How to Make This 3D Landscape in Cinema 4D | Greyscalegorilla Tutorial

[Music] hi everybody this is chris schmidt with another grayscale gorilla tutorial so in this video we are going to be trying to recreate this effect but enough of that let's jump on in and see how to make this thing from scratch now i'm actually going to be creating this in r16 but nothing i'm doing requires r16 in fact all you really need i think is your version has to have hair because we're going to create this using the hair module so how are we going to do this well i'm going to start out by creating a plane and uh let's make these numbers nice and even so i'm going to make this plane 1000 by 1000 and so there we go that's this is going to be the foundation of everything that we do what we uh what we want to do is drive how many hairs we have based on how many polygons we've given this plane there might be some slightly different ways to do this but this one's worked pretty well now i've had really good luck with having about 500 by 500 i get pretty good real-time feedback in the viewport i'm gonna go a little lower than that just for the purposes of this uh tutorial and if you were to go a thousand by a thousand it started going pretty slow for me but a thousand by a thousand literally means you will have a million clones on the screen so i think we had yeah like eight hundred thousand or uh eighty thousand so i forget the number but we get a lot even just with this 400 by 400 so i had to change our view here you can see we get a lot of polygons and each one of those is going to become a surface for hair why don't we do that right now i'm going to go ahead and go to simulate hair objects add hair so that's added hair and how has it added here well right now the way it's set it's added one hair to every vertex and normally that would be fine but because we want to kind of map these to be a particular color we're going to get around that by changing the root from vertex from polygon vertex to polygon center and as soon as i click that you're going to see that the center of each polygon becomes a hair and now what's great is like these are all guides right now but you can see that i'm getting pretty good refresh as i rotate my screen and for all purposes we have 400 by 400 clones i want to see what number that is um i'll just make a cube and say 400 times 400 oh okay uh 160 thousand we have 160 000 don't close 1000 clones so what do we need to do now well we want to first of all we want to make this run as fast as possible so our guides because we're going to be doing straight pillars we don't need any subdivision so right here we have segments and i don't want any segments i'm going to drop it down it's probably going to jump to one but yeah so we're going to drop down to one segment per and then we go to hairs here and this is how many hairs it's going to generate but we actually don't need those at all i think we can just zero that out or actually i think that what we want to do is set this to as guides which means each guide becomes one hair so i'm going to turn that on as guides and that means it turns off count attack turns off segments which means the guides also or the final hair also has one segment and then where the magic really comes in is the generate tab and in the generate tab that is where it's being told to render hairs but we don't actually want to render hairs we want to render a whole series of little pillars so we're going to keep this as light as possible so i'm going to turn off render hairs and we're going to we got a bunch of options here and you're going to be you want to be careful about clicking any of this stuff here i'm going to keep on pointing out different warnings but it's really important like you could really easily kind of freeze your computer if you click the wrong thing somewhere at least wait a really long time so i'm going to go ahead and click on square and now this is actually going to be extruding out an entire series of squares and this is really important you see single object we want to leave that checked on if you turn that off bad news like even if i turn off right now my computer would probably freeze and i'm going to turn on end cap because right now these would be hollow so i want to end cap we could turn start cap but that would make a polygon seal in the bottom and that would be a useless polygon it would just be sitting there we wouldn't see it so why add extra polygons so right now every single one of these hairs is represented by five polygons and actually the way that point might be on the top they might be eight but in any case we don't need to start the start cap so these are these each of these is an extrusion now and you'll see that i'm still getting really good feedback and if i start zooming in here you're not going to be able to tell too well uh what we're looking at but that's because these are incredibly thin right now these pillars are as thin as the hairs used to be so that's not good we control those though through our hair material so if we go to our hair material and we go to thickness this is how thick they are so at the base they're one and at the top they're 0.1 really tiny i'm not sure what size we need exactly so i'm going to type in three and three and we have to wait a second for it to refresh and i guessed pretty correctly but now you'll see that we have a size of three by three and i'm not sure if they're intersecting a little bit if they're if they are we'll shrink it just a little but now look you can tell that these are a ton of pillars and look at this refresh rate i'm still getting we're still getting really good feedback now when we change key numbers it will take a little while to calculate but i'm going to set these to 2.5 and 2.5 and now i'm going to wait because it's got to calculate this and there we go now it's made all of our pillars and actually i might even go to 2.4 this is just a guess i mean