How to create scenes using Megascans with Octane and Cinema 4D

[Music] hello my name is aekta Rahman and I'm gonna translate this tutorial made by Alexander massive a brilliant 3d artist from the Baker team recently I finished working on the project that you're currently seeing on the screen after his publication is social networks I received many positive reviews and even several awards one of the main tasks that I set for myself was to create an interesting story with assets from the mega scans library and to practice rendering large geometry arrays in octane today I would like to share my experience to tell you about how and why I went about making this art here are the 10 main parts of the lesson that we'll consider for each of the steps you could probably make a separate lecture but will not dive too deep into it I'll share my experience at the level of my knowledge and skills I'll talk about the settings for octane render which I usually use in my projects and at the end of the tutorial I'll explain why in a deposition pass and how it can be useful for compositing in my work with commercial projects where the speed is just as important as the quality the experience has accumulated and I want to share my experience and secrets so that you can apply them in your projects in the future new projects start with some ideas inspiration or just a desire to create something new I like working with details that I decided that in my new projects the characters and environment will be somewhere in the forest and a beautiful render will be supplemented with an interesting story I found a few suitable mushrooms in the mega scans meadow pack and some very beautiful realistic stones twigs and tree bark but I didn't use the grass assets from here though in this video I'll show you several ways you can get large arrays of procedural plants I also use the spider character as a hero of the story I was doing it for another personal project and he continued his life here this is what the final scene looked like and despite the result the scene has some very serious problems with optimization to be honest I did not consider that when I made it the scene have too long saved times and is too heavy because of the objects with high poly counts the layers are not named correctly and half of the elements that are present in it or were not even visible everything was done so quickly that I didn't even have time to go back and clean it I want to emphasize that I only spent 3 days on this project and if I would have optimized the workflow it would have probably gone even faster let's close this scene and do everything from scratch to know what the magic forest looks like you need to get there somehow or right you could ask uncle Google about it let's try that fairy forest macro we asked and Google immediately gives us some interesting solutions some visual images and details are to appear which I didn't even think about before for example these small things here on the plants and here is a spider sitting on top of a mushroom or on a flower maybe some snow or other things like a supplement are seen like snails for example but we already have a spider so we begin by paying attention to the colors in the scene which would help make the objects and environment more expressive I really like the photos of Martin Pfizer the really cool atmosphere luminous caps of mushrooms accents in the form of light through leaves the contrast backgrounds juicy colors and so on we won't repeat the same picture again and since we already have some assets from the previous project let's create something new I found some interesting references that will help us generate something for mushrooms stones and plants just a little bit differently the spiderweb interesting pieces of wood and the background this is a heavily unfocused and everything just looks very macro here the spider sits on the mushroom and it's very very close our story it also integrates the protagonist and mushrooms the snail an excellent reference to the details which should be at the foothills and we may even be guided by them open Photoshop and start by defining where we'll have the main action I think that from the right side there will be a mushroom on which a spider will sit it won't hang from a web path in the previous work and it will possibly reach for a piece of wood that will lie next to it try and drawn approximate blocking out and make some space for our main objects next we'll create more detail perhaps later we'll add some colors here and immediately determine where we'll have the light and from which side will come whether it will be from the background from some source there that will shine behind or from just above or maybe directly from the camera in the center of attention I think that most likely will have something similar to our reference here it's very advantageous to see contrast in this space let's try and achieve about the same scheme of life as in our reference just experiment try and fill this area with some of our assets this piece of wood or driftwood and if nothing interesting happens and I'll try and play somehow with the composition let's try not to pollute the frame and get some more air in there I'll try and change the position of the object our main character will touch around here we'll have our second mushroom and it'll be a little smaller and it's kind of face the one standing next to it so we'll try and balance the right side with the left side a bit and since there will be more details in this part we'll have two smaller mushrooms we use a rule of triangles to improve the composition the main objects must not overlap and I think the spider is best to put at the bottom of the edge so that it's hanging and one of its paws is going to hold on to the edge of the mushroom like this and the second power is going to try and