How to Make Realitic Explosions with X-Particles 4 Explosia FX and Render using Octane Render

hello youtube today we're going to create a quick explosion using explosion FX in the new X particles for we're going to take the data from that using open V DB imported in the octane and render out a full explosion animation and at the end of the video I'll go ahead and give you some quick pointers for how you can get better results rendering volumetric explosions in an octane render let's get started all right so we've got a brand new scene open in cinema 4d nice and fresh the first thing that we're gonna need here is an explosion object-- so I'm gonna hit shift C here and just type it and I happen to know the size of this I want it to be on the ground plane not falling below it so I'm just gonna raise it by 200 centimeters so now it's level with the ground and then the other thing is let's go ahead and create a ground plane real quick and we'll just scale that up nice that is good now the next thing that we're gonna need here is an emitter so I'm gonna go ahead and just create some simple geometry here we'll make it 25 centimeters and then we'll just raise it up about 5 centimeters off the ground great and this is gonna need to actually be an explosion source so again shift C and we will turn it into an explosion source and then I like to take I've gotten a lot of I've gotten a lot of questions on Instagram about how I have smoke that looks so detailed and one of the ways I do that is I grab this curl slider and I bring it up to somewhere close to 50% so with that we'll just hit play and as you can see we are getting some smoke but it's not quite as detailed as we want it to be so we're gonna go over to our explosion settings and we're gonna change some things in here one of those things is the voracity if we crank that all the way up you can see gets pretty gnarly we're not looking for that but I do want to bring this up to about 30% and then I'm gonna bring the radius down to like 3 and now if we hit play you can see there's just a little bit more detail in this I'm actually gonna turn it down just a little bit more me more like 25% all right and then the next thing that we want is to bring in some turbulence here now add mode is the default and that's pretty crazy it's gonna add 10 centimeters of strength to the turbulence every frame that's not what we really want here so I'm gonna set this up as the max and then we're gonna set the strength to like 4 and we'll hit play just to see what that looks like and that is looking like some pretty detailed but also your regular smoke but it has enough veracity it's sticking together enough to where it looks reasonably realistic so I'm liking the way that that looks the next thing I'm gonna do is just come over here to the voxel size and set that to 1.5 and you saw that this grid in the background changed this grid has a bunch of boxes or squares that represent the the voxel size kind of looks like maybe one of your dad's old shirts so essentially these these things are rendered in 3d pixels of volume data called voxels and I'm raising and lowering the size so that we can get more detail just like you would have more detail if you had more pixels or smaller pixel size so anyway I said that's a 1.5 that's gonna be good for our purposes and it's still gonna render out or simulate pretty quickly the next thing I'm gonna do is create a cache object and the most important thing that we can change here is to change this to open V DB because that is the file format that octane render is going to be expecting and then the other thing I recommend is that you do change this folder so that you're not just dumping folders full of volume data in your home documents directory so I'll go ahead and change that now and there we go we are all ready to build our cache and this really isn't gonna take very long but I am gonna go ahead and fast forward here so that you don't have to wait the minute or so that this is going to take awesome looks like the cash is ready and so is the cash so let's go to the octane viewport and see nothing because the data still hasn't been imported to octane but what we are going to do is we couldn't come over here to objects and we're gonna select octane VDB volume I'm just gonna scale this down doesn't need to be too big don't want it in our way here and what we're going to need to do is bring in the V DV files that X particles just created but before we do that I could just put one file in here and it would read that file and it would be fine but we wanted to do do an animation so what we're gonna do is we're gonna configure these options first because there are a lot of glitches around for example if you set your start value by accident higher than your end value just because you're setting them in the order that they're presented octane will completely crash and cinema4d will also crash and you'll be swearing at yourself for not having saved more recently so let's go ahead and set these up I know off the top of my head that it's a 90 frame simulation so we'll set that there and then we will go ahead and we know that the X particles outputs a six-digit frame number so we'll set that to 6 and then it starts on frame 1 so I'll set that to 1 and now we can open our cache files and open our explosion and if it worked right you should see data here and not some error message and now if we push through our timeline we can see the smoke this is great awesome so the next thing that we want to do here is go ahead and set the emission mapping to heat and that's just going to help us later when we try to make this look like an explosion it's going to make it easier to separate our smoke from our fire so if you just came here to learn how to bring this data into octane and you already know how to set up the materials then you can probably stop watching at this point you probably have everything that you need but if you're looking to pick up some quick tips on how to make this smoke look really cool I get kind of an explosion like a photorealistic explosion look out of it then you may want to continue to watch because that's what we're going to get into and the first thing that we're going to do in order to do that is open up octane