depending on your size these will be different but if i go to 2.4 then we should get a little space in between them and i want that and you also see we have a phong tag on our hair if we turn on limit angle or we could just delete the font tag then you'll see that our edges go away and we get nice hard edges and you'll see that we're still getting really great refresh now the reason we're getting such good refresh with refresh with this technique and why this wouldn't work if we're doing a cloner is because if you're using a cloner and you put in a cube then we would actually have 400 by 400 cubes being cloned but when it comes to using hair what's happening is the spline object that this hair object is actually returning for all purposes a single spline even though there's six you know 160 000 parts to it it's a single spline and then it's for all purposes sweeping one spline cinema doesn't like a lot of poly uh it doesn't like a lot of objects but doesn't mind a lot of polygons so as long as this is being treated like one spline we get really good feedback all right let's move on so uh i guess the most next most important thing is how do we want this to look how are we going to make these have all those interesting heights well we're going to do that through the actually the length checkbox inside our hair material and that's going to be what drives it as an example as a test why don't we go ahead and just put a noise in so i'm on length and i'm going to drop in a noise and i'm going to leave it default and now i just turn on this checkbox it's going to take a second but let's let it refresh and boom it's refreshed now i want to deselect it because it's hard to get feedback when you have it selected because all the hairs are still the same length all the way up to the top so i'm actually going to do is grab the hair lock it right here you see this little lock if i lock that that means i can deselect my object and i still have the hair object selected here but now you see it's not selected in the viewport all right so there you go look we've got this awesome varying height and we're still getting just as fast a refresh here so that's working really well all right so that's a noise and that's really fun and if you could use any kind of noise you want you could animate the noise you could layer a bunch of noises up with the layer shader um and that's actually all i did in the animated version that's what i did in in this this kind of uh this one is all just a series of layered noises i have like 12 different types of noise all layered on top of each other to make this one but let's make an image-based one they're a little more fun that's what i started out with now if you look at the reference material here like it clearly looks like this is like some topographic data maybe or who knows i mean it could be generated in a million different ways but it kind of looks like topographic data or maybe pictures of storms maybe some undersea floor stuff there's a lot of different options and what i initially did is i just searched i went to nasa if you go to like nasa's website all of those images are in the public domain at least if you're a us citizen maybe everybody's i don't know and all those images are free so you can like legally use those because our tax dollars went to pay for all those photos being taken so uh when it came to those images say this one this one is actually a nebula photo that i took from the nasa website so what we're doing is i'm using both the height data and the color data to drive it so there's a lot of different images we can do but then i started moving on and actually trying to tinker with some of my own photos so i just went through my photo album and i tend to take a lot of photos of like just textures and materials and whatnot so here's some examples of other of of renders when i was scrolling through you saw some of these as renders um and some of them are pretty interesting like this picture of cereal is actually this one this is just a picture of cereal um but the one i thought looked pretty cool was this this one this rusty one so it's just a rusty pipe in fact you can even see it curving around a little bit but i didn't care too much about that now in photoshop the only step that i think is kind of important is find whatever reference image go find a galaxy go find a picture of a solar system go find some nebulas find the hurricane whatever kind of image you want but there's some important things you you do want what you want is maybe like areas that are similar you see that we get a lot of these green areas and then we have distinct other areas in addition to that we want to make sure that we have the full spectrum well i guess we want color if you're making a color one but you want a you want almost everything from white to black and you'll see in this image we get these very bright white parts and these are pretty light here and then we get black areas and those heavy air that contrast is going to uh really help with our height map so i'm going to actually hit command l i'm going to go to levels in photoshop i think i don't know where you find in the menu oh right here levels i'm going to hit command l to go to levels you'll see i've actually already tweaked this a little bit but if you hadn't tweaked it actually where's the image like this one i haven't tweaked this one yet so if i go to levels you'll see this is the spectrum of how bright it is and let's say i want a little more contrast i could grab this line and pull it in and you see how these darks are getting darker and if i pull this in we're getting brighter whites now if i go too far then this these areas of white would end up be being completely flat so we don't want to go beyond it but the image you bring in i don't know if i have any good like here's the my original image if i go to the levels here you'll see that there's not a lot going on right here so i could crop in a