How to Turn Yourself Into a Robot | VFX MASTERCLASS (C4D, AE, Octane)

hey guys welcome to the channel my name is clinton jones i am the punisher and i'm here to teach you guys how to turn yourself into a photorealistic robot using visual effects this is a whopper of a tutorial it's basically a mini master class on how to shoot your footage track that footage bring that 3d track into cinema 4d create your own custom hdri get a robot we're going to learn how to texture this robot to make it look photo real it really comes down to the textures i actually got 50 off my surface imperfection pack for this week and this week only from there we're going to slap on a rococo mocap suit record some custom animation then we'll wrap things up by talking about render settings we'll export it and composite in after effects i promise you guys are going to learn a ton about vfx by the end of this thing and if you guys are new to this channel it's all about learning and growing together in our creative passions so it's time to dive in and turn yourself into a robot starting with shooting your footage so one thing i'm going for and trying to keep in mind when i'm shooting my footage is two things one is visual contrast the patterns here in this brick work is perfect on the ground there's little leaves and stuff that the auto tracker can catch on to and there's also the background here all these leaves and different points on the wall the program is gonna have a better time tracking it if there's more visual contrast for it to latch onto and the second thing i'm trying to watch out for is my shutter speed if it's motion blur city and your camera is moving really fast it makes it very difficult to latch on to those points of visual contrast so you want to crank your shutter speed so that your motion blur is reduced so that you can track it easier in post okay so if you guys can you'll want to shoot a custom high dynamic range image of your set where you're shooting your footage i'm doing this with a 360 camera this is the insta360 one r the theory behind custom hdris is that you can light your actual 3d models in your 3d program with an image of your actual set where you shot your footage this works by combining a number of bracketed images together in order to create one high dynamic range image so if you guys are gonna do this which you should be if you're trying to get your render as nice and photo realistic as possible i have a separate tutorial which you can check out right here where i break down the very specifics of this process so now that you guys have your footage we need to 3d track this meaning we're going to create a virtual camera copy of your camera movement on set and for that i'm going to be using the most accessible software i know after effects all right let's do this let's select our footage go up to effect come on down here to perspective and 3d camera tracker is exactly what you want now by default it's just going to start doing its thing up here in the top left you can see it's initializing but let me go through these settings while this thing actually does its magic so the shot type fixed angle of view that means that we didn't do any rack zooms or anything if you guys are zooming in and out you're going to want to change that to variable zoom now the horizontal angle of view if we get some jankiness on our track and we want to try and like spice it up just a bit what you can do is set to specify angle of view which is different than focal length so i've provided a link to a chart in the description that allows you to look up your camera's focal length and gives you the horizontal angle of view our track is done we can select the effect to make sure that the points are visible and if not hit ctrl shift h and that'll actually show any of the the ui stuff that we can't see if these points are too small for you you can change the track point size up to like 300 or so just to make it a little bit easier to see and then finally if we drop down this advanced tab and your track still isn't working you can check this detailed analysis box and i don't know it's just the do a better job box that should just be there all the time i don't know why it's not so if i scrub through the footage you can see that most of these points here are down on this brick that's the area with the visual noise i was talking about the visual contrast that the program would really latch onto and if we scale up these tracker points you can see that there's a lot on the back wall as well now what we need to do is determine where we are in 3d space right now the camera doesn't know that this is the floor or this is the back wall so let's go ahead and give it a little bit of information to work with so with the camera tracker effect selected let's just make a big selection here clicking and dragging i'm going to right click and you see this option set ground plane in origin let's go ahead and click that because that's going to tell the program that these points we've selected are the ground plane and the center of them is the origin so we'll click that we'll right click again and we'll make a solid and a camera and what that's going to do is basically place a solid right here on the ground with a 3d camera and you know when we move around the scene we can see that that solid is perfectly stuck to the ground now i do want to orient this a little bit so i'm going to hit r and then we're just going to rotate this around until it lines up generally with the patterns on the brick there and maybe we want to put a plane on the back wall there just to represent that wall in 3d space so select all these points on the back wall right click create a solid and there you go you have a solid on the back wall representing that space in 3d but what we're really looking for is that our ground plane doesn't slide all over the ground you want it locked to that ground surface and if you guys have made it this far then we're good to go and ready to move on to normalizing our scene and what i mean by normalizing if we were to bring this 3d scene into cinema 4d cinema wouldn't really know the scale of the scene it wouldn't know how it's rotated or oriented so what we need to do is normalize this thing and i'm going to go