reach the neighboring one and it's going to give a sense of trying to stay in jumped to the neighboring mushroom we have almost everything ready in order to fill the scene with already made objects and will most likely build it right away in 3d without additional modeling just based on our sketch when searching for an exporting assets for different engines click sell offers mega scans bridge for free and so far is pretty frustrating that there is no cinema 4d or octane list yet but we'll choose one that fits the closest which is the marmoset specular roughness 3d and this time we'll use the pack with white mushrooms which will look good on the green background like in the reference I'll select all that I need to build a scene and the top bottom starts to display the number of assets ready for export first we will select the highest LOD of the model and the maximum quality of the textures and click on the export button we'll put everything together in one folder import it to cinema 4d and we'll work on the shaders we can start importing object into the scene one by one and at the same time will most likely encounter a problem with optimization since I chose the highest LOD level in mega scans bridge we'll try to a test render and it will most likely turn out that not all assets will need such a dense mesh we'll check the number of polygons and when working with octane render this can significantly affect the work let's start with a stone we now see that the grid is very dense and contains almost 2 million triangles it's really impressive considering that there will be a lot of other elements in the Sene besides that one now we'll try shading it and then import this stone with our less density and we'll render it to compare and try and understand whether we need this LOD level or not let's put in a live source assign the texture and try to assemble the base shader without a connected displacement the stone looks like this rotate the light source and connect the displacement map and reduce its value to 1 in order to avoid trouble as this can greatly affect the geometry it can even make cinema 4d to freeze next change the parameter medium to 1/2 around 0.5 like this displacement does its job it reveals many details and so you can save this render with a dense mesh let's go back into the bridge and export the model at a lower LZ for example Lorde 3 imported into cinema 4d and we can see that the stone now has much fewer polygons but this is before the application of the displacement and normals assigned the same material with textures that were assigned to the high poly model and copy the light from the previous scene for the same appearance considering that the high version has 2 million polygons and this one only has 7,000 they look almost the same you can compare the results and decide quickly for yourself is it worth leaving the high poly I think the answer is obvious since we're on the path of optimization I say we stay with LOD 3 for all the other models as well and I'm more than happy with that for this project as you can see the stone rotates very quick in the viewport in real time and it's rendered really well next proceed to configure the next asset the mushrooms set up the materials apply a light source with HDR I and now it looks like this let's make the view slightly larger for all mushrooms one common material is applied and the textures and it looked like this would be nice if each mushroom had its own separate texture in a larger resolution and not just one as it is now create an octane glossy material in order to give the mushroom some reflectance using drag-and-drop we import all associated textures into the node editor we quickly distribute each of them to their inputs and after applying the displacement maps our geometry changes seams are formed almost like it's bursting after changing the value to around midway you can see small stitches this is because our geometry is too low poly so the displacement detect doesn't have enough information to make everything go smoothly there are several ways to solve this problem and I'll use octane tools I apply the object tag and I switch on level 2 in the subdivide tab seems that now disappeared and the number of polygons have increased and the performance that's not visually changed since the bitmap texture is a pointer to an input of a specular I can't control the reflection I'll try and fix this and modify the shader a bit I'll detach the texture from the specular and immediately see how the mushroom has become almost a mirror the first input of the mix node is connected to the bitmap texture and the second input is connected to a white RGB spectrum node I add the node fall-off and send everything to the specular input now I have control of the reflection I'll select the preset of the normal versus the vector of 90 degrees and now it's possible to improve the appearance of the mushrooms that isn't glare so they become more realistic I'll try rotate the HDR map at different angles and see how they appearance and reflections of the mushroom changes by changing the minimum maximum and fall-off parameters in the mix node I can control the reflections from math to fully mirrored so the final image will have a macro effect I'll make an octane camera and adjust it accordingly by blurring the depths of the background it looks good so let's move on I'm finally getting closer to the creative part and I'm ready to place all the objects in one scene according to our sketch but as we can see not all textures are correctly displayed for example the stone is completely black and it most likely doesn't have any pictures at all this often happens when you import objects into the same scene with textures that are located in different folders - exactly what materials have problems like this you can use the octane picture manager let's