little and this one there's not a lot going on until about here so i might crop into about there so we get the heavy contrast and the other important detail is ellie the one that we're making is square so i want to make sure this image is square so you hit c go ahead and crop your image and make sure that you've cropped it to be a square image that way it's not getting stretched that's all you have to do you don't worry about the resolution as long as our resolution is at least as high or higher than what our pillar count is and right now our pill count is 400 by 400 and if we were to check out the image size of this one and we go to pixels i okay actually scale this one to 400 by 400 but you can actually have higher than that like i use this image and this is obviously bigger than 400 by 400 but we're going to deal with that in cinema and if you were going to go to a higher resolution you want to make sure your image is at least as high a resolution all right cool anyway here we are in our noise i'm going to save this file so we can find our textures and we're just going to save this as number one tutorial cool okay now i'm going to go to our track down image and i'm going to grab rust i'm going to say open and now all i guess i have to do is wait a second for it to figure out the way this should look so okay that's pretty crazy it's automatically mapped um it automatically maps as if it was flat projected so that works out for us but now we need to apply our material on top of this so how do we do that well we're going to create a new material and we'll tur turn off you probably see reflection but i've got reflectance right here i'm going to turn that off for now we don't need to worry about it and let's go find our image so i'm going to go ahead and track down rust in here as well now here's an important step now i don't i don't actually have to do this but you might if you have a higher resolution image i'm going to now that i've made in my image i'm going to click on the drop down and i'm going to go to effects and i'm going to go to pixel and what this will do is pixelate your image and all you have to do is in this shader go inside you see the tile number and all we have to do is make sure we type in the same number of pixels as the number of subdivisions we put in our plane which is right here 400 by 400 400 by 400 so those should match perfectly alrighty so now let's take this image and throw it on to our hair object actually and this is not going to look good right away because it's being mapped uvw and in fact i'm not even going to put that on the hair i'm going to put that this on our plane i'm going to turn off the hair so we don't worry about that for a second and now that's on uvw but that's no good we know that's no good so let's create a flat projection and now we've created the flat projection we will make sure the object selected and our texture is selected and now we want to go to our texture tool and we want to go to i'm going to full screen this wow we got our texture tool our texture mode rather and i'm going to turn on axis because it makes it easier to rotate around so i'm going to go ahead and rotate this down so it's flat i'm going to layer t for scale and scale it up until it's about the size of this and i don't have to be exact there because now i'm going to click on my material go to my coordinates tab and now we can see what numbers we want to be reaching and you can see that we're really close to 500 so it's actually 500 that we need this to be all right so that should be overlaid now our rotation might not be correct so that's the only thing we might need to rotate it to a different angle so the only way to find that out is to put this back on top of our hair and turn it on now i turn on the hair i just have to wait a second for it to kind of calculate and it's going to pop in now we have to see if this looks like it's corresponding properly i'm gonna go back to our object mode and let's zoom around and let's see if this feels like it's corresponding properly it might be kind of hard to judge actually i mean i mean um [Music] i kind of feel like it's not matching yeah you see like this very light area it's not popping up the if we've done a different image this might be a little easier to figure out but let's go ahead and oh i know an easy way to figure this out i'm going to turn the hair back off and then let's reapply this material and now that we've applied this material this is a uv mapping and the uv mapping is the way that it's extruding it upwards so we just need to make sure our flat projection matches what this looks like so now if i throw this material back on here you're going to see that we weren't correctly matching it and if i go back to our regular shader review then we'll be able to tell a little better so i think we need this corner to be over here let's find out i'm going to push pull it off and there you see it's over here so i'm going to pull that down yep it seems like that's what we need so i'm going to go ahead and go back to my texture tool go back to our object make sure we have the tag selected i'm going to rotate this there and let's see if that's correct it is not which probably means we have it flipped upside down so i'm going to flip it 180 after you do this one time you'll never have to set it again so that's good and now we can rotate it here and now i think we're matching if i pull it off and pull it back you'll see that our flat projection is exactly the same as uv just make sure you keep rotating until you get that correct now i can go ahead throw that on our hair material turn it on and i can actually grab our base plane here we don't need that anymore i'm going to turn it off i'm going to not not turn it off here but i'm going to get invisible in our render all right so we can go back to our object tool i'm going to turn off axis because we don't need that anymore and look we're still getting amazing