How to Create Procedural Clouds in Redshift w. Volume Builder - Cinema 4D Tutorial

[Music] hello and welcome to the rooks nest Alex here in today's tutorial I'm going to be showing you how to create these procedural clouds using the volley builder in cinema 4d I'll then go on to show you how to render them using redshift so without any further delay let's get started so here we are inside cinema I've already got my scene set up and my lighting materials a plain sphere in order to keep this tutorial as short as possible but for those who care I'll go over those at the end first let's just focus on creating these clouds now the first thing we can do it's kind of a just grab a few primitive let's stretch it out along the X and then along the Zed and we squash it down it's Y like so now this is just gonna be the basis for our volume R we're going to be displacing and deforming this cube putting it in a volume builder and then using some shaders to them effect it even more but let's get this cube suitable for deforming first now let's fill it the edges I'll give it a nice roundness maybe increase the subdivisions and then because we're going to be displacing this cube primitive let's increase the segments along the X 100 or so and then along the Z and maybe just a few there for luck now we've got our base primitive let's start displacing it so let's grab a displace of object make that a child of the cube and then come down to the displace options and shading shader let's load in a noise now if we click on this little image here give us the options for our noise now the noise type I'm going to choose is called turbulence we just pop that on juicy it's already starting to affect our primitive let's increase its scale because we want it to be like a more cloud shaped so 1700 1071 that region and then on our new scale let's stretch it out it's 200 just to try and because clouds aren't normally round they normally seem quite elongated so so just two hundred percent on there you should be fine that's also increase the contrasts cuz at the moment because it's a bit soft and get more contrast in this cloud pattern a 50% type in 50 and also if you come back to our display sir go to the object let's modify the height just to get there we go that's going to be the basis for our volume now in order to turn this into a volume we're going to need to create a volume builder we just take our cube make it a child of the volume builder and it disappears but as you can see in here it's made this voxel grid of our objects and the first thing we're going to do is when it comes to volume builder on the object tab we're going to change it from volume type to science distance field to fog and now we get these dots in the viewport once again we're still not seeing anything in the redshift render view and in order to start seeing our volume we're going to need to create a volume shader so we come down to here it's the materials and go create redshift material and select our volume material we take that volume material put it on our volume builder steel nothing that's because we need to open up our material and the shade anode shader graph select our RS volume and I'll scatter channel this drop-down box here we need to choose volume builders and volume builder and there we go now we start to see a cloud also at this point I should mention that my lights my dome light and my area light in their volume setting the contribution scale is set to 1 both of them if you don't have any volume contribution on your lights they won't illuminate your volume so make sure you've got your on your lights that in the volume tab your contribution scale is above zero I just got these sets of one just makes it simpler now let's just increase the resolution of this Orlean quickly just so it's a bit nicer 5 you don't wanna go too high with this number or low because it start to slow down if I show you if I go to 1 for example it'll give you this warning we have a long calculation time which we want to avoid so we cancel that say for that like to probably a bit better it already looks better but this is working 5 it'll update faster and we have to get things done a lot quicker now let's make this look more like clouds do this quickly so we're gonna come up to our come up to our fields get a shader field make this a child of the volume Builder and then in our shader field which can be load in a noise in order for the shader filled out to the way we want it to we need to open up this volume builder come to the shader field and in the creation space we want to choose objects below that's just going to use our cube object or a cube primitive as the reference for the area which is filling this shader fill in if it's just a box it would just be a small 100 by 100 centimeter box in the center here that the shader is affecting so back to objects below normal mode is fine now let's check our shader coming to the noise let's select our turbulence which is down here we're gonna make it large just like we had in our original so may make it this maybe not this exactly the same size as our display sir but maybe a thousand there's also stretch it along the U by like three hundred just to give that elongated cloud look to it we're also going to want to increase the contrast of this as you can see look it's very flat at the moment and it's not doing anything really so there's up the contrast this give it a no let's say this let's put the contrast at fifty see what we have and that hasn't changed much let's reduce the increase the contrast the low clip there we go so you see we start to see it breaking up as we bring in this low clip value bring this up nice now if we see it does look a bit rubbish at the moment but if we go to like say - and the voxel size once it's calculated down here does see sometimes it can take a while but they they I see we getting these breaks in the pattern let's just check our shader field a bit more let's maybe bring in a bit more it's bringing more gaps Oh seats being slow that's because I'm the voxel size is a bit too high or low or too small let's go back to five just to help speed things up it would help if I had a faster computer at the moment but I don't like the shader there we go so now look you can see it's actually quite a nice cloud pattern nice I quite like it so I'm going to leave this as is right now and let's focus on our let's add another shader field so control drag click control drag above the shader field its create a copy of verse one let's come into our shader list we see it's already been added because we've dropped it under the volume builder there is let's change this mode to additive because we want to add to the clouds then let's go open up our shader field let's change this noise something a bit different let's use stupor here it is all you selected from this if you just want to look around at the things I always always you choose this because I can sometimes I forget which noise does which when you can see quite well from these images but they kind of look like so we got a stupor this one we don't need to be as large it's gonna be a more smaller detail but I think this is gonna be our wisps as if like long pieces of the cloud the wispy that makes