back into after effects and use a free script called normalize it's made by a guy named action movie dad who has a lot of fun with his kids doing vfx it's a very handy script that all of you guys should have because it's free and it'll save you a ton of time so let's use this script to prepare our 3d scene in after effects for cinema 4d or blender maya 3ds max whatever you guys are using so what we're going to do is name our ground plane as ground so if i go to file script and i run normalize right all i have to do is select the ground and the track and hit this first button right here normalize track bam and that's going to do a bunch of stuff on the back end but basically if i make a new solid and i make it a 3d layer it's going to spawn that 3d layer right at the origin point and it's going to totally be lined up and super easy and accessible for us to drop in 3d assets not only in after effects but when we re-export this to c4d it's gonna be a lot more normal it's gonna be normalized so let's go file export max on cinema 4d exporter we'll hit okay and now when i drop in a figure it's much more accurate we still need to adjust the scale a little bit but the center point from after effects is now aligned with the origin in cinema 4d you've normalized your 3d scene you got past the technical jargon this was such a hurdle for me going from 2d to 3d it took me years to figure out now we're almost there we're almost to the fun stuff we just need to export a jpeg sequence so that we can see our footage in our 3d program of choice so just hit ctrl shift forward slash change it to a jpeg sequence and make sure you guys save it in the correct output go ahead and hit render back in c4d let's go ahead and double click in the materials window down here open this thing up and in the texture channel for color let's just go ahead and load our jpeg sequence by double clicking the first image now by default this thing doesn't play we need to tell c4d how many frames it has so click this little icon here let's go to animation and calculate if your numbers are all astronomical then you can basically hit control k inside of after effects and that'll bring up your composition settings just make sure your start frame is set to zero the last thing we'll need to do to make sure this thing's animating in our viewport is go to the viewport option and click animate preview now from here we can hold down this floor button make a background and drop that material onto the background and scrub through our footage we can see that this character is sticking to the floor but we notice that the character is a little too small so what we actually need to do here is go to this tracking folder and by default it's in a null object in order to do this correctly we need to put it inside of another null object so hit alt g to put that in a null but if we start scaling this thing all over the place it's not going to scale from the zero point that's because our gizmo is you know in some random direction what we need to do is get that gizmo to the zero zero origin point so to control the gizmo we just hit l or click this little button over here the axis tool and down at the bottom here we just need to zero out our position values and then when we hop into the camera and start scaling our scene you can see that it's scaling properly we're not scaling up the figure we're scaling up the scene and the proper way to scale this if you just click and drag it will not work so we need to actually type these numbers in to the coordinates down here so if i just hit uh you know 0.5 across the board it's going to look proper one thing i'll actually do is stand in my footage to make sure that i'm getting the right scale but in this case i think we can just eye this up and that feels about right and the last thing we should do here is rotate our scene by 90 degrees alright guys so now it's time to match the lighting so whether you're using a custom hdri or an hdri from hdri haven we need to take that high dynamic range image and match it to the footage all right so i know i mentioned i have that custom hdri tutorial but for those of you guys who want to stay put i'm just going to do a really quick breakdown of generally what's going on with that so in photoshop i have all of these bracketed images that i took on my insta360 1r i'm going to go to file automate merge to hdr pro i'm just going to add all the open files and hit ok and this new window pops up combining all of these different images together into one 32-bit image let's go ahead and open that up and we'll adjust the exposure to our liking and we'll save it as a radiance file.hdr that's what we want all 32 bits now in my case i'm using octane but if you guys are using redshift or arnold that's totally fine too again if you're in blender we just need to make sure that we're in our render view so as soon as you guys hit render you can see your object and the world around it right now it's all white because we don't have an hdri let's go ahead and change that so i'm going to go to objects hdri environment and i'm going to go ahead and load that custom hdri that we created boom and by default we're actually seeing this hdri in the background here we want to switch over to path tracing and if you guys aren't seeing the background just make sure you go up to the octane settings window here and you know we can even some of these settings out gi clamp set to one but really it's the alpha channel we're gonna make sure you check alpha channel and uncheck keep environment that way we're able to see our footage instead of the hdri layer but i want to show you guys this cool trick go ahead and make a sphere and we're going to try and match our hdri image to our footage let's create an octane glossy material change the index to one that way we get a chrome ball and we'll apply it to the sphere here and now we're really set up to judge the lighting of the scene the hdri is more saturated it's a little bit more contrasty too let's composite this hdri image in the node editor so i'm going to click this environment tag and right down here you can see this node button so let's go ahead and scroll down and find the color correction node and we'll drop it right in the middle there