Houdini Tutorial | HOW TO MAKE Villiaumite Crystals

[Music] hi how's it going welcome to an houdini tutorial so in this video we're going to talk about minerals and crystals and minerals are such an amazing topic to talk about i just love them so much they look amazing uh they're pretty easy to create especially with houdini and yeah once you get the hang of it it's just a normal modeling it's very simple all right so before moving on uh to the actual setup let's analyze this image uh i i think analyzing renders is actually very important and very helpful because uh we get to see what's happening in here and then if you come across an image that you like you can just analyze it and recreate it all right so we have a shape these are clearly some boxes that have been copied onto some points we have some cracks happening in here and we're going to achieve that using boolean shatter we have this tiny crystals and uh they look nice uh there are very many uh different techniques that you can use to achieve this and yeah that's it uh you can see these parts are fused together so these are not just some random boxes they've been turned into uh vdb's and changed back into polygons so they look connected and we have this simple mountain node on top of this uh kind of sphere that which gives us the rocky look uh let's like talk about the lighting we have a light in the background which is giving us this uh nice rim light happening in here are these parts we have a light on the right side which is giving us these highlights we have a light in the left side which is giving us this color this highlight in here and uh these uh highlights something like this all right and then we have a light on top which is giving us this volumetric uh look in the background you can see it's kind of foggy and i added this bloom effect in here as well and it's helping with the render i also made a bunch of other colors which i really like especially this this one looks like a kryptonite and i also really like this one all right let's talk about uh gathering reference images so there's this website uh mindat.org uh probably stands for mineral data uh there's there are a lot of data in here like you you can just search names you can uh just randomly uh read the articles that there are a lot of stuff happening in here now from my render i chose two different uh minerals first one hydroxy apophylite k which is a very hard word to pronounce uh i used it for the shape uh you can see i have boxes in my render and uh it kind of looks similar i really like that i didn't like the color so i chose another uh mineral vilamite for the color now let's take a look at the gallery uh i really like this image i used this one uh for the reference when i was modeling uh these are amazing i really like the way they look and this is the villamite which is also really interesting by the way velamite is toxic so if you come across one of these in nature don't touch it and let's take a look at uh this page for example for hydroxy apophyllite and if we scroll down we come across this optical data and we have this ri values and this is actually refractive index or as we like to call it in uh 3d index of refraction or ior which is gonna uh it basically it means when light hits uh your surface it's going to break and then it's going to exit and this is going to give us the angle basically and it's a very important parameter when you're setting up your render engine and it's going to help with the physical accuracy all right i use this software called pureref for gathering my reference images i use this website and google and gather some references i'm going to use this one for the shape and then you can see i have a bunch of other uh references here for the velomite and as you can see the velamite uh minerals are not actually angular like this like in my render they're just random but in nature they don't like basically the orientation is just gonna stay the same so if you want to go for a more physically correct version of belamite don't randomize the orientation but i kind of like this look so i'm just going to mix them up all right let's take a look at my setup and then we're gonna start from scratch so i have some lights here uh i have some unused lights which is like a light dome i was experimenting with it uh let's talk about the mineral our main object and by the way these are just some uh random mountain nodes here just for the background and like for this stone it's not really important uh let's dive in this is our setup it might look complicated but it really isn't uh we have this part which we generate our main shape and then we scatter some points on it we scatter these uh boxes as you can see and then i'm just going to do some boolean shattering in here and then i'm going to do some pyro techniques and scatter these points and basically use them for the crystals i also made a very simple uh visualization for myself which helps a lot and it's very fast because it's just using very very low poly version of this setup and it's very fast you can clearly see here and i use this for deciding which frame i like i kind of like this the 18th frame and then i'm just gonna visualize that i have different materials notes here i added a switch and i added color to them so whenever i change it i know which material i'm using you can do this switching by the way in your material tab but i kind of prefer to do it in here and yeah that's it as you can see it's pretty simple all right i'm just going to put this on the side and we are going to start from scratch all right so uh i'm just gonna put down a geometry node and dive inside i'm gonna put down a sphere i'm gonna reshape it a little bit uh maybe something like this i'm gonna rotate it and i'm gonna put it on the side something like this i'm gonna copy that and i'm just gonna merge them together let's move this one i'm gonna move it for example in here rotate this there are a lot of cars in the background i don't like that uh i'm gonna bring it for example here make it smaller well this looks good i'm just gonna copy this one more time add it in here i'm gonna revert this back to the default again let's make this part i don't know taller make this part smaller bring it to the side and yeah something like this for example it doesn't really matter uh we're gonna add so many things on top okay and i'm gonna put down a vdb from polygons and the resolution is fine but you can bring it up i'm just gonna add a smooth sdf and smooth this a little bit yeah it looks good and then convert it convert vdb convert it back to polygons okay i'm gonna add a mountain note play with the values maybe bring the roughness down and yeah this looks looks good i like this uh this shape is not actually really important because uh we're gonna uh but we're just going to use this for scattering it doesn't matter if we're getting these intersections here if you want to be too clean you can just repeat this process in here i'm just going to put down a transform node and i'm gonna bring it here okay yeah this looks nice i like this all right i'm just gonna put down a iso iso offset i'm going to bring the uniform sampling divisions up to 100 so i get a very high quality version of it and i'm just going to scatter some points let's go with 25 for now i'm going to put down a box in here oh before that let's just save it tutorials with the mite crystal all right i have this box and then we're going to add a uh cupped points let's take a look yeah looks pretty good i'm going to put down a hatchback randomize i'll randomize my pca bring the dimensions to one and i want it to be between 0.7512.25 all right yeah this is good i'm going to put another attribute randomize i'm going to randomize the n and i'm going to do it inside the sphere right and you can just play with the seed on your scatter node to get something you like let's see kind of like this one i think it looks good yeah let's go with this one all right now i want to have some details in here so i'm just gonna come to my box i'm gonna use this box i'm gonna copy it and scatter some points