want to crash anything um so yeah it's just a platonic converting to a polygon polywire and moving it here so this is what i'm going to use to emit light so what we now need to do is go to our red shift tab command click rs light and what you need for the mesh lights to work is you need the light to be at the origin like this so just zero that out and now if you change where it says area from rectangle to mesh we can now drag in our tube light mesh but now keep in mind you will need to hide your tube light mesh otherwise the light is going to have issues coming through so you'll see what happens now um so if we just i'm just going to save and command click ipr and it starts to generate our little scene so i forgot to change this back to 2.2 and 0.0025 so now we have like a nighttime scene and you can see even though our tube light is disabled the light uh our light that we created is essentially a geometry light so um to make this look even nicer what i'm going to do is let's just keep this on top and then i'm going to disable the update so i can show you if you go to out we go to redshift go to volumetric scattering and enable volumetric scattering and let's just hit ipr again and you'll notice that not too much has changed and that's because on our light the new light that we created you have to go down to where it says volume here and up the contribution scale so if i up that 0.5 you'll see we start to get a nice volumetric scatter from the light so if i pump it up to one we should get a lot more scatter and this is just a really nice effect you know volumetrics in a render can add a lot of atmosphere and haze and that is something that we are kind of used to seeing and it also just makes it look a lot nicer and then you know in post we have control over that if we want to render out aovs later which i did do um so yeah that is how we scatter and start to art direct these different objects um how we create a geolight quickly and get some volumetric scattering so let's jump into our main scene now and we can uh dig through that a little bit okay guys so jumping into the scene that i created for this image um this is what it looks like so essentially i've just pulled in a whole bunch of different mega scan assets duplicated them at least some of them move them around um the scene isn't ready to scale which i will have to fix later but i was just moving uh things around according to the camera so let's just disable everything disable the light box and the wire so essentially what i did was i brought in this rock sandstone asset this one rock sandstone assembly and i just duplicated it around so that i have a bit of a background let's see i added this rock assembly here which i'm pretty sure is it's this one over here red sandstone rock assembly and let's see i got a plant got a tree desert rocks that's this one here these little cactuses things there and it's pretty much it for the actual assets so then just quickly i created this little lightbox geo and inside of here all i did was create a let's hide everything this little light stand it's like a little led light made one big one small just created like a little ex formation out of it like that i grouped i created a group for the light tubes so you'll see where that comes into play at the end let's clear up some of this mess and then i just created like this little back panel for it really nothing fancy all i did was take like a line and copied uh actually deleted the middle copied these to the points and merged it over this little back panel and then it was down here then i just created like this little stand for it i added a little bit of procedural control to it so you know i can change the stand height on the fly how wide it is that sort of thing how many points are in the center in the middle um pretty basic stuff and then transformed it around and then what i actually did was so you'll notice that the light geometry the geometry for the light is still there so what i did was this should actually i'm just going to duplicate this this should be out uh pre blast this is what i've been calling it and then what i would do is i would blast out the lights and add a material so this is just like a generic black like metallic um material so now we have everything except for the lights and then what i did was i created this light box over here and inside of this i just merged in the pre-blast null that i just changed and then i blasted the lights but set it to delete non-selected so now i have a group with just the lights which are right there and that is what i use inside of my red shift light as a mesh light there and you'll see the contribution scale 0.5 cranking up the samples because we want that juicy good render quality and that's pretty much the setup for this and you know i just wanted to give you like a brief overview of how i kind of achieved this this took me a couple of days to really you know play around with the composition get the lighting and everything and materials especially looking nice with good amount of displacement normals bumps and everything like that um and you know i had like a general idea of what i wanted and then i started taking these um uh these other assets here from bridge you know there's like the arid weed the dead broom bush um i downloaded like a bunch of different ones the more variation that you can add the better um let's just jump into here so here you'll see this is the old kind of setup so you used to get like a grid that it referenced from the instance freezing you know