open it as you can see you red crosses here show textures with the lost paths green checkmarks and textures that have no problem remove the extra so you won't have to repair the materials or not even apply it to any objects as we change the path to the texture the thumbnail immediately shows the correct texture and the list updates also the icon changes to a green check mark and now everything works now I quickly fix the paths of the remaining textures and I continue we update the list and everything works now let's the other scene looks when we can see that the problem has disappeared on the stone I usually prefer to have the resolution of the textures in the viewport as high as possible this has no relation to optimization of course it just looks better and it all depends on your video card if it's possible for you or not in order to change the display of the textures in a viewport go to the properties of the material find the item editor change the default value of the preview size now our stone has to come much more beautiful and it's much more pleasant to work with you this already reminds me of the sketch at least compositionally it looks organic the focus of attention is concentrated at this point and it may be necessary to shift everything away from the center I'll see how it looks after the test render when more details are to appear next we proceed to obtain small plants and moss for the rocks and there are many ways to scatter objects on the surface of others such as various plugins and the scripts I'll try and use a mixed technique and place objects manually using parent tags and I'll also use plugins I'll start with the biggest stone and try and fill the space around the mushrooms so that looks natural and seamless and I'll fill the entire adjacent area with some small objects to do this I'll use the plugin called ivy grower I select the stone select a point from which we want to grow the plants and press the grow button now we can see our splines forum near the surface of the stone it simulates a very natural appearance but I won't take it too far so let's stop here from above I want to add smaller and more diverse other plants I'll try and use one more plant generator Forester this one is called and now I need to decide what we want to clone find the tab with presets inside the plugin where you can find a lot of ready-made plants they are all procedural and they can be modified at any time you can add a small blades of grass or long stalks long spikelets or some white flowers dandelions by scale won't fit but I'll add a few for a variety fern will use later as an element of the background let's go with these green bushes and small red flowers I'll try and clone them on the surface here on the stone and apply the surface spread plugin in the general tab find the object dragged out on the stone here add a flower as a plug-in parent and it's a bit too dense and not like we want it start to configure and reduce the maximum amount to ten for example reduce the size of the flower instance and cloning occurs on polygons for now and it's necessary to decide where there will be more or less and will most likely determine that it will grow somewhere in the upper part I'll make a polygon selection and save it find constraint in the plug-in settings and drag are set to the polygon selection change did a way of cloning to polygon center and now it's much more dense change the parameter minimum distance and it affects the distance between clones and so far it still doesn't look very natural since the size and angle under which our group tends grow remain identical and we need to add some variety so let's go into the settings and change the intensity of random scale by 100 percent decrease the base scale liz'll i won't make it too dense as we need room for other plans as well now I can see that some bushes grow on the slope it doesn't look very good and there are several ways you can change it the first is to remove the polygons from the selection or edit the plug-in settings we haven't yet considered slope it determines the angle on which clones will be generated we'll adjust it so that the plants remain at a slant angle it looks better now and I'll add a few more plants I want to pay attention to one feature of the forest or plugin if you need to create several versions of plants the preset also generates materials for them and when you create a new version the materials will be replaced by all plants to avoid this when you create a new version of the plant don't forget to check include insert new materials this creates a new group of materials which will only belong to this version and won't affect the previous ones I decided to clone a little more of these green bushes I copy the spread from the first one and change the parameters of it to add some variety I'll speed it up a bit that the process is the same I'll leave some space add more plants I keep in mind that they were on the edge of the stone - I also want to add some little white flowers so that they stand out from the green I'll make another duplicate of the surface spread and play with the settings let's see how it looks from the camera now it looks good now I'll show one more way of cloning busying up the fuzz map which is exported with some mega scans assets open the scene with a stone and create a material in the color I add a Fuss texture copy this into the Alpha Channel and assign it to the stone apply the surface spread plugin find the tab filter by material and drag the new material there create an instance that you want to clone add a stone in the general object tab and I'll reduce the size of the instance change minimum distance parameter change the polygon to the poly Center go back to the filter by material tab and change the intensity to 100% now we can see that we have a growth activity where which is