again do the same procedure as i'm doing it here just turn it into an iso offset and we don't need to have 150 is enough i'm going to scatter some points i'm going to scatter 250 i'm going to copy the point put down a couple points note something like this and i'm going to use that great this looks really good uh i do want to make this one smaller maybe something like this i want to play with the dimensions so maybe just make it a little bigger on this side maybe make it a little smaller and you can put down attribute randomize in here as well uh so let's randomize the p scale and let's go between 0.8 and 1.2 all right yeah this looks pretty good for our main shape i'm gonna turn this into a vdb again and we need to bring this value way down the voxel size because we want a very high quality and a very high resolution version of this and it's going to take some time it's going to calculate this 30 down 45 [Music] down and yeah okay oh this looks really good awesome cool i'm gonna add a a smooth sdf note let's move this a little bit like this right and convert it to a vdb convert it to a polygon all right i'm a null in here i'm going to call this out base shape okay uh actually uh let's just a mountain note in here as well because it's too smooth right now and this is way too much 0.0 uh 0.005 maybe uh let's see probably too small so 0.01 yeah this is good i just want a little bit of like this effect that's happening in here i don't want it to be too smooth as you can see before that it was a little smooth but now it is better i'm just also going to play with this element size and bring it down a little bit and it's good it's going to offset it as well right yeah this is oh i went in the negative section i'm just gonna put the manual okay this is good i like this and let's also add normals in case uh something wrong with them looks good all right now uh we're gonna have a bunch of uh different ways to go we're going to create our shattering effect on this side and we're going to go with some pyro techniques on this side for generating these small crystals okay and by the way don't worry about pyro it's going to be very simple again i'm going to create an iso offset in here i'm going to do the shattering effect first uh bring this to 50. yeah 50 is good enough i'm going to scatter five points maybe let's go with seven but i think five is enough i'm gonna put down a grid and i'm just gonna do a couple points as you can see they're not going to be very interesting i'm just going to put down randomize again randomize the end value and do inside sphere all right take a look at our shape uh it's covering everything maybe make these a little bit bigger and so we're sure that we're gonna get the result that we want i'm just gonna copy this parameter uh paste a relative reference in here and just bring the rows and uh columns to a higher value let's say 100 put i'm going to put down a mountain node make the element size bigger and play with this value okay i like this and i'm just going to put down a boolean note so oh shatter and in here i'm going to go to set b which is going to be coming from this side and change it to surface because the first one our first input right now it's a geometry but our second input is a surface and i'm going to save it because shattering is not the fastest note so let's make sure if we get any crashes we have our project saved hopefully we're not going to have any problems all right wow awesome take a look on the inside and these are our intersections it's pretty clean i'm pretty happy it's actually better than my own setup that's great uh and we're done in here i'm just gonna add normals i'm gonna put down a null in here i'm going to call it out shattered geo and maybe actually create a group node in here as well i'm gonna stay in the primitives and call it main geo group i'm going to use this group for shading all right so let's take a look at how to do the uh tiny crystals again we're going to scatter some points and okay so basically before that for scattering let's talk about pyro i'm going to use the pyrosource what i'm going to do here is creating a very simple pyro spread like an infection spread which if you've seen my channel i have a video there infected system and it's the trailer for the channel and it's the same technique i'm gonna use a pyrosource pyro source and we have too many points right now so i'm just gonna instead of using the keep input i'm gonna go with surface scatter and i used a 0.03 in my setup so let's just stick to that looks good uh i'm going to hit this plus button in here and go to temperature and we want the temperature attribute but i want to set it to zero so we have this uh attribute in our simulation but it's set to zero now what i want to do is activating a couple of these points and add a value of 1 to them so in some parts of our setup we have a temperature of 1 which is going to be the highest temperature and we're going to have a value of 0 and then use those points with the value of 1 to spread the infection okay so in order to create that uh i need a group and in order to create some i want to use the bounding regions and the bounding object it has to be a point and i'm going to say start group now i i need to connect something to the second input so i'm going to scatter some points let's say let's go with five points i'm gonna put down a sphere i'm gonna copy points and i'm gonna connect this and our spheres are way too big right now so let's bring it down to 0.1 pretty good and yeah let's just create an attribute i'm gonna type attribute create i'm gonna set it to start group and i'm gonna type temperature so if i am at the value of one so if i visualize this temperature node as you can see in this points which we copied from our spheres where is it our spheres we have this value of one and we're going to use that and let me put down the pyrus spread okay we're going to take a look at temperature we're going to bring this a cooling rate to 0. 35. let's see and yeah our infection is spreading you can use this for many different techniques i really like to change the diffusion by the way if you hit the diffusion tab you can see what's happening in here uh and i like to change it to [Music] alligator gives us a very nice look i really like that i'm gonna bring the element size down a little bit and parts that are purple they're not gonna get infected maybe offset it a little bit and yeah let's take a look at temperature again yeah it's much more interesting now right i'm gonna put down a group expression i'm gonna call it uh i don't know infected it group really matter i'm going to use an attribute which is being created by this pyrospread we have a lot of attributes in here let me actually show you as you're visualizing them right now we're visualizing the temperature but we have a total burn attribute and we also have a burn we're going to use this uh burn attribute and basically select let's say two points and we're gonna select our burn wherever it's equal to one we're gonna select those points looks good uh you just type an expression in here you remember to use two equals uh and i'm just gonna blast this uh infected group and delete unselected all right we have our points now you can just use an object in here and just copy them it doesn't really matter but i am going to actually use another technique with the pop network so combining [Music] a pyro spread and uh the pubnet so let's just uh dive inside in here i'm gonna uh first of all let's just disable the guides i'm gonna use points i'm not gonna use all points i'm just gonna use some of them and you can just come to the birthdam and play with this value i think in my setup i used 2 000 so something like this okay yeah this looks pretty good i'm going to put down a pop grains and if i just play this you can see they're just going crazy i don't want that i want to see some clamping clumping so let's take a look now and they're sticking to each other but they're going crazy uh first of all i'm gonna uncheck this assume uh uniform radius it's gonna help with the setup then i'm gonna