settings and bring it over here and I'm going to set this to path tracing you need to be using either path tracing or pmc and nobody really uses pmc so we're going to use path tracing here I'm just gonna set this to a sane number like 768 I'm gonna set our diffuse and specular depth to something low because we have a pretty simple scene and I just want to make sure nothing goes crazy and makes our renders take a really long time GI clamp is gonna be really important for when you have bright light sources or when you're working with volumes I like to set that to 1 sometimes it needs to be higher than 1 but in most cases one is low enough and it helps get rid of fireflies next thing we're gonna do is go ahead and turn on adaptive sampling that should speed things up we'll leave these settings at the default though and then we're gonna come over to our camera imager normally I would set this to gamma 2.2 and linear for like a production environment but I'm just going to go ahead and set this to portrait here because it gives us a nice look and the filmic feel is going to be nice for this particular explosion and then I'll go ahead and just bring our hot pixel down just to make sure we don't get any hot pixels the only other setting that we're going to be addressing in the camera imager is saturate to white but we're gonna adjust that to taste later on the next thing that we're gonna do here is start to work with our medium so I come in here to get this smoke looking nice and thick well first let's go ahead and just turn off our emitter so we can't see it anymore so now she's kind of emitting from nothing to make this look a lot thicker I'm going to bring this down to the volume step length to one and pretty instantaneously here you can see that this this smoke now has a lot more a lot more thickness a lot more volume to it but it doesn't need to be quite that thick we'll go ahead and set this to 60 and then the other thing that we're gonna do is click on this fire preset here oh and that just changed some of my settings I'll set those back 0.1 and 60 now if you look at our fire it's pretty much mostly red and that's not what we want and that's gonna be a function of this emission ramp here but before we go any further I want to tweak our lighting setup just so that we can really see what we're working with here so to do that I'm gonna first of all turn off this ridiculous black background by creating an octane sky HDRI emitter and setting the power all the way down so now the only light source in our scene is the fire itself but that's also not what we want I'm gonna create a null and just bring it up to maybe 100 centimeters here to function as our target and then I'm going to create an octane targeted light now you'll get more detail or the appearance of more detail anyway out of smaller lights because they cast harsher shadows and those shadows bring out the detail so I'm gonna make this something like a foot in diameter so we'll punch in six inches here and that's going to give us a much more detailed look we'll come in to our options we might want this to be a little bit brighter I set this to 100 we'll set our temperature to something nice and cool and you know what let's go ahead and create a camera so that we can just see what we're doing we'll bring this over here something like that and we're gonna give it yeah again a nice cool color we're gonna duplicate it command C command V we're gonna bring this one over here bring this one over here to be more of a side light you're not quite that far over and we're gonna bring it down in terms of temperature bring it in a little closer all right that's fine that'll do it for you so now I've got some some light in here that's just gonna help balance things out and you've seen a little bit of fireflies here another thing that we need to do is come into our VDB volume and set the emissions sampling rate and for explosions it's really good to just have this be a pretty high number and that'll clean up a little bit faster okay so how do we get this to stop looking like a big red cloud unless that's what you're going for then you know more power to you but we're looking to create a photorealistic photorealistic explosion we're gonna come to the volume gradient you see we've got a bunch of different options to your absorption scattering and emission we're gonna come to the emission ramp under a mission and this max value you see it's supposed to be going from yellow to red but it's basically just red you got a little bit of yellow down in here and that has to do with this max value I'm gonna set this to 0.5 because that's the way that I like to work with the with the emission because I actually don't want it to really be nearly as fiery up at the top as it is at the bottom and again all of this is based off of the temperature channel which was determined by by our explosion data that we created an explosion effects and if we needed to we could Reese emulator change that but we don't need to do that we could set this to 1 and you would get kind of more yellow to red maybe set it to two yeah kind of get more of a yellow to red look that's also not what we're going for so I'm gonna set this back to 0.5 and then I like this if I click on the spin this down and then go to load preset I like this flame preset it gets pretty close to photorealistic results right off the bat but we are gonna tweak it a little bit I'm gonna go ahead and bring this yellow down a little bit further bring this orange down bring this red down and then you know what I think we could actually go to like 0.8 here yeah that's more like it and then I'm going to bring this black in because I don't actually want the top of the cloud to have any emission so we're just gonna keep bringing things down here if we could set this to 1 I know you were probably sitting at home thinking you should set that till 1:1 just makes sense as a value and now you're vindicated but I've done this I've done this a lot of times and this is the first time I've actually used one one is just kind of what's working here in this particular instance and I've had different settings and all that anyway you're probably gonna be playing around with with adjusting both of these quite a bit but I'm liking the