influenced by a fast texture you can change the minimum distance parameters to increase the density this approach is good when you like to resolve the texture offers but I chose to distribute the growth zones manually by selecting polygons I'll speed up the video now and try to grow a little vegetation here and there on nearby stones I'm using a very similar workflow as before I'll finish messing around with a plan to start adjusting the rest of assets small stones and branches for example I I won't clone it but instead I'll add them on surface manually in random places I'll try and simplify the task by applying the constraint tag activate clamp in the target at our stone reduce the distance to a minimum and change target to surface now our branch will always remain on the surface of the stone if necessary you can change the alignment axis of the object I copy this tag to all objects I should be on this stone and distribute them on the surface in a random order to look more natural we'll do the same with the small stones and since this lesson is mostly improvisation and the final result is unknown I rely on reference experience and a sense of taste so our scene now has around 6.5 million polygons and now we'll end up cloning and multiplying the assets next we'll proceed to setting up the lighting we still need to improve the materials that are generated after using the plugins first they are duplicated and secondly they need to be converted to octane open life viewer select the materials and press convert material the script will automatically replace old materials with the new ones select any of the generated materials and go to the octane node editor to see the results of the conversion the script doesn't always work correctly and may need to be edited manually for example in the bump we now obviously have wrong textures I'll fix it a manually reassignment will use the diffusion bump normal and opacity I will also add a subsurface scattering node so that the leaves can be illuminated to look more natural in the same way you asked with setting up the materials for the mushrooms I want to have control over their reflectivity so that the leaves are alive and a little blistered to do this we need to make an octane mix material add a new glossy material to the second input and add a balance between the first and second material with a float load we'll adjust it to that it's slightly reflect surrounding light since we have this plant consisting of two different types of leaves the first material will be for the young and the second for the more adult and they will differ slightly in color I will speed up a little and make the same changes for the second leaf the branches on which ivy leaves sit will most likely remain with the diffusion material as a result we got two new mixed materials one material for the branches and for islands with ivy remove the old materials and replace them with new ones immediately we will remove the unused materials and I'll take care of the materials adjustment for the plants which have been made of this surface bread I'll speed this part up a bit as well on the transmission input I had a texture from the diffuse and on the input of the medium of each material I add the scattering node here we'll finish setting up all the materials and we'll quickly make a visual inspection so that there is no anomalies with textures and we'll proceed to setting up the environment we'll add light sources HDR adjusting the camera and since we haven't tried rendering before we'll perform a test render of the scene now eight and a half million polygons for my 2d text and seventy cards this is not a critical indicator and most likely there will be no problems the moment of truth now we'll try to breathe life into our project and try and render it there is currently no light source except octane sky with an HDR and most likely I'll add some point light sources to highlight some places that need to be emphasized or highlighted and finally it's time to be creative now all the scene objects are loaded into the memory of the video cards and we'll try and see what we get when we switch to the path trace in total our scene now occupies four gigabytes of memory and that's not bad I'll have the spider and set up at the very last we defined the light direction in the scene would be from the left above and from behind and the sources is now incorrectly located and we'll try rotate the HDR to achieve the desired result and it seems like this is what we need now I'll just leave it there then I'll add the usual Sun to simulate a sunny day on the lawn don't forget to tick mix to work with the rest of the light sources I'll try and change the angle of the sun's rays and I'll focus on the result now the IV looks much better to be honest I used this plugin for the first time even though it's been installed for a very long time I'll continue to customize the materials as the preliminary renders show that the mushrooms don't look very good and I need to do something about that I'll add some softness of the picture using octane realtime post effects even before setting of materials i'll add a background clean with a texture the technique always works well and will give us additional light wrap on the edges of the objects I create a standard octane material and add this texture to the diffusion and emission channels so that it has a light self luminosity I'll try different images as a background to understand what works best changing the depth of field in the camera to find a compromise between the small details and the stones and the beautiful optical D focus our further customize the rendering and change the GI clamp parameter which effects the quality and rendering speed in my projects I usually put this coefficient to no more than three I'll slightly decrease the hot pixel removal for