add in a pop triangle i'm gonna type v at v equals to zero so now they're just gonna clamp on top of each other which is what i wanted but right now we don't have a piece gate so let's type fpscale and we need to actually initialize this piece get i mean we don't have to again we had the same thing going on in our virus tutorial but i like to initialize them so i'm gonna come out here and i'm gonna say assign p scale equals to zero because uh i wanted to start from zero and i want to add to it so uh we have our uh initialized uh attribute p scale up here and then in here i'm gonna just gonna say add some piece key scale plus equals and give it a tiny value for example i think in my setup i used 0.01 i don't know let's stick to 0.01 and yeah let's take a look so they're gonna get extremely big as you can see this is not what we want as we go forward it's just going to take the entire screen so we're going to clamp this and say at sign piece k it goes to clamp and clamp is basically going to cut the values above or below a certain threshold so we're going to say at some piece gate and clamp it between zero and zero point um up zero to zero two five and uh you can just uh come to this uh clamp hit f1 and it's gonna bring the houdini's help window and you can see uh we need a value which is going to be our p scale we need a minimum and a maximum it's a pretty simple uh expression and as i play it you can see they're clamping on top of each other looks awesome i love it all right we're done with the pop net uh i'm just gonna uncheck this burn from here we don't need to see what's happening there and let's get to the fun part all right i'm gonna copy some points in here all right so let's put down a box and [Music] i'm gonna copy this box ctp to my points as we play you can see we're generating these boxes and they're a little small and we want to have intersections here it makes it so much more interesting so let's bring this value up now let me take a look at my own setup and see the size that i used in here uh yeah that's seems good let's manipulate the size a little bit so like 1.5 1.5 and three okay yeah this looks good and i'm also going to write a simple expression in here let's take a look at our box and i'm going to set this to 1. when you're copying something into some points uh what uh let me actually put down a sphere in here let me explain it in action so we have this uh sphere i'm just gonna copy some lines on top of it and ctp and as you can see the orientation is not correct the reason why it's not correct is because this is facing up and for coffee points we want to face it to the z side so the axis so let's do it like this and when we copy it you can see it's correct now same thing goes for the uh everything that you're doing with uh coffee points so we want to put the this side of the uh box and the uh on this center so i'm just gonna come here and write a very simple expression i'm basically going to copy this parameter i'm going to come to the center and paste relative reference and it's not going to do anything right now because there's a 0 in here and it's going to move it to the side but i want to move it half this amount so it sits at 0.050 now as i increase the uniform scale you can see it's going to change so i'm just going to come here and copy this parameter as well come here put down a asterisk sign multiplication and multiply this by this scale value so now it's going to sit here i can change the scale size and i can change the z size and it's going to be fine and then as i copied it they're going to sit on top of my geometry let me bring it down exactly like this now if i hadn't done that let me just bring a version of it in here i'm just going to turn it into zero and as i copy it you can see half of it is going to be inside my geometry i don't want that that's why i did it it's not really important as you can see after this we're gonna actually randomize the scale so randomize the orientation so it's actually not that important i just wanted to uh you know stay uh cleaner and we have two ways in here i like to use vex for this part but if you don't want to do that you can just put down an attribute randomize and just randomize the n again as we've done before and we can just use inside sphere and this is fine this is okay but it's too randomized for my taste let me actually check that actually let's uh i'm gonna select this i'm gonna select this i'm going to use if what i did here if you don't know you can just select the nodes that you want to merge together you can hold down alt and you just do this and they're connected and you put down a merge knot it's very easy and it's going to be very slow i think yeah it's not the best thing to do again that's why i made my visualizer uh i basically brought this node and just merged them together and that was my visualizer it's very simple let me just connect it to here it's going to be very fast okay yeah this is good you can add color in here so it's faster but i don't want to do it like this it's too randomized for me and i actually want to use wix so we're going to put down another angle and we're going to use a function that i really like i think it's very simple and it's very interesting so i want to randomize the n again like as i did in here but i want to randomize it the way i want it to i don't want it to go too crazy i just wanted to wiggle around you know have some orientation changes but i don't want it to be all over the place like this in here if i connect it this is too random for me so i'm going to come here and say v at sine n which is my normal is equals to we're going to use a new function sample the direction i'm just gonna and hit f1 let's take a look at our function so sample direction cone takes a vector as the center a max angle as a float and a u which is going to be a vector 2. the u is going to be a random number it's going to generate the direction for us so let's fill this as my center i'm going to use the add n i'm going to use a variable called max angle and a variable called u and when i hit ctrl enter to get out of this we're going to get an error it's because we didn't initialize these two so let's come here and say float max angle it's going to be equal to the channel and let's just call it max angle now uh this maximum angle in here it's going to be in radians as defined by the houdini documentation so i'm just going to put down a radians function before that after that i'm going to come here vector 2 u it's going to be equal to a random number based on my pt now and i forgot to put down the sign all right let's create the channel and as you can see here it's set to zero so we're not going to get any orientation changes but as i increase this you can see i'm actually randomizing it as you can see you have so much control in here i kind of prefer this again you can randomize other stuff in here so let's actually do that i'm going to disable that i'm going to come here and type scale now when you randomize scale and i'm just going to set it to the default uniform uh you're going to randomize everything but i don't want to do that i just want to randomize the uh z direction so i'm just going to go to my attribute randomize i'm going to change this to one and one and they're gonna be okay and you can see as i increase this we're gonna get different values so let's set this to 0.25 and maybe some randomizing here isn't that bad actually so yeah we're getting randoms and again i bring this in and yeah we're we're done okay uh actually we're kind of done we just have to scroll scroll through our setup i'm just going to set it to like i don't know 24 seems like a good place i'm going to use a time shift and we don't really need this margin here and ctrl shift left click and we're stuck at frame 24. you can see i'm going to use again vdb from polygons let's go with this value maybe lower 0.05 probably even lower yeah 0.003 yeah this is good ssdf as pdb smooth sdf now let's bring this value down yeah this looks good and convert vdb right good now i am getting some uh crystals like these two these ones that