the first thing i'm going to do is drop the gamma down so it washes out the image a little bit and i'm going to take it down a little bit further and the saturation certainly needs to come down so we'll take that down to 0.8 as well that's not far off maybe we can take the brightness to 1.2 and this feels a lot better to me now here's a pro tip these white areas here in the hdri are blown out compared to our footage so if you give this camera an octane camera tag and we go into the camera imager settings enable it you can actually crank up the highlight compression to save some of those highlights and the last thing to check here is that your hdri image is oriented properly so uh in the footage right we can see that we're facing this back wall here and when i go to direct lighting it switches to the hdri it's facing the back wall so that way we know our scene is oriented properly the light is coming from the correct direction finally let's go ahead and add a plane hit t we can scale it up and let's make an octane diffuse material we'll drop that onto the plane double click it we'll go to the common tab and check shadow catcher what that does is basically hide the plane but keep the shadows and that's very important for compositing anything into your live action footage is keeping those shadows that's what grounds it to your scene i'm really excited for you guys making it this far because whatever you drop into your scene at this point is going to be perfectly composited it's going to be lit and it's going to be tracked into your scene so now let's throw in some robots it's about time huh so i briefly want to go over three different methods to sourcing a robot starting with building one yourself so you guys know peter france if not even living in a hole somewhere this dude is incredible he's a blender whiz kid and he's kid bashing a robot with a bunch of photo scan pieces that he took from his phone this is all just for free he's doing it in blender he's using free software to photos getting his stuff and he connected it to mocap data that he shot with his rococo suit and made something really sick so another way of doing it is actually to kit bash it with pre-existing models online like batali bulgarov stuff this guy is insane and he has a ton of different packs that you guys can go through to build to your heart's content or you can just buy a model of a robot cg trader is my favorite place to go for stuff like this it's very inexpensive and the quality is through the roof mookie has some seriously high detailed gundams that are going to be perfect for exactly what we're going to do so i'm going to buy this bring it into c4d and start building this thing out so i know we need to optimize this model we just got and animate it but i want to jump right to texturing because that is honestly the best part for me specifically the surface imperfections getting it all scratched and nasty and weathered down and i actually have a pack of 16-bit seamless surface imperfections for you guys to use i'm running a 50 off deal on it for this week only there's a link in the description but if you guys want to learn how to create your own surface imperfections i got another video breaking down the entire process every little detail all right guys let's jump into texturing so we're talking like water drops on the top we got leakage on the side we got scratches on the edges we got dirt in the corners and that's all broken up very specifically so it's not uniform across the whole thing we also are breaking up the reflection in a very specific way with some surface imperfections and you got scratches all over the top of this thing once we build out this master material in three little chunks then all you have to do is duplicate this material and change the colors and then you got your fully textured robot so let's jump into this all right i'm gonna break down this base coat for you it's in four little chunks as you guys can see right here very simple very straightforward so i'm gonna just note this up front every time i bring in an image texture it's attached to a texture projection node with the projection set the box and a transform node so we can scale this you know all these different textures up and down all right so here we go four simple little steps starting with the roughness if i were to just take all this stuff off we can see that we're starting with a base octane glossy material set to a blue color if i just take this first piece and pipe it in it's simply a like fingerprint smudge texture it's being combined with this other one this is like a shoe print kind of a texture i'm using a mix node and i'm using an octane gradient to just kind of control the intensity of all that now we come down to the bump alright so we're doing this again in two separate chunks that are being mixed together the first chunk is an octane noise this is a very specific case where the texture projection is set to xyz to uvw and i'm taking down the intensity of this octane noise that you see here with a multiply node and a float texture that's set to 0.1 if i were to set this to 1 that's what it would look like by default that noise right there but we want to take it down so it doesn't break up our reflections too much that's part one and the final part right here is basically the same thing but instead of noise it's another image texture and this time it is just like a scratch texture and we're digging these scratches into the base material here we're combining these two together with an ad and piping that into the bump and that is our base coat moving on to part two this is the scratches we got scratches on the edges of all of these pieces here as well as some scratches on the surface now in order to see through these scratches to see through our base paint and get to a material underneath you need that material underneath and it is a very simple octane metal material with a roughness turned up it's very simple very straightforward now we're combining our base coat with that octane metal with a mix material all right so you have your slot material one material two and the amount is going to be a specific little setup that i'm going to break down for you guys right now so once again we're going to