How To Create A Daredevil Inspired Liquid Pouring Effect Using X Particles Infectio, Cinema4D Octane

what's up artists my name's Ryan Talbott and today I'm going to be showing you how to use the X particles and effectual modifier to create some detail of gold dripping effects inspired by the daredevil intro then I'll show you how I created the gold material in octane and finally an overview of my comping process in After Effects let's do it Before we jump into cinema 4d I just wanted to go over a couple of the inspirations for this project so the first one is this Cartier ad that was created by the mill it's got this really cool underwater atmosphere where you got these volumetric light rays and all these golden particles that are floating in the air so that's really cool and then obviously the effects that we're trying to recreate here is this liquid pouring effect from the daredevil intro and I think what's really unique about this is that the liquid is being poured over extremely detailed models and they managed to maintain that level of detail even though it's a fluid simulation which is really cool if you actually go read about this intro you can see that they did use real flow but there's a little paragraph down here where they mentioned that they actually developed custom fields to get the fluids to flow the way they needed them to they also remesh multiple Sims together and played with the worldspace scale to cheat speed so the way I interpret developing custom fields is that this might not be something that you can actually do out of the box with real flow and that's why I'm gonna try and do this in X particles as opposed to real flow today alright one more thing we need to get out of the way before we get started is how to get the infection modifier so you need the early access version of X particles 4 in order to access it and the way you do that is a little bit convoluted in my opinion but here's what you got to do there is a download link that you got when you first ordered X particles I ordered it through greyscale gorilla so it's in an email I got from them and this is the link that I first downloaded this from almost a year ago so you have to go back and find that email and find this big long number at the end to that link so you take this big long number you copy it and then you replace it right here once you have that you copy this whole link with your download number and you paste it into your browser once you do that it should send you a verification email and then it'll download it for you so here I have a mannequin model which I purchased off of CG trader comm and the first thing you want to do is head up to X particles and drop in an XP system then you want to head over to your emitter and you want to change your emitter shape here from rectangle to objects and under the object you want to select your mannequin and now if we head back to the start and hit play we should get a bunch of particles shooting out of our mannequin now let's turn off our mannequin now let's head over to our mission tab and let's changes from rate to shot that way when we replay this the particles shoot from frame 1 and that's it the next thing we want to change is the particle speed right now it's set to 150 let's change that to zero and if we play that back now our particles freeze the second they spawn what we're essentially doing is we're building the mesh of this model through particles so the higher particle count you have the more detailed of a simulation you can create so for now let's turn up our particle count to 200,000 I'm gonna bump those numbers up those are rookie numbers in this racket and just be careful that you type the right number of zeros in there one too many could crash X particles and cinema4d so let's reset that and play it one more time and now you can see we have more particles but they're they're emitting in the polygon Center so let's head back over to our object tab right here and let's change our emit from polygon Center to polygon area and let's replay that one more time and now you can see the particles are evenly distributed across our model now it looks a little creepy to have these two spheres for the eyeballs in there so I'm gonna go ahead and turn back on our mannequin for a second head into face mode and then uf and then i can just click on these polygons right here and hit delete and delete those eye-sockets cool so now if i turn off our mannequin once more reset our particles those are gone so the next thing we want to do is set up our infection modifier let's head over to modifiers and under control modifiers let's choose infect show so by default the color mode is set to fixed value we want to change this to use groups when we do this we're going to be asked for an incubating group and an infected group so if we head up to our groups up here and then we click create group we have particle Group one I'm going to rename this to incubating and then I'm just going to control drag to duplicate that and change this one to infected and now let's change the color down here to red that way we can differentiate the two groups from each other so if you head back into our infection modifier let's drop our infected group into the infected slot and our incubating group into the incubating slot now nothing's going to happen yet because what we need to do is create a new seed object so if I click on this button we get a seed object and that will spawn way down here at the bottom so let's grab that bad boy and let's move that all the way up to the top now we want this to intersect with our particles and so I'm gonna move this to the top of the head where we want our particles to start forming or infecting and let's play this back so now you can see our particles start flying off into the distance and that's because we need to change our group settings so under infected