are not connected to my main geometries so before actually converting this i'm gonna come use here uh it's going to define a name attribute now our biggest surface is going to be if i come here to zero then one surface is three so basically you're going to take a look at the points here and you have five so you want to put the four big one two three four five the five biggest surfaces you have in here and it's so yeah uh if you make any changes in your schedule for example if you add like a six uh node in here which is going to actually change everything in my setup doesn't matter you'll have to come here and include that one as well it's not that hard let me just do the uh pop nets again i'm just gonna change it back and we're getting these colors if you don't want to see the colors you can just come to the segment and uncheck these color segments all right i'm gonna add a group i'm gonna call it a tiny crystals group and yeah we're done let's bring it in here this is our shutter joe i'm just gonna copy that here out tiny crystals i'm gonna merge them together and look at everything at once all right this looks good i'm going to put down a material node now we haven't made any materials yet uh let's just specify this the first one to be for main geo group and i'm going to hit the plus and i'm going to come here and say tiny crystals right this is good i'm going to add two color notes i'm just putting these down for visualization purposes in case you want to create different materials i'm just going to make this one the dark red and make this one a light red something like this set the first one to be out working on main geo and the second one to work on tiny crystals right good now let's make this like this yeah this looks pretty good and i'm just playing around here it doesn't really matter right uh we're gonna come to our material rs math builder i'm going to create two materials i'm going to name this one main geo and i'm going to call this one tiny crystals all right let's come back to our material node i'm gonna pick my main geo for oh we're in tiny crystal we're gonna pick tiny crystals and we're gonna go to our main geo and pick the main geo material all right we're done with the setup next we're going to do the lighting and then we're gonna do the uh shading alright so let's set up our scene uh we're gonna need a camera let's pick a good angle this seems good yeah this is this is pretty good all right we're gonna hit control click on this uh camera i forgot to lock my view alright so let's pick something like this also i kinda wanna okay first of all let's increase the resolution to 1080 and maybe let's go with 95 yeah in the focal length yeah i like that you can actually bring it down it doesn't really matter you can get a like a wide effect but since this is probably going to be something small let's use 95 seems like a good number to me uh yeah this is this is good okay so again we're going to use the same technique for the background we're going to put down a grid i'm going to unlock my camera and come out i'm going to move this thing it's parented to my uh the camera is apparent here so if i move the camera you can see the background is going to move with it so that's nice uh let's increase let's dive inside increase the size uh increase the rows something like this again at like a mountain same thing we did in our virus tutorial let's increase this and yeah this looks nice let's increase that yeah something like that come up here call it pg for background now redshift object we're gonna go to tessellation and activate uh distillation and displacement also you can actually to that on our main object as well uh we want to get high quality renders um we don't need to activate the tessellation because we already have a lot of polygons on our main object actually 7 million so you know that's good uh also let's create the stone i'm gonna make a sphere i'm gonna call it stone before diving inside let's again activate distillation and displacement because i don't want to forget that let's make it bigger and bigger in this direction as well let's go with something like this uh okay yeah this this is fine we can use some vdb techniques here uh if you want to uh add more details you can just use this turn it into an iso offset again just adding some points copying and other spheres on top of it and changing it to a very high quality uh vdb and then bring it back to polygons and then adding like a mountain noise a mountain stop uh i'm just gonna use a mountain in here actually maybe i should do that yeah let's do that let's let's make it more interesting so we're gonna scatter 25 points for example i'm gonna copy this sphere make it a little smaller copy points let's take a look at randomize p scale uh dimensions to one and we're going to go with 0.5 okay this is good we're gonna merge these two together all right we're gonna vdp from polygons let's go with zero point zero one all right we're gonna smooth this at vdb smooth sdf we have to bring this to a very high value so we're going to go with gaussian it's going to be aggressive let's go with 3 in the filter boxer radius or 4 actually let's increase that to 5. let's bring the iterations up how would this look yeah this is pretty good you might want to increase this to like 55 or something okay this is nice and again turn this into polygon convert vdb let's take a look maybe this is uh too much yeah probably you can go with like two okay yeah this is good and again mountain maybe make the element size bigger and something like that okay yeah this is nice let's take a look at our camera okay can be better but i think it's good for what we want to do here you can also parent this to the camera so it rotates with the camera it doesn't really matter it's fine uh now let's do lighting so we're gonna have a big light in the background i don't like the space in here let's bring it back let's take a look it's small now so make it bigger right okay this looks good uh let's put one huge light in the background so we're going to go to our redshift tab and we're going to add our rs light i'm going to make it bigger because i want to have a big rim light on my object go to our slide i'm gonna place it for example in here i'm gonna uncheck the visible i don't wanna see it in my render i'm gonna call this rim yeah let's take a look at the render right now we assigned our materials here i think or yeah we have let's also create a material for our background and we're gonna go rs mat builder call it stone we're gonna apply this material to this stone material and our background it's going to be like a cave or something uh let's take a look at a render we're just going to take a look at our rim light i want to see how it would look let me bring my render view in here i forgot to save i hope i don't lose my file hopefully we didn't great let's just save it before we forget that all right let's go to our camera this is what we're seeing right now and it's not the best rim light so let's actually make it bigger okay this this looks nice as a rim light right we need other lights here though for example light coming from this side so another rs light let's zoom in i forgot to lock my camera again and let's go with something like that on this side and we're just gonna copy that go to the second one we're gonna rotate and we're gonna put it on this side as well so all right this is good this is our basic uh lighting setup just uh i'm just gonna put one on top as well because i know i'm gonna enable uh volumetrics so something like this let's look at it with an angle all right yeah this is this is good now onto our materials i'm just gonna save this i'm gonna hit this lock button i don't wanna do that we also need the light for the background before i forget that uh let's come here let's go to our background and angle like this i'm going to hit our slide again put it here it's got a bg light i'm going to select everything come to the light tab and check the visible and let's place this one why is that part so dark what's going on in here oh the angle it's the angle okay