the source all the different lods and then we would get like this instance node here and this is essentially what the setup would kind of look like so again i painted a attribute mask let's do that so you know just looking at the camera and ghosting like objects it was just like ah let me you know put some around here and that's essentially what i did and you'll notice here in the old one it doesn't actually show you it just shows you the points so that's why you know i would pin the viewport so when i jumped in here i could actually get a live update of these things so again i painted a mask i jumped inside of here i went to the density i added a attribute flop which does the same thing multiplies the density in the mask and outputs that as the new density and and then essentially i just i just did that for all of these other little ones as well so let's see instance so again the mask is me just playing around with like different things masking things um and adding more variation so you know trying to get rid of like you'll see here this is this edge over here like that's going to look terrible during the render so pretty sure i grabbed some more uh more assets and just try to hide those kind of areas and this was kind of what i was left with um after all of that and then you know taking a look at my final render settings which i probably cranked up you know making sure global illumination is turned on brute force radiance point cloud volumetric scattering is on disable ipr progressive you know here's my min and max settings i'd probably even crank this up like a little bit more optimizations fairly straightforward and then you just hit render to disk and that is essentially how i made this and hopefully these techniques or the few little techniques that i showed you helps you in your own renders and again this was me just playing around trying to get something interesting looking with a lot of variation and some decent kind of detail so i'm just going to jump into nuke because this is ultimately what this is the final image this was my final render so it was quite dark and you'll notice like there's no stars in the sky but all of the information is there and again guys i uh i am a compositor that is my official job title and that's what i've been doing for the past 10 years i've always enjoyed 3d and you know i suck at drawing so i find using houdini and rendering things and playing with light that's kind of drawing and painting for me so although i'm sure none of you have a license of nuke because it's ridiculously expensive i'm pretty sure achieving the same thing in after effects should be fairly straightforward because they also have a 3d view um like viewport and tools such as you know i just brought in the same hdri that i was using and graded it and slammed it around a bit so we got so we got something like this it's basically just the background and then what i did was i just took an image of the milky way wrapped that to a sphere as well plugged in on camera this is the view it gave me crank the grades and all of that and this is what gets plugged in behind and if you really want i can definitely figure out how to do this in after effects i choose nuke because it's what i'm familiar with i do have after effects down here so if you really want me to figure that out and show you how to do this kind of setup within after effects i will reluctantly oblige because it is something that i've been wanting to do so i rendered this you know i get the diffuse i get the gi reflection i outputted all of the aovs look how nice that looks um all the arvs so that i can have all of this control within a post you know be it after effects on nuke so you know i just started painting things around added the sky and background let's just crank this up a bit you know added some depth of field to the bottom portion here obviously because my scene isn't really in scale got bit in there you know a bit of color correction uh adding the haze back over because i exported out the volume here it's a bit noisy you really need to crank your samples um then throw a grade on it some exponential glow lens simulation grain all that good stuff and then you know i tweaked it i brought it back in and this is essentially the same as what i posted to instagram just with better quality so that was essentially my workflow using houdini mega scans and redshift hopefully i didn't take up too much of your time hopefully you got a bit of a good bit of information out of there i can definitely do more and i am currently doing a whole bunch more of these scenes um so probably in the next uh few tutorials that i do land up putting it up it would be more um you know directed towards camera and composition and lighting and you know some of the thought process that i kind of go through so without further ado i think i will wrap up i hope you guys are staying well

Channel: Break Your Crayons

Views: 7,266

Rating: 4.9633026 out of 5

Keywords: Sidefx, Houdini, Quixel, Megascans, Bridge, Redshift, 3D, Redshift3d, Composition, Lighting, Rendering, Compositing

Id: cDZrtD9o1Sc

Length: 35min 14sec (2114 seconds)

Published: Fri May 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/MuggyW]

Here is the tutorial for the render I posted a little while back. This is not a paint by numbers tutorial. Instead I just wanted to show you what I used to achieve the final look of the render. Hopefully you can use the masking technique and some volumetric lighting to better art direct your own work.

Hope it helps!