real-time feedback of our scene here and now we've got this set up and that is looking really cool look at that i mean at this point i mean that's oops i accidentally clicked the hair object if you click the hair object stuff will run a little slower and you won't be able to tell what's going on um for the most part that's it like this is the uh this is the key part to making this after this go ahead and render everything so i can hit render right now and you'll see like look how quick that renders because it's a simple setup right now i'll go into some of the details of things i did in mind to make them look maybe a little bit more sexy not specifically my area of expertise but let's go ahead and tweak a little bit so here is our material i'm going to double click on that and um i don't i'm just going to call it uh main just so we have it in case i copy it okay so we've got our material and we can do things like maybe turn on reflection so i'm going to turn on i mean for me it's reflectance but for you just turn on reflection uh if you're not in r16 i'm going to add a new layer and i'm going to make sure it is nice and reflective i'm going to set it to yours will add i'm going to make sure that mine is brightening as well okay cool now i just have a reflective material now something's kind of important i'm going to go to my render settings and right now if i hit render it might take well not that long but it might take a little while to render that's because we have a lot of reflection depth and i'm gonna set that down to two uh so now if i render it'll take longer than it did before but it should still be relatively quick and you see it's reflective so that's fine that's kind of cool if you want it to look reflective it's a little more crystalline looking perhaps uh and then i might want to pull in some sort of hdr to [Music] um to give us reflection i don't know that i have any good hdr setup i'm just going to go and find some probably random oh here i've got well that one's not great but but it's something i'm just going to grab an hdr you can search for hdr on your computer you'll probably have one somewhere the next next one who knows all the lighting stuff really well if i take that and i put it in our sky and i hit render then it should just give us something nice to reflect so now you see we get these really like bright highlights and that stuff looks pretty cool there so i mean an option to do reflection i don't necessarily like it so i'm going to turn that off for this render and where there's some other things well maybe go to your render settings and turn on ambient occlusion so we know our scale here is actually pretty tiny each of these pillars is only what was it like four units across so keep that in mind because right now our dispersion or our maximum rate length is a hundred and that's really big so for this maybe we'll set that down like 25 and we just go ahead and hit render and see what this looks like here but i think we're going to pull down some of the dark the darkness like these get pretty dark what's great is you really get the depth you get the layering and how these are all interacting with each other and you get the spacing in between so turning on ambient occlusion goes a long way to making this look good but maybe we don't want this quite black so i'm going to grab a dark gray and pull this over and maybe uh pull our midpoint further over so it ramps up to this gray so now it should get a little darker but not overboard so go ahead and hit render there so excellent looks pretty good and i'm going to create a light and we can light this guy up now i'm not the best lighter but we can maybe pull this over and if we're kind of hanging out in this direction on this side rather then let's go ahead and put maybe uh our main light back here and let's see maybe give it a little bit of warmth and i'm gonna turn on a soft shadow i know nick likes area but i'm gonna turn out soft uh and something i think is gonna be pretty important i'm going to zoom back up and this should look not right right now because our shadow density isn't thick enough so it can't do much in the way of shadow i don't know how well you can tell but i'm going to crank our shadow map up to the highest default which is 2000 by 2000 and that should give our light and of course we could set as a spotlight and probably render faster but let's just go ahead and turn that on and we should start see now you can see we're getting some nice little shadow in some of these areas because we have enough resolution in our light to be able to see that and so there's just one light and some main ambient occlusion that's looking pretty dang good lots of depth in there but there's a lot of things we do um in addition to that i'm going to create another light and let's go up to our top and let's see maybe we'll push this one over here off to the side and i'm going to pull it up into the air a little bit and maybe even higher and i'm going to maybe make this one not super bright and give it some blue and i guess we're doing some sort of three point lighting then we can copy that one and i'm gonna pull it maybe back to a little bit more in the back area and uh i don't know just some other color maybe some pink over there because why not and i'm gonna go zoom back up again and what's really cool i mean you saw with some of my renders like some of the renders i did zoomed out a little bit so you could see the world it's in and i have to do is zoom in far enough that you can't see anything on the outskirts and now you've got this entire world that's you know could be infinite as far as anybody else knows so i hit render i get these three different lights only one has shadow i could turn shadow on and the others if i want to but this should fill in some of the uh the gaps so yeah that's looking that's looking pretty nice and then you have all your normal options as far as texturing like you can add