let's take a look at camera it should be fine okay yeah it is it was just a buck right yeah everything seems good we can tweak everything uh if we don't like it i do have a little bit of problem with my stone so i'm just gonna stop rendering put it down here and yeah let's change it i don't like it it's too smooth uh maybe it's a little bit more nice to the mountain why isn't anything happening here uh oh i think i added the noise to the background did i what's going on uh it's weird nothing is happening it's probably bug okay yeah it's fine so yeah okay this looks better yeah this is this is much better and maybe you want to add the transform node in here as well just bring it for example put back a little bit down maybe rotate it okay yeah this is this is nice much better go back go to our angle yeah i like that okay this looks great so let's do some shading i love shading it's awesome uh before doing that i'm gonna enable [Music] the bokeh effect let's take a look at our image just want to make sure my angle is correct and i'm seeing everything where did my uh render view go i think the scene is too heavy so we might get a crash right about now let's hit render view again see if it works it does not and i'm gonna crash okay uh i'll be back after the crash okay uh yeah everything is fine um let me [Music] activate my bokeh i'm gonna sorry i'm gonna focus on let's say here gonna change this circle of confusion to 0.1 maybe and yeah everything looks great disable the bokeh and check this uh focus picker thingy what's it called click to focus yeah focus picker thingy sounds better uh [Music] render we have stone we have everything set up and we set the material inside with the material now all right let's do shading so we're going to do some subsurface scattering and subsurface might be hard a little bit if you're not used to it but i'm going to try and explain everything as we go so i'm going to come to my material and bring everything down reflection uh diffuse everything and uh we had a number in our refractive refractive index i think it was 1.542 yeah that's nice i'm just going to leave it at this let's activate our subsurface so for activating that you're going to bring this scatter scale up and as we bring this up you can see we're getting something this is our scattering effect now right now it's not that interesting we want some color here now there are two ways uh you can use transmittance or extinction extinction is more physically correct let's take a look at it basically what extinction does is it's gonna take your color whatever color you give it for example something like this and it's gonna use the complement of that basically what happens is it's going to absorb this color whatever you're putting in here and it's going to give you the complement you can stick to this or you can just simply use transmittance in this version whatever color you put here it's going to be reflected in here so whatever you prefer i'm just gonna stick to extinction uh we want to get this red effect so i'm just gonna bring it here let's let's use this actually i think i'm changing the other one yeah i was all right this looks pretty good uh let's play with our values a little bit as you increase this you can see you're getting more or less scattering uh you can play with this extinction scale and basically this is what's going to give us the look that we want you can bring it up and as you can see it's going to get much more darker you can play with this as you make your extension color darker it's going to get lighter in here it's a little weird if it's too hard to understand you can just stick to transmittance and uh it's gonna be much more simpler uh for example as you bring this value down it's gonna get lighter it's gonna be artist friendly so whatever you want let's let's just use transmittance if it's simpler and we're going to bring the absorption scale up we can make this a very very light red and just play with this absorption skill so i kind of like this when i'm getting in here uh huh okay so let's come here we're gonna enable our reflections and also we're gonna enable refractions so this is what we're gonna get start out the box uh the highlights in the background are a little distracting so i'm just gonna come out here gonna go to my stone i'm gonna bring the roughness up yeah and also on my uh tiny uh crystals and bring the roughness up there as well all right let's look here we're getting some of the shapes that we want uh actually looks kind of nice i like this let's see let's play with this value a little bit more let's bring the scatter scale up you can also play with the other parameters in here for example you can bring the roughness up it's a more rough uh crystal mineral and i kind of like that so let's bring this to here for example [Music] you can add like a tint to your reflection color let's see let's bring this value more up and yeah we're kind of getting the look that we wanted this is the uh my render and let's just compare it the colors seem correct but it's not as exciting why is that it's because we want to make some parts non-uh refractive just solid geometry so rs material blender all right we're gonna [Music] use a material node in here let's take a look at this uh second one i'm gonna make it something like this make it even darker uh what else actually let's change it a little bit something like that yeah make it rough very rough and yeah we're basically there all right next thing we're gonna add here is some displacement because this is just too smooth rs displacement we're gonna connect displacement to displacement we're going to use a tiny value like 0.05 maybe let's save it we're going to use a maximum noise and i'm just going to connect this maximum noise in here uh in my own setup i think i use booyah yeah i use booyah let's take a look at the booyah noise without connecting it here let's just see how it's going to look we're going to change the scale we're going to manipulate it and when we're happy we're going to use that for driving this material blender and also we're going to use it for the displacement so it's going to look nice let's add some octaves here and let's yeah let's stretch it in this direction yeah i like that and let's make the overall noise even bigger okay yeah this is nice this is really nice i'm gonna use that for driving my blend node and connect it to the surface let's see how it's gonna look maybe it's a little dark so i have to increase that i'm not sure let's just take a look at everything combined together so let's connect our displacement and see how it looks i don't know if you can hear it but my pc is going crazy making a lot of noises uh let's see kind of looks nice uh i i'm still not really happy with the uh values i put in here also i'm not very happy with my lighting so i might change that i might add a increase the size for which one for the one on the right side let's name them so this is gonna be our key light the one on the left side is yeah let's make it our fill light so i have to increase the size on this and this one and increase the intensity on the key light uh this is the light from top so this is the volumetric so we're going to call it wall the key light we're going to bring it closer to our object let's see i'm going to add a little bit of intensity in here okay fill light we're going to make it bigger minus 2.3 all right yeah we're getting there okay now it's starting to look good so uh fill light let's bring it to this side all right let's make it bigger let's bring it back let's make it bigger let's bring it to the side yeah i'm also thinking maybe i should make this one my key light because let's instead of doing that i'm just gonna call this one left and i'm going to call this one right whichever is the key light it's the key light oh all right so make the right one a little bigger as well all right yeah i like this um i'm just gonna hold ctrl down and let's take a look at here i don't like what's happening in here so let's bring the displacement down to 0.025 uh you can actually just instead of using the noise like