initial adjustments of the render this is enough that I'll continue to configure the materials for the mushrooms I want to set them up so that there is some subsurface scattering going on and to do this first go to the render settings find the octane tab and enable the subsurface scattering or SSS now in the live viewer you can enable only this channel to interactively observe changes in the node scattering I change the value of density and volume step lengths to increase the depth of Rays penetration we'll do the same in order to get the reflection pass we enable it in the settings for the octane render and in the reflectivity properties with the help of the fall of node I adjust the reflection properties even if the reflections is not clearly visible in the final render we'll have a render pass available which will help reinforce this reflection already in the compositing I'll add a light glow to the small red and white flowers that we have on the stone adding the texture that is now assigned to the diffusion into the the emission Channel now the light beautifully illuminates the objects but fairly evenly and it doesn't give the feeling that it's somewhere in the forest with the help of a simple design consisting of a random cloning plates I'll create a lattice with which is possible to procedurally change the pattern and density of shadows and added to the scene will be a fern which I'll put somewhere behind the stones and a few of its leaves will fall into the focus zone of the main objects I want to slightly flatten the difference between the foreground and the flat background I met a preliminary render in high resolutions that I could look at all the details and see if everything's okay before the final render I want to add another light that illuminates a lower part of the branches separating them a bit from the background and I completely forgot to include our spider hero the firm branch in the foreground decided not to render as once but I'll add it to the compositing so that it could be adjusted or I can just remove altogether and I'll add one more light source on the right so that it lightly illuminates the foot of the mushroom in projects like this the most important thing is to know when to stop because adding new obvious to the scene can turn the imagination on and you might start adding new elements of the plots and ideas related to some association or references it's certainly very cool but to control and optimize the scene becomes more and more difficult so there's a balance between quality and creativity and I'm probably going to finish the setup of the scene and go onto tuning the rest of the renders object color ID layers for masking the main objects in the scene the normals position pass diffuse direct and indirect passes slightly increase the resolution of the picture and turn on the Alpha channels that you can somehow change the background to repaint it or even change it to another fire up the render and with the help of some magic editing powers we can see the results after just one second now you see the ripped edges this can be disregarded for now since alpha Channel in the viewport may not be displayed correctly we'll fix this in compositing and everything will be just beautiful at the moment the progress bar from the bottom shows the progress of the last passes Waits and when this process is completed just select them and jump into Fusion compositing is probably the most enjoyable part of the lesson the passes are still warm of the renderer so we send it to the flow and remove the automatically generated merged nodes since rendering was done in a linear color space when importing into fusion the brightness of the image doesn't seem to be the same as we planned and to work with it correctly we need to convert it to the color space rec.709 or srgb and we'll use the built-in fusion tools and switch the lookup table set it to srgb and the picture is already much more similar to the one we setup in cinema the edges are still ripped so let's see what we have an import tab check pass x alpha channel and now the edges are pre multiplied and they always look much better let's draw a background image in here and let's use the one we use in cinema this is a common bitmap image Janet in the color space of srgb so for our project it needs to be converted into linear since we have already decided to work in that color space for this I apply the standard gamut tool if I import a bitmap image without change color space into linear we get this overexposed and over contrasted image if I change the input to srgb we get a result closer to the original drop into the window without using the lookup table this is a picture and I won't change it here's the image translated into linear space and here it is without using the lookup table in its original sRGB color space now I can work with a bitmap picture added as a background we flip it add some unfocus to it and let's change the shape of the bouquet as in the octane render and I'll leave it that way then maybe go back to the depth of field settings again we'll continue to make improvements using render passes you the SSS passages somehow didn't work out and that's why only this pass alone it turned out unsuccessful noisy and not informative I can try to make this effect in a different way but in the form in which it is now it just doesn't work at least not for the mushrooms you why do you need a position pass you may ask perhaps it's not useful but I want to show you that you can use in a very convenient way as a real light tool for example we need to highlight some parts of the Hat of the mushroom man instead of drawing the mask manually and then animate it we can just open the tools find the group name position and apply the effect of the volume mask now go into the channels and send the RGB information to the XYZ the