your speculars you can actually i did some subsurface scattering tests and it was pretty quick at default settings with subsurface scattering now i didn't necessarily like the way the renders looked i think they look it's so detailed just with the tiny pillars like adding a lot of detail on top of it i almost feel like it starts taking away from it so what are some other things i might have been tinkering with well um something i thought was kind of cool was you can make yourself an environment and when you make the environment object you can turn on enable fog and now we're going to start getting some fog showing up here and there's a couple key settings here like we can set the color of the fog so we get like a blue we could go really saturated on that and then we can set our str actually our distance is the most important one so i can start pulling this back i'll go to half the distance like five five thousand here uh and depending on your scale it could be different but now you see it's starting to fade out a lot back there and this is really important if you zoom out your entire island will start fading away so this fog usually works best when you're really close to some of them and then looking off into the distance these close ones are barely going to be affected you'll see at this angle they start fading out really nicely in the background so you got a lot of options as far as playing around with this fog everything's going to give you a completely different look so that's pretty that's pretty neat uh and we could go super strong like 2 000 and maybe even 1 000 there now it's so strong i mean you wouldn't necessarily want to do this and you start pulling the strength down a little bit um but there's some really cool options here just as a long lines of fog let's leave it up really high like that i'm going to hit render and once again i'm rendering this on only my laptop and look at how fast uh we're getting these uh this output it works so well along these lines uh okay awesome what are some other tricks i might have done i'm gonna pull back on this fog at least i'm gonna go up to five thousand and uh let's get some quick depth of field going and of course that's going to mean using a physical renderer but i think that's okay i'm going to create a camera and this is not my area of expertise i'm going to make a camera i'm going to link to it and i'm going to create a null object i'm going to name it targ target and it's right in the center so we should be focusing right around center i can even pull it up a little because you know these pillars will be up and i'm going to go to my camera and i'm going to actually i think we have to change it to physical render to even have these options opened up oh no well we have focus object here so we can do that we drag our target into the object tab and into our focus object so now our camera should be focusing on the focus object and now to get the good depth of field of course we have to go into our physical renderer okay so now we have physical render and i'm actually going to change what's really great about the setup well if we're not doing animation is we just go ahead and turn on progressive mode and not worry about any other render settings except for of course turning on depth of field so now that's on and now we're going to get really quick renders that give us feedback right away and um we don't have to wait a long time if it render then it's going to kind of calculate for a second and now you see it goes render render render it's going to keep improving improving improving really quickly so great way to get really quick feedback anyway now we can go into our camera go to our physical tab and our f-stop is the setting that we want and now we're working a pretty tiny scale here but the smaller the number the more blur we're going to get so i'm going to drop it down to the lowest number which might be too much but i want to get a baseline so i'm going to drop it down to an f stop of one i'm going to hit render it's going to calculate a little bit and it's going to start chugging along and now we're going to wait for it to do a couple passes and now you're gonna start seeing look it's pretty blurry over where we are but it's sharper over there um i'm gonna turn off our fog while we're tinkering with this in fact i might i might grab our blue light here and add a shadow as well and that shadow also needs to get a big shadow map i'm gonna go ahead and hit render on this one so without our fog and with extra shadow we should get a little more depth in here and that should help us show uh if areas are focused or not so a little bit of depth of field definitely goes a long way um to my untrained eye i might usually go a little bit overboard but especially if these are like these really tiny things you're getting all super close and the depth of field does get pretty uh it does get blurry quickly so we could go beyond one we can make even smaller so if i were to set this to heck let's go overboard this is gonna be way too way too much but i'm going to set our f-stop to point one and let's hit render and if nothing else this will illustrate uh where it's focusing right now so you see all the stuff up front is super blurry except for this strip back here so now um let's okay let's say we don't want to render that strip back there so i'm going to turn off y and then pull this closer to us and it's really important you kind of rotate your camera around to make sure you have this in the correct spot um because if i didn't rotate my camera around this might perspective wise it might have been like way over here and i wouldn't realize because it was been up in the air but that's focusing there now we're still got the crazy high f or the crazy low f-stop so it's still gonna be super blurry but at least we can see where we're giving our focal point and that looks actually pretty good as far as like where it's focusing so now i