this use another noise instead of using the same one as you're putting in your blend color i don't understand what's going on in here i think see let's see what's going on there where are we it's here in the center oh that's not from okay yeah that's fine okay yeah all right this looks fine i just noticed uh it's sticking out our background is not covering everything so i'm just gonna make it a little bigger and there we go it's fine all right our scene is a little empty and doesn't really look nice right now so let's work on the stone and after that we're gonna go to the tiny crystals all right so for this material it's pretty simple uh it's just a bunch of noise connected to each other so uh let's make this one darker something like this all right we need to increase the light on the background it's too dark right now um yeah let's put down a material blender copy this connect it here and max on noise let's look at the noise i'm gonna use um fbm probably yeah fbm looks nice let's make it bigger let's also get some parts of it bring the low clip up make it a little bigger yeah something like that um now let's add some colors so let's connect this one the second material let's see make it dark brown or something how would this look yeah actually looks kind of nice so let's see everything together okay it's starting to look more interesting uh we're gonna keep doing that let's also add a little bit of a bump here so i'm just gonna use this maximum noise that i have i'm going to use a rs bump map connect it not to over overall color connect it to bump input maybe play with the value i don't know we're gonna have to take a look let me just update my scene hopefully houdini won't crash okay yeah i think i need to add some contrast in here because it's just too much i'm just losing material that i had uh something like this probably our scene is a little heavy so i might have to go back to my mineral and just bring it down since i'm recording it's getting so slow uh yeah that looks fine i'm also going to [Music] just keep doing that yeah let's uh add another material in here matt and another axon noise let's check the maxon noise individually uh let's see what's we're doing there actually uh yeah instead of a maximum noise let's use a curvature note i think it's going to look nice let's see let's go with 0.01 too much 0.025 good maybe actually a little bit more 0.35 okay and just connect it here we're gonna use this to create some highlights probably in the color i actually kind of liked what we're having here this white color i i just don't like the reflection so let's bring it up i'm gonna make it even wider something like that yeah that's actually very interesting i like that now our background is just too dark right now so let's take a look at the light which one was it it was this one uh bg light yeah make it a little bigger okay i think i also disabled the bokeh effect yeah so we can activate it right now um yeah thanks pretty good make it even bigger yeah this looks kind of nice i like that you can play with the color as well activate our bokeh since we wanna look at our final image looks good i like it let's work on our uh tiny uh crystals so tiny crystals are pretty simple it's basically the same workflow we're just gonna create a refractive material and just increase the subsurface values here i'm just gonna bring the diffuse value down and let me save it before bringing the this value down as well uh let's see what can we do here let's just enable our scatter and i want to make these parts oh not that much let's make it bring it down i still want them to be red but i want i don't want to want them to be like this this is too much uh this is too dark i want these to be lighter i'm also going to enable my refraction because it's a crystal maybe also enable my reflection we can just judge everything together i'm gonna create a selection in here and let's take a look at this part something like this okay um some color to it maybe play with this absorption scale you can bring it all the way up and have like very shiny parts in here kind of want to keep it a little bit down uh let's see maybe bring the scatter scale up as you can see as you bring the scatter scale up you're moving uh your uh basically the subsurface and it's gonna have different results here uh okay yeah this this looks kind of nice i like that if you increase this it's it's going to make it darker the absorption scale let's let's leave it at something like this and in ior i'm going to increase it to 1.6 all right let's take a look at everything together i'll let it render for a little bit and see how things look uh i don't like this part it's too dark i need to add some color in here also maybe uh i should increase the this value for the subsurface scattering on my main geo here as well yeah let's do that bring it up bring this value down a little bit okay yeah this looks better um somewhere like here maybe ah the booyah noise let's just offset it all right let's uh change the lighting a little bit i want to have more highlights in here so in my volumetric light i haven't activated that so let's take a look at that one we're going to go to our redshift before doing that let's go to redshift tab in system i'm going to enable automatic sampling and optics rt on supported gpu global illumination i forgot to enable that so actually before activating the volumetric scattering let's take a look at our global illumination i and it's actually going to help a lot i think my houdini is so slow today i don't know why i'm just gonna take a screenshot from what we have right now let's set it render for a couple of seconds all right that's enough let's enable brute force and brute force and let's take a look actually not getting much of a different image out of it okay let's let's edit the light i don't like it uh when it comes to rendering uh especially with subsurface you have to play with everything and just uh change everything make it bigger make it smaller change the angle that sort of stuff i'm just gonna bring this one closer and we are getting something starting to look interesting uh i want to increase the intensity also before i forget again i want to include volumetric scattering here let's go to my light i'm going to increase the contribution scale all right we're getting somewhere i'm going to bring this spread and go down okay yeah i mean it's very different uh with what i had in my setup but i kind of like it let's do it like this all right we have to play with our values a little bit more uh set it to here i'm not seeing my cracks in here so i might have to render this uh let it render a full render and look at my cracks in here i'm getting something in here but i don't really like that it doesn't look as good i also don't like this orange i'm going to change that not tiny geo material let's make it darker let's go with something like that all right looks better main geo material i'm gonna play with this value the absorption scale and bring it up i'm also going to go to my background light the rim light increase the scale a little bit more maybe i shouldn't have brought this scatter the uh volume light in here so let's just bring it up let's see it's starting to look better uh i still prefer my own version over this i also don't know for some reason we're not getting as much details in here so let's take a look it's just too bright i don't like that i actually think the resolution is too much on the main geometry so i'm just gonna pause my rendering i'm gonna come here where did i set that up polygons yeah this this is a little bit much so let's go with 0.01 i think it's going to look better all right let's smooth it zero seven five maybe yeah probably this is gonna look better also maybe just uh play with these because i might need more and change the center all right let's take a look now seems pretty good i'm just going to increase this value because i feel like maybe we had too much breakup in our section in our uh geometry oh this is getting too long this video well it's fine we're gonna just wait for it and let's turn it into