you can see we have our own particle speed and radius this is almost like an emitter but it's not an emitter so we can change this to zero and let's do the same thing for our incubating group and now the speed should not change and if we hit play one more time our particles are now infecting from the top and they're not moving the problem now is that they're all in affecting at the same rate the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to head over to our infected group and I'm going to change the editor display two squares I'm going to do the same thing for our incubating group right here and our emitter so if I head over to display I can go from dots to squares and now let's reset that and play back so now we can actually see our infection much better now comes the fun part we are in our emitter in the display tab and underneath editor display we have color mode so what we want to do is we want to change this from single color to use shader now what we're about to do is we're going to control the rate of infection with a noise pattern so the darker particles are going to infect slower and the bright particles are going to infect faster so let's put a noise pattern in here and let's click on that and I'll make this window a little bit bigger and I'm gonna crank up that contrast and I'm going to turn up the global scale to maybe 500 percents and I'm gonna stretch it on the y-axis by 300 just to start and now let's reset that and see what happens all right the particles are now infecting in a cool pattern which almost looks like liquid pouring down now why don't we throw this in a VDD measure to see what our mesh is gonna look like so under generators I'm going to choose V DB measure right here and if we scroll down we have a list of sources which is currently empty so let's throw our infected group in here and now you can see we got this marshmallow blob this wonderful blob going on and that's because our point radius is way too big so let's come to our point radius right here and let's change this to 1 and you can see it completely disappears because our voxel size editor is bigger than the point radius so let's make our voxel size editor one also and now we got our particles back cool so let's play this and it definitely does not look like liquid yet so we want to come over to this filters tab right here and we're gonna check use filters so this is gonna smooth out these particles and you see we got a median filter by default which is alright but we're actually going to delete that and we're gonna add a Gaussian filter and you can see that really smooths it out now I'm going to share my solution to you with a very common problem that I found using the infection with of measure and that is this ugly stepping effect that you get from frame to frame and there's a couple things you can do to solve this problem the first thing is if you head over to your infection fire you want to change this incue bation multiplier from 1 to 5 and what this does is this actually speeds up your infection and by speeding up the infection that makes that stepping effect disappear the other thing you want to do is go to mode and then go to project and there's a tab for X particles right here and there's this thing called subframe steps if you turn this up to 2 now it's going to be calculating in between your frames as well and this will result in a smoother motion with those 2 things changed I'm gonna reset it and let's play it back one more time and you can see it's infecting much faster now now would be a good time to increment and save your project if that's not something you're in the habit of doing I highly recommend it just go up to file save incremental then it will just duplicate your document and add a little 0 0 0 1 to it that way if all hell breaks loose your file gets corrupted or you don't know how to get back you do some crazy undoable action you always have the old version to go back to so first things first I'm gonna go back up to my emitter and let's crank this up to 1 million particles so I'm just making sure I got 6 zeros in there and let's reset that and it's gonna lag a little bit and we'll let that play out but you see our liquid is already a much thinner I went back and adjusted some settings to refine the look a little bit more and the first thing I did was if we head back into our noise pattern I actually lowered the the white brightness to 85% right here and what that will do is just slow down the entire infection I also increased the scale to 600 percent and then I stretched out the Y to 1000% so that we get these nice long streaks running down the body the other thing I did if we take a look at our mesh in the VDB measure is I layered up a few different Gaussian filters and the reason I did that is because if you just use one Gaussian filter and then you turn up the number what happens is it kind of eats away at the entire mesh and that's how you lose the detail really quickly so the first one I just set two iterations to width two but then if you layer another Gaussian on top of that it rounds out the existing details rather than eating away at the entire mesh so the more Gaussian filters you layer up the more detail you can get while smoothing it out so I found that three was a good number you can't really tell yet because we can't play this back in real-time but once it renders you're gonna see that it's infecting really fast so one way to control the speed of the infection is to head over to infect show and decrease the search radius so for my final render I had that set to 5 another thing to note is the infected particle lifespan you want to crank up this number really high that way your particles don't die out halfway through your animation if we head over to the general tab and scroll down we can see that I also added the incubating group as a source for the VDB measure and