have to do is go back to our camera and be reasonable about what we're doing i'm going to say maybe 0.8 because just a little stronger than the one was giving us hit render let it chug a little bit there we go now it's definitely pulling a focus here and the longer i let this sit here the more passes it's rendering and you see how dang fast this is going i haven't tried playing with gi but i imagine that would be relatively reasonable as well you see that we're our focus is being pulled to this little area almost like a city in the forest um so yeah that's looking awesome uh what's another trick i might have done i i did some water in some of the renders let's just talk about that real quick i'm going to set this size up to a thousand by a thousand on this cube and i'm gonna pull this cube down as i pull it down think of this as the level of the water so this the way this render is set up the way this background is this could be like a swampy area so that's fine right there i pulled it down let's make a new water material we'll call it water we'll open it up and we'll do this really quick we don't need a color channel uh we do need roof we do need transparency and i think water is 1.55 so now we got our transparency and then we could turn on reflectance and get some and of course you know if you're an r15 you got to do our 15 stuff but uh in reflectance i'm going to go ahead and add a new uh beckman layer i guess there might there might be better ones but i'm going to add that and i'm going to go to my fresnel and i'm going to add a i think a conduct no not connected dialectic and go to water and that should give us a good fresnel on that and let's go ahead and throw that on the cube and actually well we can go ahead and hit render that and see how that looks oh that look at that that's looking pretty sexy already i tend to find that if you have physical render on or not it makes a big difference on this and it looks so cool i actually want more of it i'm going to pull this up higher so we get even more swamp and another thing i can do is go to our transparency and i'm going to add some absorption distance so what color should our swamp be i think it should be kind of a boggy ucky yellow so yeah there we go so this should be pretty heavy color our absorption distance is important now remember this our scale is really tiny so i'm going to set this to maybe 25 so as it gets to 25 we'd have full color so anyway when i hit render now the deeper areas should look more and more green so yeah there we go and if you set a really tiny absorption distance in fact why don't we make it look like muddy water i'm gonna go to like a brown and let's say our absorption distance to something tiny like five five and now it should get really murky really quickly and that now look we only we can barely see through it at all so our absorption distance does a lot um actually that's looking pretty cool so why don't we set our absorption distance to something like 15 so we get a little bit of depth not too much render again and now you can start seeing like these plunge into the water a little bit but mostly we're getting reflection out that's pretty cool maybe there's a little too much water so i'll pull this back down again get a little more of these guys poking their heads up above just break it up a little bit more there we go totally a swampy looking thing now keep in mind our source material here all this is is a photo of a rusty pole and look at what we're getting out of it um for the most part those are all the tricks i wanted to talk about uh really quickly i guess we can swap this out to a different image i'm gonna turn off our cube i'm gonna hide our environment and let's just put a different image in here real quick um and then keep in mind you can throw in an animation i could and i oh very very important thing if you put an animation in here and you want to have it render you know how when we like turn off the hair and turn it back on and it takes a long time for it to kind of be like and i'm on if you put an animation in there it's going to take that long to figure out every time you change a frame so if you put it in here don't hit play if you hit play it'll probably just freeze cinema it'll never you'll never be able to escape out of it it'll probably calculate and then you know a minute later pop to the next frame but then it'll start playing the next frame so don't hit play but you totally could put animation here just make sure you render it to the picture view or not in the viewport okay anyway uh let's go to our hair and we'll go to our thickness and let's find a different image i will just grab one of the other ones i did um we do serial we could do [Music] winter this one looked pretty weird a little serial i'm going to open this up and we can just actually copy this image and then we go to our color as well go inside the pixel and now we'll paste it here inside the pixel so now it's pixelating this and boom it's already refreshed for us and now we've got serial world so now if you go down here this one's got like a cool grand canyon vibe going on look at these these rich colors we're getting excuse me but what's crazy is if we actually start zooming up to the top and i started zooming out look at that it's serial so there's probably some cool renders you can do along those lines or it's like oh wow we got this crazy environment you're doing and obviously we're getting really good feedback here so you can do like a camera fly through and it's like yeah when you're flying through and past all these pillars and at the end you kind of zoom down and zoom out and then it's like oh it's breakfast cereal that's crazy um in addition to that there's a lot of things to play with as far as hair like this didn't necessarily have to be on a plane like this could be a deformed object this could be a sphere uh you you'll lose your imagery of course if you do on a sphere but this is