break this up into two parts part one and part two we're combining them both to get this final effect it all comes down to this dirt node this dirt node is basically going to focus on either the edges or the corners and i'm going to check this invert normal box to make sure it's focused on the corners now this is about half the work all right we have this thing focused with the small radius and high strength on just the corners of our robot and it's uniform across the whole thing but to keep it realistic i want to break up these edges here with some more surface imperfections so so here's a scratch texture that's you know slapped over top everything and it's combined with a multiply node to this other scratch texture you know it's just giving it a bunch of bunch of scratches basically over the top of this thing but obviously i don't want it this scratch that looks kind of janky so i'm using a add node to basically blend between this dirt node and the multiply and that gets you this effect right here it's just chipping away on the corners here it's pretty uniform and you can use this transform node to scale these things up scale them down do whatever you want get the look you're going for but i'm feeling this right here i think it looks pretty sweet so on top of this we gotta have some scratches on the actual faces of this thing too so i'm using another surface imperfection here from my pack to get some lighter scratches across the top of this thing i'm combining step one and step two with a multiply node to get you the best of both worlds you got scratches on the edges as well as the scratches on top of all these surfaces here and finally let's talk about the dirt we have dirt buildup in the corners we have leaky water streaks here down the side we have water spots on the top and a general kind of wiped dirt across the entire robot so let's go ahead and break this down once again this is split up into four very simple steps each one of these steps are combined together in twos and then those twos are combined into the all four of them together to get the amount for this mixed material now just like our scratches we needed that chrome to to basically see through to and for our dirt we just need a dirt texture so this is an octane diffused material set to a tan color mixing between the scratch mix material and this octane dirt all right so let's break it down nice and simple step by step here technically this should be step one this is step two all right so just like our scratches we're using this dirt node we're unchecking this box so it's hitting the crevices as opposed to the edges and we wanna break this up it's too uniform for us right so we're actually going to use an octane noise node again when it's noise we're just setting the projection to xyz to uvw as opposed to box and that's going to give us you know this kind of look right here that we can definitely change the contrast on go to 100 and we're combining that dirt node with that noise node with an add node to get this kind of look right here but let's go and let's go and take that contrast back down to one like we had it so it's breaking it up just a little bit so that's part one part two gets us our dirt wipes on top just like our scratches we still wanna have some dirt across the top of this thing so i'm using another surface imperfection from my pack to just get some wiped dirt across this and both of those are being combined with a multiply node to get you the best of both worlds dirt in the corners and dirt on top now we're not done we gotta talk about those water streaks so step three and four are basically the same thing just with a different image texture so let me let me show you guys how this works so i'm using a falloff node to really focus on faces that are pointing towards the sky or faces that are just pointing towards the ground in this case it's just the sky right so that's the falloff node set to normal versus vector 90 degrees it's a really cool one i like it a lot now this image texture that i'm using this is just like a water spots texture from my pack as well and it's getting you this nice kind of stained water effect going here i'm combining both of these together with an add node all right so that gets you just these water spots on the top marked by that falloff node the gradient node here is just in between this image texture in the ad and that's just you know i'm just crunching this up to get a little bit more juice out of that imperfection now lastly the final step i'm duplicating this whole setup control dragging it down to get this right here i switched out the image texture for more of a streaky kind of imperfection and for the fall off i'm just inverting these values all right so instead of on top we flip those and now it's everywhere except the top i'm combining them with an add all right because we just copied it from here and now both step three and four are combined with a multiply node that's going to give you this dirty streaky water look and finally to wrap it all out we're just using another multiply node to combine these multiply nodes to get you all four dirt textures to finish out this master material we got the corner dirt we got the wipes we got the streaks we got the water spots from this angle you're actually able to see the scratches a little bit better on the surface as well as the scratches on the corners you can go to town on this you can max it out but i think this is pretty sweet so all you need to do here is duplicate your master material this one mix material right here and start changing out the colors in your base metal and that way we can color our model to get a photorealistic robot so at this point we need to optimize our model and get it ready to animate for those of you who are still with me i want to say thank you so much and ask you guys to leave a comment down below on what other topics you want me to really deep dive into let's jump in in order to get this robot hooked up to some awesome mocap data we need to break up the robot into a number of pieces here very similar to the structure of the mocap data you know we want to break the robot up into shoulder arm forearm hand it's all listed out here head neck torso and hips the thigh the shin and