How to Render Realitic Explosions From X-Particles 4 Explosia FX Using Redshift

hello again youtube today we're going to take open VDV data created using X particles for explosion FX and render out a photo realistic explosion using redshift take a look this tutorial assumes that you know how to export open VDB data from X particles for or at least that you have some open V DB data exported from X particles for if you don't have any open VD V data or don't know how to export it I suggest going back to my last video where I explained how to do this process and octane I explained how to export the data from X particles in that tutorial so if you go back and just watch say the first five maybe six minutes of that tutorial you should have a pretty good idea now if you have open V DB data and you're ready to go let's get started here we are in cinema 4d and we're basically where I would have left off at like the five minute mark from the last tutorial I've got my explosion FX object here with some sweet sweet smoke going up in the air and I've got I've cashed out this data to a series of open V DB files so before we get started trying to make all of this work we just want to turn the lights on so I'm gonna go ahead and create an area light here and I also I'm going to want to target this just to make things simple so I'll create a null and because I am talking to the camera I'll go ahead and name this and I'm going to use it for the focus as well as the light target so I'll go ahead and call it center of attention and then we need to create a target and drop our center of attention in there and let's go ahead and move the center of attention right around there I'm wanting it to kind of be a little bit higher over that right okay so now we can take our light and I'll go ahead and do my four up just bring this over here always come up a little bit higher something like this and if we come at it from the side we're gonna get harder shadows so I'll go ahead and set this to about 30 maybe 35 by 35 about to bring up the intensity another thing that I like to do here is set one light set one light on either side and have a little bit of a difference in color temperature so we'll set this one to 5500 Kelvin and then we'll duplicate it bring it over to here maybe spread them out even a little bit more and I'll call this cool light and this will be our warm light great and we'll make this say 3,600 cool so now we can go ahead and bring in our IPR and just take a look at what we have so far and as you can see they basically have nothing I mean we've got our lights here so that's great but where we're missing an explosion and that's because we haven't even brought our as far as redshift is aware we don't even have an explosion so we're going to need to bring in a redshift volume object and only to essentially tell redshift where our open V DB data is and we'll do that using this path here so we'll open up finder and we'll just grab the first volume file here and redshift is actually pretty smart unlike octane this is bringing in the entire animation is pretty simple actually we'll select simple and no pun intended there I promise and we know that well let's just do detect frame and it knows how many frames we have which is great and so now we still don't see anything let's go ahead and turn off our four up view here we still don't see anything and that's because our volume is here but it doesn't have a material so now we need to create a redshift vol material there's a lot of build-up here this better be good so we'll open up our redshift volume shader we just added it to our redshift volume we still don't see anything that's because that's because it's not hooked up to a channel so when you export out of X particles your gonna export various channels if we select a FX format here we can see fuel smoke temperature we could have exported velocity but we didn't UVW in color we didn't export these three but we know that when it comes to these channels here we have these three options fuel density and heat so for our smoke we're going to go ahead and set this to density and smoke is basically controlled by scatter and absorption so now now we've got something but it's basically pure black and there are a number of different reasons for that but one of them is that our light sources are not affecting our smoke so we have to select these two light sources here let's bring them down here and we're going to need to come to the volume tab and set the contribution scale to something nice and low like 0.1 and now we start to see a little bit of detail in the smoke which is great I'm gonna bring up the scatter co-efficiency which basically adds lightness until it looks about right to me that's good but the smoke is looking a little bit dense and I mean that in the kindest way possible so I'm gonna come in here and the easiest way to thin out your smoke a little bit is to grab this old Max and just start bringing it down and as you can see as I adjust this slider you know the more I adjust it the less dense the smoke yet so I'm gonna bring it to something like like that that looks pretty good the other thing we can do is actually we have this contribution scale I'm gonna go ahead and let this affect the smoke just a little bit more there we go that's looking pretty good let's let's make this window a little bigger alright so and this this this slider here for old max will also help you if you're starting to notice that the smoke is a little bit blocky you see the further down I bring this the the thicker the smoke gets and while that might look kind of cool these areas where it's wispier starts to look kind of blocky so you can you can really affect that by bringing the bringing the density down a little bit so I'm pretty pretty happy with how that smoke looks but you'll notice that we don't have any fire now the fire is controlled by emission right here and if I had carefully exported a physically accurate fire and used fuel for the fire channel remember the fuel channel that I showed you over here in the in the XP cache and we have the option here for fuel if I had used fuel I could type in fuel but the problem is that it just isn't very much fuel if I go back to the beginning maybe you'll see slim yeah there's a tiny bit of fuel there it's showing as orange on the viewport anyway oops that helps type it right there you go there's your fuel and it's kind of not very believable that that little bit of fuel will be generating that much smoke so I'm going to go ahead and use something else I'm