yellow triangle is the entrance to the position pass and you can submit any picture to the green input so how can this be useful to us well in the colored tab will specify the mask only and in the shape tab we draw out the coordinates of the space that we're interested in for correction for example here under the mushroom head reduce the size to get the zone of interest we can soften it and most interestingly we can now make this mask even for the foot of the mushroom it really has a position in space we open the position tab and try to move it along the x-axis here is information we now have in the Alpha Channel we can move this mask to the depth of the z-axis as well we spent a couple minutes and we have a mask attached to the surface of a particular object and this method even works for animation it's enough to allocate the space of a place of interest in the scene with a pipette and the mask will follow it in space this tip is used by very few people but sometimes it saves a lot of time for example here is a song that I want to dark a bit for accentuating the place where the mushrooms hat needs to fit so I take the color correction tool and use the input of the correcting mask and volume mask tool I'll play with the settings and then darken and tint the selected area a bit so how do you apply normal maps this is a very useful pass and there are many ways to do it I often use it to add extra reflectance and small highlights of course they could be obtained right away in the render adding light sources to the scene but if that's not possible I try and make such corrections in the compositing phase and it saves a little time now I'll quickly show this technique we need the installed sapphire plugin and in the light group we'll find the light 3d effect a dark background added into the yellow input and the normal pass added to the green if I move this pointer you can see how the reflection on the objects are changing the light stories not only has X&Y coordinates but it can also move in the depth so with the Z position slider we can rotate it and see how the light source is moving towards us or away from us showing some new faces that may be interesting for us we can add a thin specular on the Hat because it looks unnatural and dry look here is I'm going to highlight showed up on the rocks - and on the mushroom this flare looks odd will most likely be masking that out you now the accent lighting focuses the center as we planned and we didn't do any vignettes or any additional color Corrections with this on the right here is the dark part it's the least of all attention and due to the directional light source and the cluster of objects your eyes are concentrated at this point perhaps now will artificially add depth of field to this part since there are too many details on it attract too much attention you can of course make a mask and darken it a little from this side you can apply a vignette but this is the last thing you need for compositing in color correction this vignette is an optical defect and I don't want to use it for now the depth of field will be made artificially as the mushroom and these flowers are at the same distance from the camera they shouldn't be blurred but I still think that will look odd and now we try to reduce a little bit of this information with depth of field I'll use of fresh left depth of field and draw a custom depth of field map the usual bitmap node in which the higher the brightness and the stronger the unfocus is it looks nice and doesn't feel as if this edge goes too deeply now I'll work on the bouquet shape and try to add more unfocus to this edge we're close to finishing and the last thing I want to do now is to adjust a spider it doesn't require a significant retouch just make it a bit juicier and brighter in projects like this which are very rich in details it's gonna take a very long time but I suggest you stop at this stage of course you can still change the composition solution or add remove objects from the scene and everything will depend only on you and your imagination patience since the picture is rendered in high resolution you can improve for example the spike to finish it separately and you can polish every element in this composition this way but as a result of this improvisation lesson I consider this an acceptable result a little tip if you want to make a beautiful project don't try and do everything in one day do as much as you can and sleep on it in the morning you're gonna see a lot of imperfections and get many new ideas that will improve your work we have reviewed the workflow with the material for octane render try to use the assets from the mega scales catalog learned how to grow plans in many different ways and I spend quite a bit of time setting up the light and environment and the fusion node tree reminds me of a beginner compositor because the correction was almost not required to the final render result and I think now with all the modern graphic software it's very hard to get a bad result all you need is regular practice if digital art is a door to another world then it seems to me that with octane render cinema 4d and good imagination you just don't open it you can knock that door out with your foot I hope this tutorial was interesting and that you found something useful for yourself this is Victor lemon translating for Alex melteth and I'll see you again thank you

Channel: Quixel

Views: 158,096

Keywords: Megascans, Octane, Cinema 4D, Mason, Otoy, quixel, mighty, Mushroom, spider, scan, environment, texture, render, computer graphics, realistic, art, materials, woods, artstation, lighting, compositing, scene optimisation, assets, modelling, render pass, digital art, 3D, tutorial, blackmagic fusion, scenes

Id: RSh-_YA7nT8

Length: 39min 52sec (2392 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 09 2017