a vdb this looks good let's take a look at our shatter it's gonna take a while all right so maybe actually uh let's take a look inside maybe we need more more grits here for the shatter again it's going to take a while to do that all right let me take a look on the inside right now it might be actually too much i don't know uh let's come here let's simulate our object let's go for like 24 frames or something yeah good change turn it into vdbs okay let's see how it looks right now i'm not happy with my lighting setup i think oh why is this thing looking at my background i don't understand didn't i set it to my object i mean it's not gonna be very important but it's weird and why is it minus sight it's weird all right yeah i realized what happened i i turned it to a small number on the minus side and it was rotating towards the object all right i'm just going to disable all these lights especially the volumetric i don't want to see that let's hit render again and see how they look you also need displacement on the tiny crystals so don't forget that okay yeah it's actually starting to look much better let's go to the this material i'm gonna bring this value down something like this looked a little weird yeah it's starting to look much much better all right what else can we do here to improve the setup maybe increase the displacement let's take a look at our displacement here very quick i think i have to make it bigger kind of these parts don't look really nice let's just change the offset yeah i think this is gonna look better maybe increase the set scale as well see oh no no no no what if we do it like this might actually be fun it is not it is not fun okay yeah let's just go with this one uh and connect this gonna take a look at my subsurface again let's play with the values a little bit more i'm still not happy with what i'm getting maybe make it brighter some saturation here bring this value down the tiny crystals look really nice here so i really like that i'm still not the biggest fan of these ones so i might actually remove them all together you can keep playing with your stone you can keep playing with your setup i'm still not getting the cracks i don't know why they don't look as good let's go to the roughness let's bring the roughness down a little bit maybe bring the reflection weight as well you can actually add your diffuse it doesn't really matter at this point you can make it like a dark value like a red value something like this just in case if you're getting any reflection uh you can increase this color change it to something with like a red tint starting to look better maybe too red so bring it down maybe less scattering look better all right this doesn't look good i don't like it i have to figure it out give me a couple of seconds and i will be right back all right so i changed a bunch of stuff and it it looks much better now i'm getting the result that i wanted i'm getting these cracks in here they look nice i'm gonna show you what i did first of all i changed the lighting a little bit it's basically the most important thing i brought this rim light excuse me i brought the rim light closer i also changed the angle on my lights i disabled this volumetric light i also rotated this slide for the background it looks much better now i also changed the material in the stone i added this second color layer to the first node basically this is what i'm getting out of it if i just connect it directly to my output uh i added these tiny color changes here uh one of them is this grayish tone one of them is this one has kind of a little bit of orange in it very dark orange then i just add them into my material uh blender and it looks kind of nice it's very different than what i had in my render but this one is actually more physically correct because uh if you take a look at our uh references they are the uh velomite actually sits on uh lighter stones i don't know what uh the term for it is i just looked at our references let me bring the reference back yeah if it's something like this as you can see they're lighter so yeah also i played with the absorption scale here i brought the reflection down a little bit i uh brought this value up i changed it into a uh another hue of red i think this is kind of like what i had in my setup i'm still not happy about the boxes i feel like there are too much happening here and i don't really like them uh i'm going to go back to my setup and play with those a little bit but uh we are kind of done like this is our setup we can just add the bloom effect on top of it bring this value up bring this threshold down and you can see this reflection is not very good so we have to play with the lights again it's kind of a back and forth you have to fix everything then something else breaks you have to fix that i think the rim light is causing that so let's just go to the rim light and let's give it an angle like this maybe it's not actually see if i look up okay it is uh let's change it let's bring it to somewhere like here maybe something like this in all honesty if it's actually too much uh first of all you can come to your room light here go to objects and just exclude the stone object so this hat symbol and we're going to say stone our recording yeah and we exclude that but i think it makes it a little you know weird to look at the light and right now it's actually much more realistic you can also go to your geo go to your stone and for example this one bring the reflection weight down this one as well and technically you won't be getting so much reflection out of stone so this is actually better yeah something like this it is starting to look better uh i feel like we need a light from this angle also maybe rotate this to something like this the rim light it's probably going to give us better results yes maybe bring it a little bit back like this let's see i'm just gonna disable bloom for now i'm gonna enable it later all right uh let's go to our light on the right side i'm gonna bring it back yeah make this part a little darker it looks much better how about the left side bring this one back a little bit as well maybe rotate it a little bit towards the front yeah okay uh the pg light okay where is it it's this one let's make it a little bigger okay yeah that's that's nicer what else what else we still have this light coming from top i have disabled it but i can re-enable it and we can add some volumetrics in here it's up to you if you want to keep it that way or not you can also add some temperature make it something like this kind of looks nice uh let's set this thing to render and let's see the results if we don't like it we can just change everything again i do want to change the tiny crystals and actually bring this value up because i feel like maybe it's too much it did they look too much like a square yeah let's bring that up also i did forget to include uh yeah this is much better uh i forgot to add the displacement for tiny crystals so let's just bring it in here gonna connect it like that i'm gonna change the offset yeah this is good and bring the value down 0.05 is too much 0.02 maybe okay let's go back to our mineral i still don't like these these shapes i think we have too much boxes so too much visible boxes you know that's the problem so i'm just gonna come here and add a thousand i think it's gonna get fixed also let's skip this one to one yeah this is this is better i think it's better i'm just gonna save it i'm gonna go to my final note i'm gonna let it cook okay let's take a look now i think it looks better i'm not sure i have to check my render you might want to consider making these cubes taller right now they're too uniformed so maybe maybe we need to do that as well let's take a look as you can see it's just a back and forth you have to keep editing things and then just go back change something else your setup goes crazy you have to bring everything back it's a fun back and forth i like it it's interesting uh-huh let's see yeah this one looks pretty good to me so let's take a look at our setup our uh angle here might wanna actually change the or is