way that this looks now I kind of want to refine the stuff that's just smoke so I'm going to go ahead and come to the absorption and scattering and bring those down so that I can work with them and we're gonna set these to float values just because it's gonna make it a little bit easier to work with I'm not gonna have to be setting RGB sliders every time so now we can spin these down and we've got our float now absorption has to do with how much light is actually blocked by the smoke so the higher well this is actually inverted so the lower that it is the more light your smoke is going to be blocking that's going to cast things like shadows what you're going to bring out some of the details in your smoke scattering has to do with how much light is just scattered obviously by your smoke and it's at the higher this is the lighter your smoke is going to be but the it's it's not quite a one-to-one thing it's not like these are adjusting the same thing this the absorption is going to get you more shadows and scattering is going to get you more light kind of passing through and being emitted so I'm mostly liking the way this looks maybe we could bring this up a little bit see if I were to set this all the way up now we get this you can see that it's just the the fire is just emitting straight through but that's that's not the look that we're going for here we could set this to maybe yeah right one point for bring this down a little bit and that is looking pretty good I'm pretty happy with that so now I'm gonna come over here and just I may not even need to do this but I'm gonna bring in saturate to white and what this does is it takes your the things that are emitting and it saturates them to white and the lower that this is the brighter something has to be to be saturated the white and I do usually like to turn this on it also affects the bloom and glare which we're gonna go ahead and turn on because what's an explosion without some bloom and glare and my preferred way to work with these is to crank them up and then bring them back down to something that I feel like is reasonable it kind of gives me a feel for what exactly is blowing out at first so that I can then know what we know what I'm looking at basically and then for glare I like to set up kind of an anamorphic style flaring I don't think it's really built with this in mind but it's a trick that I discovered a while back if you set the right amount to one and you set the glare angle to 90 we start to get this kind of anamorphic flaring and man if we were JJ Abrams we would be done and this is this is gold right here I may even submit this to him for like as a job application but no we're gonna go ahead and bring it down to say 19 and then the other thing that you can do even when this is up is just start to blur start to blur it so it's not quite as extreme and recognizable so set this at like I don't know 18 point 3 7 5 0 1 2 that's looking pretty good to me alright so now let's go ahead and create a camera and we're gonna make the cam oh we already have a camera so we'll delete that camera because this this original camera is way better when I'm working with explosions I like to use a telephoto lens because if I were working with explosions in real life I would want to use a telephoto lens because I value my eyebrows and you know the flesh on my face so we're gonna let's switch to this camera and whoa we're really zoomed in I'm going to zero out some of these coordinate settings zero zero actually I'm going to zero all out and then we'll just zoom out and now we can raise the camera whoops raise the camera up I know how to use cinema 4d you guys don't worry awesome this is starting to look pretty good pretty good not gonna win any awards but you know it's it's decent for a tutorial alright and that that'll just about do it let's go ahead and actually don't want it to be quite this telephoto will go to 85 I know that's that's technically not telephoto right you guys who are photographers are probably at home gone that 85 85 is technically not telephoto David chill out buddy chill out all right and then I'm gonna bring this light this would be the first light and we'll just push that out of the way so we can't see it anymore and that is your explosion now if it's looking a little bit too bright which you know maybe it is maybe it is we can we can also adjust this here we've got the power slider here just like with any emitter so we could bring this down maybe maybe to something like that and then maybe is something like let's go with 0.333 yeah and then play with saturate to white again I'm pretty happy with that that's pretty good all right so the other thing that I'm going to go ahead and do here is I am going to upload this cinema 4d file to the to the Internet if you look in the description below you will find this cinema 4d file it's not going to include the VDB files you'll have to come into the cache object and build the cache yourself and probably change this unless your home directory is the same name as mine and you actually happen to have these folders but yeah you'll be able to just build the cache yourself and then should be able to just load it in to load it into octane again by going over to here and I'm giving you this you can use it in whatever you want but I'm thinking you'll just be able to use it as a playground so that you can get started learning these things tweaking settings maybe maybe redo at some more velocity or less veracity or you know whatever you want to do so go ahead and grab that and that's it well thank you for watching if you liked this video do me a favor and hit the like button I mean that's the least you can do right you liked it you could like it that'll help more people find it and then the other thing you could do if you if you enjoy this kind of content is hit subscribe this is actually my first tutorial so you can go ahead and hit the subscribe button and see when I make more if I make more which I'm planning to totally

Channel: David Mikucki

Views: 37,212

Keywords: x-particle, x-particles 4, cinema 4d, maxon, render, octane render, cgi, tutorial, explosia fx, explosion, fire

Id: eh3qG0JpMuE

Length: 21min 37sec (1297 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 18 2017