the foot that way all that stuff can be dropped in to these different bones here and basically be parented to all of the different layers making it look like it's moving correctly so most of us downloading models are not lucky enough to have the model broken up in very specific ways like this so how are we going to do that so by default this gundam comes as one piece it all moves together we want to get it separated into its individual parts like you guys just saw now the best way to do that that i've come across is to go into object mode and use the loop select tool that's going to be ul on the shortcut and you're going to want to select just the shoulder for instance here and i'm holding shift to select different parts of this thing and if i hit the shortcut u y that's going to be grow selection and i'm just going to mash that until it basically selects all of the polygons on the object that i have selected the gross selection tool basically works like a disease that just spreads across all the different faces of this model this is a tedious process but it needs to be done in order to break these pieces up to have full control over the animation of our robot so i'll move these polygons away from the robot just to make sure i have everything selected i'll undo that and then we're going to hit the shortcut u p to disconnect these objects from the main robot piece you can see that it made a new object and if we go back to the gundam the original one we can actually delete those polygons and now if we solo this shoulder we just have this shoulder piece you know we can name that right shoulder and we'll continue doing this operation for all the rest of the limbs until we have everything broken up into all its individual pieces once they're separated we can t pose our robot overlay it on top of these bones here and then have them be parented to the motion tracking data so that it copies the exact movements that you made when you were in your mocap suit your robot is ready for animation so let's talk about some motion capture data now we're going to be using a rococo mocap suit to get some custom mocap data but i want to fill you guys in on a really cool motion capture resource it's a website called miximo it's paired with your adobe login so if you guys have one you can use this site and it offers you a bunch of different motion capture data anything from jumping flying dancing dying literally anything you can think of you guys can find it on miximo this isn't a sponsor it's just a fantastic resource that you guys gotta know about if you don't already know about it so if you guys don't have either a rococo or xn's motion capture suit they can be a bit pricey miximo is the way to go but i'm going to be using a rococo motion capture suit now this is basically the same way we did bosstown dynamics we used an xsense motion capture suit in order to get custom motion captured data to tell a unique story so if you got a rococo mocap suit they're the most affordably priced ones on the market right now slap that suit on do a few performances until you have data that you really like but regardless whether you're using miximo or a motion capture suit you'll just want to import it here into cinema 4d or blender whatever you guys are using but it's very important that the first frame of your mocap data is t-posed that way we're actually able to line up the robot or your model with the motion capture data for a perfect pairing this is basically the home base it's a way for us to easily line things up it's gonna be a lot harder if you have to line things up from this random pose right here it's finally time to bring our robot to life we're going to take that 3d model and we're going to parent it to the motion capture data so let me break down the theory behind this for y'all basically if i line this thing up right on top of this mocap data right and we get it as close as we possibly can so that the hip joints are basically where the hips are the knees are basically where the knees are the joints of the robot should basically line up with the joints of the mocap data the closer you can get this the more accurate it's gonna be all right so let me just show you guys what this is gonna look like if i drag the hips into the hips of the mocap data you guys can see how the hips actually track with the hips from the mocap data so you guys are gonna need to do this with all the different pieces of the robot the shoulders the arms the hands the thighs the legs the head the neck backpack everything until you get a moving robot that looks and feels about right so the example on the right is clearly jacked up and that's because these parts are kind of far away from the individual joints of the mocap data you can see it really screws up your model but on the left i got those as close as i possibly could even to the point where i scooted the arms in a little bit and kind of broke the model you can scale these pieces up individually if you want to get even closer but it gives you guys a good idea to see how the closer the joints are on your model to the joints of the mocap data it makes for better results now here's a tip for you guys that you'll want to know if your pieces get thrown off axis or you know start popping off in random spots what you can do is basically select all of your objects come down here to the coordinates tab and if you drop down the freeze transformation button you can hit freeze all and by freezing them all that means that's their base position scale and rotation so if some things get thrown off axis like this and you know your model just starts getting all janked out on you what you can do is basically reset those by selecting them and then hitting reset psr and that'll take it right back to the original t-pose that you've had all right we're basically ready to render this robot we have our scene set up we have lighting that matches our footage we have a robot that's textured with really nice surface imperfections we've parented it to motion capture data and i want to go over a couple render settings and things to watch out for before you guys hit that render button now motion blur is very very important to the realism of your render so make sure you include this in octane what