I set this to difference mode so it's subtracting the incubating particles from the infected particles so if I set this back to Union you can see now it's including them I think now it'd be a good time to set up our first cache that way we can play this back and see what its gonna look like and this is sort of a stage where you're going to be caching it playing it back seeing what needs to be tweaked tweaking the settings and then re caching it and sort of repeating that process over and over again so I'm just gonna show you how to set up your cache and you do that under other objects XP cache and right here under folder you want to make sure that you save this to a place where you can easily access it like in your project file so I'm gonna go down to my tutorial file and I already made a folder in here called XP cache so I'm just gonna make sure it's saving in that folder and hit OK and the other thing is I'm gonna make sure that my timeline is set to the number of frames I want to cache so right now it's set to 50 and that's because we don't want to wait around for two hours for 300 frames to cache and then find out that we need to change the settings and re cache it anyways so you could usually tell within the first 50 frames what what you need to adjust so I'm just gonna hit build cache and it's gonna ask me if I want to override it because I already did do a cache and I'm just gonna hit yes and it's gonna start caching a few moments later alright so our cache is finished and now we can we can play it back we can rewind it and we can see that it's cached but in order to see this in real time we need to make a preview and before we do that I'm actually going to turn off all these distracting particles so that all we see is the mesh and then I'm gonna hit alt B and that's going to bring up my make preview command and by default it might be set to a full render we don't want to use that because then it's gonna use all of our final render settings and that's going to take a really long time so I'm gonna set that to Hardware preview I got my preview range selected I got mp4 format and 1920 by 1080p all those settings look good so I'm gonna hit OK and now we're gonna see this little calculating preview icon and you can see it's calculating right there and boom it's already done so let's see what this looks like cool I went ahead and I cashed a little bit more of the animation and I'm pretty happy with how how it's looking so let's set up a nice camera movement in here now there's this trick that I like to use camera drink where if you hit the mouse button you get your four orthographic views and so I actually like to go into this second one right here change the display back to quick shading and then set the camera to perspective and now what I have here is a secondary viewport and why this is really helpful is because I can now set up my camera in this first viewport and look through it and then I can head over to my second view and I can navigate through the scene without touching my camera now if I load up my octane preset and I'll enable my live viewer and now you can see I'm navigating around the scene but my octane View is staying the same so oops I can drop a cube in here I can add some lights to the scene and I can I can adjust these lights around and move everything in my scene without actually changing the camera angle camera drink now we can start to build our material and block the lighting in so I'm just gonna grab this octane glossy material and I'm gonna change the diffuse to black and then I'm going to change the specular to a hue of 27 saturation 41 and a value of 100 and then if I come down and bring up the index to 8 now we got this metallic material so I can drop this onto my head and now we can start blocking in the lighting I'm gonna come up to objects and bring in an HDR eye environment and I'll rename that real quick and in the image texture I'm going to load in this HDR studio which I got from polygon comm and now you can see we got these nice reflections the next thing I want to do is actually remove the HDR eye from the backdrop that way it's only being used for reflections so I'm going to duplicate my HDRI and name this one visible and then I'm going to come over to the tag right here and I'm going to change this to an RGB spectrum bring it to black and then under type I'm gonna change it from primary to visible and now we have a nice black background but our HDR is still being used for reflection the next thing I'm going to do is just drop in a plane down here and I'm gonna scale this up until we can start to see the reflection in our manikin then I'm going to add an octane object tag to that and in the visibility tab just uncheck camera visibility now if I come over to my glossy material right here I'm just gonna turn up the roughness temporarily so I can see what the lighting is looking like the next thing I'm gonna want to do is add an octane camera tag to my camera and under post-processing I'm going to enable that and turn up the bloom to something like 20 this always looks really nice with metallic materials on black backgrounds especially the next thing I might want to add is a nice rim light so I'm gonna grab my octane targeted area light and I'm gonna grab this null right here that it created and I'm gonna move it up to where we want our light to actually point towards now I'll grab my light and I'll move that up as well and and let's move it somewhere behind the head add a nice angle maybe back a little bit more and I might even make the light thin and stretch it out like that too to create this elongated tube and now if I come over here I can turn up the power even more and turn down the temperature to get some nice warm lighting the last thing I'm going to do for this step is I'm going to come to my octane settings and I'm going to change the colonel's from