going to use the heat channel now the heat channel seems to correspond pretty closely to the density Channel that's okay but if we're going for photorealistic smoke here we don't want the whole thing to be white so one of the things I need to do here is come in and again stand out the explosion so if I bring in this this max you can see the more that I adjust this the less white there is but of course fire isn't white although if this was a black and white shot we could just tweak the color on these two lights and I mean we're done but know what I want to do is load a preset here and this is one of my favorite presets it seems to come with cinema 4d so I'm just going to grab flame one and this still is not quite physically accurate but we are getting somewhere so I'm going to go ahead and bring up this white because I really do like the look of the white and I'm actually gonna kind of like color picker you saturate it even more you know what let's go ahead and bring this back down it's more like it now you're wondering how am I going to get how am I going to get it so that this area isn't quite isn't still glowing essentially to do that in red shift we're going to need to shift the red I spend a lot of time thinking that one up guys now we can bring in this black here we start to see a lot of this is just going to be eyeballing so you can see I'm kind of struggling here but as we do this we start to get we start to get less and bellowing in the upper part of the of the smoke here so bring in this black just a little bit more bring up our intensity so we get more of that white down at the bottom there and this is starting to look ok let's go ahead a little bit later in the timeline as you can see it's a bunch of smoke here it's not a bunch of red so maybe we do want earlier for there to be more fire but by around here you're starting to look like that I'm pretty happy with how that looks now another problem is that we're just absorbing too much absorption is basically sucking the light second light right out of here now you're looking at this in your life this does not this looks like a cartoon explosion that's because we do have to tweak a couple of settings in the renderer itself namely we need to turn on global illumination so I'm going to set our primary GI engine to brute-force and as soon as I do that you start to see that the fire is now like physically affecting its surroundings so we'll turn the second one here to irradiance point-cloud and then the other thing I'm going to do is switch over to bucket rendering mode just because it's going to render a little bit quicker in this particular instance so this is starting to look good if we want to get rid of some of these fireflies some of this noise we can set this up to something like 256 and it's still a little bit noisy but it's also rendering nice and fast and that is starting to look much more realistic and you're kind of getting that that fall-off of the brighter parts of the explosion into the end of the smoke so we can actually bring our scale down a little bit here and now you're starting to see something it looks fairly realistic I don't like how much red there is I've never been a big fan of red so we'll keep shifting the red it's a little bit more like it maybe tweak the color picker here just bring the brightness down actually I am gonna bring the saturation down here just a little bit more now as you can see we've got some photorealistic smoke so now I'm going to go ahead and create a camera and we'll make it a redshift camera we'll look through it and another thing that I like to do when I'm shooting smoke is be far away because if I were taking a picture of an explosion I wouldn't want to be standing closely enough to use a 28 millimeter lens I'm gonna be you know at least a 90 millimeter lens away units of measurement a 90 millimeter lens yeah all right so I'm mostly liking how this looks now if you were to try to render this out you might want to go oh we've accidentally lowered this again I'm go ahead and set this to 512 you can see it's still rendering crazy fast I mean even compared to if you look at the octane tutorial i recently did its rendering very very fast so that's a little bit noisy you might want to play with that a little more to get rid of some of that noise but in essence we're done here the only other thing I want to point out is that in octane you have an ability to get kind of a flare and a glow and there are other tutorials on how to do this so I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this but if you use the a Ovie's here ayoh these are essentially multipass and I'll go ahead and turn multipass on but a Ovie's allow you to separate different parts of the image so I'm going to a volume emission pass and there are a few different ways to add these again there are other tutorials on this but if I add a volume fog emission and make sure that my IPR is set to bucket mode I can come over here to volume fog emission and now I'm just getting this fire let's that's the only thing that's on here so I could export this as like an open EXR save it as a an open e XR file and then I could bring this into something some sort of compositing software like After Effects or fusion and just use this channel to create a glow effect I mean you could also just render a glow effect based off of the bleep right based off of the beauty channel but if you're looking to only make the the fire glow so that the smoke doesn't end up glowing having this volume fog emission channel can be really handy and the great thing about a Ovie's is you can get as fancy as you want with them you know you can also add all kinds of other all kinds of other passes in here but if all you're looking to do is make one final tweak in post just throwing in a volume fog emission and then using that to create a glow or a flare using your favorite compositing engine that can be a really nifty trick ok everyone as before there's a C for D file in the description below so that you can use that as a jumping off point if you found this video helpful I would appreciate if you could give it a like maybe a comment maybe show me something awesome that you created using some of the techniques in this tutorial or the last one and last of all consider following I'm planning to create more tutorials in the future thanks for watching

Channel: David Mikucki

Views: 6,706

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

Id: emGgiIXW420

Length: 16min 23sec (983 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 31 2018