sense so make that like 600 once again we're not really seeing anything in the viewport we can see it here so we should be adding these bits to our clouds but we can't really see it and I think one of the main reasons for that let's just reset let's just get this back to zero and all the stuff back to normal maybe have a bit less contrast maybe there's just make sure we can see it first such as if we come to the volume builder this code this make this to update if we turn this shade it on and off yeah as you can see is having absolutely no effect and that's because once again our creation space is set to box when it should be on objects below as soon as we do that it will update the volume give it a second there we go now well this is far too intense this is not what we want let's open up our shader field one take a look at this now let's drop the brightness of this down we only want to be filling in a few bits and bobs a bit of few gaps there's also while we work reduce our voxel size to five just to help speed things up help the renderer now let's adjust some of these values coming in there you see we get any extra if we turn it on and off we're filling in and if we drop the brightness you know we can you can you can choose how much of those little extra cloud bits you want I think I warned you about that much so I'll just by lowering the brightness yeah we leave that as you can see it's very blocky them they won't look like that in the end so now let's add a let's do another just duplicate this shader field and now I'm gonna add some more finer details to this gonna you change the noise type to booyah and we're not gonna have this one stretched along any axis so we could put this dancers 100% but we are gonna leave the global scale at 300 let's go into a fully builder change the mode to additive and then once again make sure that its objects below and not box the objects below so make sure it's affecting our volume in the shader you can see it's quite minimal at the moment this should be adding these little Bluff II bits but let's just increase the brightness to see if we can see a bit more of them and in fact for this it might be quite difficult to see that are there you can see them in this larger voxel but let's just drop down on sale voxels to very quickly just to get an idea there you go starting to look better in fact let's just do it down to two now the next thing we're gonna be doing whilst this builds the voxels it's just adjusting this material because at the moment you can see it's too dense dick doesn't really look much like cloud so what we're gonna do is we're gonna open up our RS volume so let's adjust these coefficients for our scatter and absorption we're not going to be using the emission as we're not really having the plow submit anything but let's start with our absorption so in fact let's turn off scattering down so you can see kind of what the absorption is doing then we get rid of it completely we can see that it's not scattering any of the light at the moment it's just absorbing light and so if we've reduced the absorption you can see it gets thinner and thinner until we can go all the way down to zero but I think you mean you want it probably around not point two so you still see through it's quite nice now all we need to do is up the scattering if we raise this that's it's slowly you see as we increase this we start to increase the amount of light that's being scattered around and bounce back towards the camera if we just raise it up either get lighter and lighter I think in the end I settled on something around 0.5 and that gives it this really wispy cloudy look looks like I might have gone a bit overboard with these dots but yeah and so we can also introduce a bit of color into this if I just add a slot here and not actually the best if you just do this drop-down select the not you can't see the whole thing right set the knot and maybe we want it to be up slightly red maybe like her evening hue so we can just introduce a little bit of color into the clouds yeah that's quite nice that you want to leave this black and this white if you have this any other color other than black you won't get proper shadows it's good if you want say you don't your shadows to be black you want them to be red then you can do this and then your whole thing you see you get no shadow areas but if we just whack that back down to the same thing with the white at the end you want the brightest thing to be white unless I'll show you what happens if you change it I mean doesn't really make much difference but just want to make sure the shadows are black another little thing to take note of is in the Advanced tab there's this thing called shadow density scale now that when we change it if I put this up - you'll see we're getting much harsher shadow so if you want a media more contrast you look you can up this it won't affect the density of your clouds I think in the end I went for something along the lines of 0.8 obviously this all depends on how thick your actual volume is so you might you might wanna do this on a case-by-case basis yeah so well that's that I'll just give you a quick look around my scene that I promised at the beginning of the video if anyone else is interested if we go to a camera out of a camera here you can see all I've got explain this material here all it is is a c4d shader the gradient I've topped by 512 running into texture RS texture node you can see nothing interesting there that's just so that we can pipe that into take this that take the c40 shader put it into a texture then I think the iris materia in the diffuse color and it is a fully diffuse material we look at the base properties like there's no reflection and it's fully rough and then the material on the ball is essentially just a RM a Max on noise with a stupa the stupid noise played around with the overall scale and just did a color ramp on it to give it a variation of color on the surface and then just a roughness I'll show you you forgot close you can see just to give variation in the roughness and then obviously the on bump map I just put this straight into a bump and reduce the height scale and I think that's about it oh and the lights I just got a dome light with a HDRI in it from hgri Haven it was a free resource place we can get a bunch of HDR is great now you should check that out I'll put a link in the description oh and just before you render you might want to change your voxel size and your volume builder something small like one so there you go I hope you enjoyed this tutorial I recommend you go off and have a play with some different noise patterns and shapes and sizes and see what you can come up with get creative and if you like this tutorial please subscribe give us the thumbs up you have any questions or suggestions please leave a comment the project files the animation you see on screen now will be available on patreon and to please check that out link is in the description yeah oh that's that thanks again for watching boy [Music]

Channel: The Rook's Nest

Views: 18,560

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Id: 0DOqA14UIT8

Length: 18min 50sec (1130 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 27 2020