direct lighting to path tracing so if I actually compare this real quickly and then change it to path tracing you can see on the left way of path tracing and on the right we have direct lighting so this fills in the shadows especially on the inside of our model next we're gonna build our swirl material and then we can come back and tweak the lighting once we see what our swirls are gonna look like next I want to get into how I created the gold swirl material and to do that I need to mention this guy he goes by mankind on Instagram but his real name is Rhett Dashwood and he created the series a while ago called sorbet tumors where he created these really cool acrylic photo textures and he was even kind enough to put these up online for free so I went ahead and I downloaded these I'll include the the link to this as well in the description and this is what they look like and for my gold swirl material what I ended up using was this image right here now the only issue is that these images do not come tileable so I had to create the tileable version myself in Photoshop since there are plenty of YouTube tutorials out there on how to create a tileable texture I'm just going to go over it briefly the first thing you want to do is go up to filter other offset and what you want to do is offset it by half the number of pixels as your original image so because mine is 3 to 6 4 by 2 4 4 8 I'm offsetting it by 16 32 and 1/2 to 4 so I'll hit OK and all we have to do now is create a new layer and pretty much cover up these seams there's a couple ways to do this the first one is to take your smudge tool and literally smudge across over the seams like so another way to do it is using the clone stamp tool and for example cloning this area right here and then just going over the seam another thing that's really important is never to go over the edge of your image once you do that then you are breaking the tile so you want to get as close as humanly possible without actually painting over the edge all right so now you should have something kind of like this this is what we had before and this is what we ended up with now and now I can go up and export this as a PNG and add it to my tileable textures so to animate this texture what I did was I put a displacement map on this using fractal noise so I hit control Y to create a new solid and then I'm just gonna type in fractal noise up here and drag that onto my layer now I'm going to change the fractal type from basic to swirly so we get that swirl look and from soft linear to spline then I'm going to go into transform and scale this up to 500 from there I'm going to turn down the complexity from 6 to 1 and instead of animating the evolution we're just going to offset the turbulence so I'm going to hit the stopwatch and we're gonna start at 5,000 and then I'm gonna go all the way to the end and make this zero so now we should have something that looks like this the next step is to pre compose this with shift ctrl C and I'll name this fractal noise and I'll hit OK and now if we jump inside that comp let's create a new layer hit OK and I'm going to fill this with black now I'm going to mask off the center bit something like that and I'm going to invert this mask that way the edges are completely black and then we're gonna feather this out and we are going to change the mask expansion until we know that all of our edges are completely black this prevents the animation from breaking our tileable texture by only displacing the areas in the center so if we head back I'm going to turn off this layer and I'm going to type in displacement map and we're gonna drag that on to our tile bulb image and we're going to set the layered fractal noise set to it effects and masks and we're going to turn this up to something like 100 and 100 and now let's see what happens we get this edge on the top and the left which we don't want so we're just gonna check rap pixels around and now you can see it is tileable once again one thing I forgot to do if we jump back into our fractal noise I'm gonna create a new layer with ctrl Y hit OK and then I'm gonna make this an adjustment layer so now if I type fast blur in here I'll drag this on to our layer and I'm just gonna turn this up to something like 38 and now that just blurs out our fractal noise that way we don't get these harsh edges in the displacement and it looks a little bit cleaner so once you're happy with all those settings you can hit ctrl M and cue this up and export it as a PNG sequence or a JPEG sequence if you want to save some hard drive space hit OK and now you got an animated texture now that we're back in cinema let's start plugging in our swirl material so I'm going to open up the note editor and then I'm gonna navigate to my acrylic texture folder right here and I'm just gonna drag in this first image and I know that my sequence is 719 frames long so if we head over to our animation tab I'll type that in as our end frame and I'm going to change our movie frame rate to 24 next I'll plug this into our roughness map and head over to editor and check animated preview now you'll notice not much is happening at first that's because we need to change our texture tag settings from UV mapping to cubic so if we reload this now we can see our swirls but it's too big so I'm gonna scale this down from 100 to 50% and let's reload that one more time and now you can see that's about the right amount of detail I would like the next thing I'm noticing is that the floor reflection right here is actually pretty distracting so I'm going to create an octane diffuse material and I'm just gonna change the color to somewhere in the middle to lower the brightness of that and then I'm just gonna drag that onto our floor and I can see our reflection is much more subtle there's actually a bit more to the material than I just showed you so I'm just gonna