it the seed oh that's nice this is also nice yeah we should have done this earlier okay yeah i like this this is much better again we're gonna come here to our pubnet we're gonna let it cook so slow but this one was nice as well i kind of liked it all right yeah this is definitely better this is what i had in mind let's uh play this 24. we don't need the rest of it let's take a look uh-huh right like that over grouped it uh let me see [Music] yeah this is nice this is pretty good let's also do the shattering again it's gonna take some time okay and our final oh the time shift the time shift is still making the old one we're just gonna have to disable and re-enable it the time shift was set to the previous uh previous setup okay yeah this this is this is pretty good i like that take a look at the i really like the rock here looks fantastic let's take a look at our render yeah this is nice this is very nice i liked it we have our main shape here we have our crystals scattered here we have displacement on top of them i think did i enable it yes it's enabled uh i had a displacement here as well a tiny bit of displacement in all honesty maybe i need more on my main geo i think it's not enough uh let's see it actually set to 0.1 should be enough i have a feeling i'm not actually getting the displacement i don't know why let me test this 0.5 okay we are getting the displacement but it's very tiny it kind of looks cool though let's go with 0.2 it's probably because of this uh noise that we have in here maybe we should add a little bit of a cycle to it a little bit more this is not nice i don't like this okay yeah this is much better i'm gonna bring the scale down okay yeah this is good 0.075 maybe it is a little too too much in here let's just play with this go back to zero have a look in here maybe booyah is not the best noise here let's go with fbm let's see how that might look bring this value up the low clip okay uh i'm gonna do this i'm gonna keep this one for my displacement and i'm gonna copy it and create another one for my uh material blend i'm just going to use the same booyah that i had there i think i'm getting the displacement now it's starting to look better let me have a look maybe actually switch them so or not yeah i think it's starting to look much better now 0.1 let's have a look let's not distort it that much let's go with 25. see starting to look better let's go with 10 yeah i think this is gonna look nice i'm just gonna let it render and if it was good and it's good and if it wasn't we're gonna keep editing it okay so i let that one render and i was still not happy with the results so i just deleted every material and set it up from scratch again it is the same technique so i'm just gonna walk you through the materials uh and this thing is being rendered as we speak and we can take a look at what's happening so the setup for the main material is still the same the only thing i changed is i actually included another maximum noise here for the uh reflection roughness i think it actually helped a lot with our setup uh especially adding these highlights here and there they actually look really nice uh we were missing that in our original setup and again i'm just using a simple material for my second material here with a reflection set roughness set to one i didn't change anything on this material i added the maxon noise i again i use the booyah with a overall scale of 10 and a scale of 100 in the y value and a displacement of 0.05 i think it it looked really good uh let's take a look at our subsurface in our main material by the way i brought the ior back to 1.5 it was fine i'm just using a transmittance color with this value you can just copy these values uh absorption scale of 36.1 i play with it and this one seemed better and a scatter scale of 0.31 and the setup look really good as you can see it's actually very similar to the original render that i had for the second material i used the same technique i just used a transmittance color again very near red but not quite there a very light color i brought the absorption scale down it's not as high as the other uh geo and a scatter scale of 0.55 and that's it i played a little bit with the lighting again uh and yeah that's it uh this light again it's facing the other side i don't know why uh i'm just gonna change it i think it's gonna stop the rendering i think or maybe not i think it's fine uh yeah and we're gonna wait until the render is ready again uh you have to play with the values you can just replicate what i have in here and you might still have to play with it because if you change one tiny thing when you're working with subsurface everything is going to look different i would encourage you to play with other shapes other setups you can instead of doing it like this you can just use one uh cube and make it very long and then copy them on top of each other they're gonna look really nice and just use one floating crystal it's gonna look nice it's gonna be good and yeah we're gonna wait until this render finishes we can also include the bloom from here the value is too big bring it down we're getting this highlight in here so if you don't want to have that just don't enable that maybe play with the lighting a little bit more so you get better results there clearly the light that's coming from the right side is affecting that part of the geometry so just maybe play with that make it smaller make it bigger see which one works better all right i'm just gonna end it here we're gonna wait for this render to finish of course i'm gonna include that in the tutorial and yeah that's it see you soon and it's finally done wow this was a very long tutorial but i think it was worth it and we finally finished this i really like the colors here i really like these cracks they look so real and you can just do some color lookups there are some great ones in here for example like this one looks nice also [Music] maybe this one i really like that uh this one looks really nice depending on your taste and the color palette that you're going for of course you can use different colors i kind of wanted to go with red but it's up to you let's go with just gonna go back to one of the first ones i kind of like this one i'm gonna bring the strength down you can do some color corrections in here you can do some exposure photography exposure for example i don't know increase the shutter time ratio something like this maybe 12 12 is too much i don't know nine you can add some igniting you can start crushing the blacks if you want i'm just gonna turn it off i don't want to do that you can include bloom uh i'm not the biggest fan of this highlight in here so you might wanna redo that part uh increase this increase the softness now maybe something like this i don't know you can also include uh streaks might look nice especially if you're like going with a very clear mineral it might actually be really nice and yeah that's it we're done we're just going to save this and i'm going to end the tutorial here i'm going to include all the mistakes i made along this tutorial because i think you need to see that i think it's actually really helpful to see the actual process like going back and forth editing the values i could have just easily used my uh pre-made setup the one i already had but i think this works better actually seeing what's happening here and judging it uh as we go forward and just changing values i am going to include this hip file you can just download it follow along i will include the new materials these two uh we can just use them if you want we don't need that and yeah if you make anything using this setup please let me know uh i'd love to see your results uh and yeah that's it uh thank you for joining me here today and i hope you have a wonderful day bye bye [Music]

Channel: Motion Designers Community

Views: 9,585

Keywords: motion designers community, tutorial, motion design, video, copilot, greyscale gorilla, greyscalegorilla, eyedesyn, brograph

Id: YlGAPbhStdY

Length: 116min 39sec (6999 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 05 2021