still this is still hair if we go into our hair i can go to something like frizz i can turn on our frizz and this is going to make our thing frizzy look at that all these pillars randomly rotate two different directions you're kind of you know it breaks the illusion a little bit but all of these are options here the thicknesses we have tons of options along those lines uh we have different scale we can vary now the color stuff doesn't matter but how it's the orientation and whatnot that does matter another thing that's important is we've only been working with these uh squares these pillars right now but if we go to the hair we can go to our generate instead of it being a square i can say go to circle now circle has more geometry instead of it being five polygons i think it's 24 but boom look how quick that was now we got these pillars and it's gonna be a little slower but look we're still getting amazing feedback and now we've got these pillars instead these pillows could be bigger they could be uh you know and then start intersecting each other they could be smaller uh there's a what else we have here we have flat i don't know what that is uh probably just be a line then we have a triangle so you can get these uh like prisms going i'll let that so we got these prisms and now you see we get these prisms but this might be a little boring because they're all facing the same direction well we can fix that easily by going from a line free to random and now let this figure out itself for a second and then boom each of these is randomly rotated so you get all these pillars facing whatever direction you want i'm going to deselect and there we go that's looking pretty great too uh and then you'd have to be careful you want to be very careful but you can also go to spline and you can feed it whatever actually not spline i think sweep if you go to sweep you can feed it in your own spline to get custom shapes that way and then you gotta be really careful but you can actually turn on instance an instance would allow you to feed it a model and actually i did a test and it worked really quickly it was still working well giving me good feedback but there's important things to note like uh like i'll just do this example i'm not gonna actually put it in there but let's say uh let's say we wanted uh this this uh six sided shape so i'm gonna go ahead and fly down the ground i'm going to create an extrude i'm gonna throw this into the extrude and i'm going to tell it to extrude upward so i'm going to pull it up so this becomes our base object and then let's say i'm like oh i want to add a cap so i want the end cap to have a it so i say cap there and get this cap on there's like okay cool now if i just feed this object into it it would be it would work but it would run really slow and it would run really slow because if i make this editable which is what would be essentially happening you see that we've actually got one two three four objects so for every pillar there'd be four objects in addition to there being four objects we have one two three selection tags and i found a cinema these selection tags slow down cinema as much as an object does so uh what i would do with this is actually this this bottom cap we don't even need it so i would delete that out and i grabbed these three pieces and i'd right click and say connect and delete and then we don't need those selection tags unless for some reason you did uh and then this uh uv tag we don't need that and the fong depending on what we're doing with it i mean if your shape calls for it then use it but otherwise delete it you don't need that either and now this is the object we should throw in as an instance so you want to make sure you clean it up and have as low poly as possible as few objects as possible i mean technically we'd be able to throw anything in here we could throw a city in here we could throw flowers in here but there'd be a lot of polygons and at 400 by 400 i would expect cinema to go really slow at that point but this this feedback is unbelievable especially compared to i'm sure all of you are familiar with like you make a cloner and you make one too many clones and starts running really slow getting this kind of feedback is absolutely amazing out of cinema so uh i think i'm gonna swap this back to our swamp and this is uh and i think i talked about everything i want to uh in some of the renders you might see i did a i'm not going to talk my way through the whole thing but uh how well can you see it i have like a visible fog floating around here actually i guess you can see it best here i'll just mention the way i did it especially when we go back here you see we get this really nice fog floating around and actually this fog is just a visible light and i went to the noise tab and i added noise to it so and then i have a fall off so there's actually a square spotlight facing upward and it fades out as it goes out and i get this awesome cloud and you turn on no illumination and boom you've got fog uh like these awesome whispers in fact you can even animate those i didn't but you can't animate them so uh yeah i think that does it uh i hope you guys have as much fun playing with this as i have i'm sure i'm gonna be making even more renders i'm posting the rest of these um but uh yeah i had a lot of fun and i'm gonna set this up because nick might tinker with this one actually uh but i'll see you guys in the next tutorial hopefully it'll be half as fun as this one so see you then bye

Channel: Greyscalegorilla

Views: 13,277

Keywords: Cinema 4D, c4d, tuts, tutorials, motion graphics, greyscalegorilla, c4d tutorials, cinema 4d tutorials, chris schmidt, abstract 3d render, abstract 3D tutorial, cinema 4d hair, cinema 4d hair tutorial, lee griggs, lee griggs inspiration, 3d landscapes, 3d topography, 3d landscape generation

Id: IOCgeRPYzuk

Length: 37min 17sec (2237 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 18 2021