hop over to my finished material and do my best to explain the node tree to you and then in addition I'll upload the material so anybody can download it and use it in their own projects if they wish so with this material this is what the node tree looks like you can see the only three channels I'm using are the specular roughness and the normal that's it for the specular all I have here is my image texture which is the swirls piped into a gradient that way I can change the color to this goldish tan and then that's piped into my specular for the roughness same exact setup except I'm bypassing that gradient altogether and just piping the image texture directly into my roughness the normal map is where things get a little complicated basically all these mixed textures are adding in another layer to my normal map so if we start at the beginning I use this car flake shader which is just a normal map used for cars I have two iterations of that I rename this one flakes small and this one is just flakes might as well rename that two flakes large because that's what it is and then those two are being combined into this mixed texture which I renamed car flakes the amount is being controlled by a noise that way some areas you see the small version in some areas you see the large version and that also helps break up the tiling from there I mixed in this smudge map which I got for free from the French monkeys website same deal here the amount is being controlled by a noise that way the smudge map pokes through in some areas and then the car flakes through in other areas from there I wanted to take down the strength of my normal so I mixed in this flat gradient so all the gradient is is a single color which emulates a flat normal map then for the amounts I just mix that in by point to the next thing I wanted to mix in from here is our swirls map so I'm using the same exact node that way I don't have to duplicate a bunch of times and I'm just bringing it down here into this color correction node which I renamed to strength and I renamed it that way because all I did was bring down the brightness of our image texture before piping it into the amount now I did not put a second texture in this mixed texture because all I wanted to do was have my normal map show up inside the swirls so instead of a mixed texture this acts more like a mask finally I wanted to take down the overall strength of my normal that now that I have it set up so I did the same thing here with a gradient and a single color basically acting as a flat normal map and then I just mixed that in right here you can see and that's my material folks another thing to note is that lighting is everything with metallic materials without an HDR I in hand placed lights around your metallic objects nobody's going to know what your shader really looks like so this is without any lighting and then this is with just an HDR eye and then this is with the hand placed lights on as well and if I jump over to my second view you can see what those all look like all right so I thought I'd share with you a little bit of my comping process and After Effects so you know I added a couple of assets on top of here just to add some atmosphere and make it feel like it's in a space so the first thing is this cool spotlight and so if I just drop that in screen drop that opacity you know I think this just adds a little bit of mood and sometimes adding these volumetrics lights is actually just easier to drop it in post rather than trying to get it all in octane so then the other thing I added was these sparkling particles on a black background so I just did ctrl alt F and that just sizes it up to your comp and then I'm gonna just gonna do the same thing drop it and screen and just kind of drop it down until we get this nice subtle atmosphere the other thing I did was I kind of created this tilt shift look so I did that with this depth of field gradient right here and if we jump in this pre comp you see all it is is two white solids with a black to white gradient set to multiply and you can use these handles right here to determine what's in focus and what's not and how fast that fall-off occurs so if I actually just copy this over and paste it in here we can grab our camera lens blur plugin which comes with After Effects and I'll just create a new solid real quick and this is gonna be an adjustment layer so I'll just enable that little icon right there we can drop our camera lens blur onto our white solid turn off that gradient and if we set our blur map layer right here to depth of field gradient now the outside edges are more in focus and the inside is not so we want to invert that real quick just with this invert icon and let's turn up the blur radius to something like 15 and see what that looks like the next thing that we want to do is we want to check repeat edge pixels and that fixes that edge right there from falling off into black and then the other thing that I did was turn up the aspect ratio to two oh sorry actually 0.5 and now it's sort of recreating or mimicking more of an anamorphic lens by stretching it out thank you for watching that's all for this tutorial I hope you enjoyed it to recap we created a daredevil inspired dripping effect with XP infect show we went over a cool camera drink I showed you how to build a tileable animated gold swirl material and I showed you a little bit of the AE comping process I welcome your feedback if you have an questions or concerns or suggestions for future tutorials please let me know in the comments my name is Ryan Talbott and I'll catch you next time [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Digital Melon

Views: 20,319

Keywords: Cinema4d, Octane, Render, 3D, Animation, Design, VFX, Liquid Gold, Molten, Tutorial

Id: pPh-4cVQ-AY

Length: 32min 32sec (1952 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 03 2019