you want to do is give the object you want to have motion blur in this case the robot and octane object tag and then in your camera settings make sure your camera has a camera tag under motion blur first make sure that's enabled and your shutter what i do is actually just type in the number of my shutter speed on my camera so if i shot this footage at 1 over 60 i will literally type in 1 divided by 60 and that will give me the proper motion blur for the camera now i know i shot this at 1 over 320 but i want to add motion blur back into the footage using real smart motion blur so i'm going to meet it up in the middle probably 1 divided by 120 or so to have a little bit of motion blur in there it's going to make it look nice and it's going to be better than doing motion blur and post because you get the true highlight streaks oh and make sure your shutter alignment is set to centered you want it to be right in the middle so the shadow pass we want to make sure that we render our robot and our shadow as separate layers that way we're able to have the most control over it in after effects so what i'm going to do is on my plane that i have my shadow catcher object on i'm going to give that an object tag an invisibility i'm just going to uncheck camera visible that way i just get the robot render but when we come back and that's completed you'll want to just uncheck the visibility on your robot but recheck visibility on your shadow plane and you'll do a second render that way we have both of these elements individually rendered for the most control in post and finally some octane settings alright so your max samples if you have the time definitely set this to a higher number i like to go 1200 plus on renders like this and your gi clamp that's going to be set to a million by default and you might see some fireflies and some white spots in your render if you're seeing that just set it to one and another thing to note here is the alpha channel we want to make sure we have the alpha channel checked that way you know we're actually able to composite our image on top of our footage and finally if we go to this far right little clapboard icon we can get our final render settings definitely make sure that your width and height is set to the same size as your video frame rate i usually like to keep as a whole number and then scale it down in after effects 29.97 if need be frame range usually set this to all all frames and in octane renderer we can set up some render passes if you're using the denoiser which is found in the camera tab under camera imager and spectral denoiser if that's checked you want to make sure that you use the noise beauty pass by default and then under render passes if we're going to be doing this you can check that find a destination for it and just click the ones that you find useful i render open exr sequences that way it kind of has a built-in redundancy if the render fails i'll just pick it up from the last frame and definitely make sure you have the alpha channel box checked if you don't have this checked you're gonna have to re-render with alpha channels so definitely make sure you've got the alpha channel thing checked once your render gets going you can go to the layer tab and you can confirm here that your alpha channel is indeed working by going to the single pass option and you can see yep there's my alpha looks really nice now you all have basically made it if you've got this far we are on the home stretch this is the victory lap because we're gonna composite this in after effects and really make it look nice this is the satisfying part where you get to tweak some settings i already have the thing composited but i'm going to go through all of my settings and all of my layers to make sure that you guys are getting the best information on how to composite your robots into your live action footage this is just the base footage without any sort of color correction or anything now on top i have a color grade it's just a lumetri color effect and i'm just adjusting the contrast the highlights and shadows and boosting the saturation a bit to give this you know some more life to it so let's start with our robot here okay so we'll double click to import our sequence whether it's an exr or png sequence all you have to do is double click on this file and it's going to open up now by default this file if you go to interpret footage main is set to pre-multiplied and you can see there's a real nasty ring around our robot you're going to want to switch that to straight unmatted if you want to get rid of that and also make sure that your frame rate is correct and matches your scene if you guys have any tracking issues or things are off just double check that this matches your footage by hitting ctrl k and confirming that it does now on this robot i got two things and they're basically just here for color correction it's a lumetri color effect and a levels effect the lumetri color is just adjusting a little bit of the exposure to bring it down a bit and the levels what i did was actually went to this little color wheel thing here and i changed this to red and then with the levels effect i go to the red channel i turn this on and i just adjust this a little bit so it matches in basically black and white mode i'm color blind so this is a good way for me to kind of color match stuff and you'll just go down to the green channel make your adjustments and sew on to the blue channel and that's it for just the base robot layer just some subtle small composites there now there's a few other things on top what i did was actually rendered out a sunlight pass because i realized there's a spot of sun against this back wall and things just weren't looking right when i didn't have that in there so you can see how much of a difference that is making with that sunlight pass obviously our surface imperfections are totally paying off they look really awesome and those scratches underneath catch the sunlight really nicely i just got a basic hue saturation effect on here to make sure that my saturation matches so here's a note on color matching and brightness values so basically if i look in my footage right and you know i have a lumetri color effect on here as well but up here in the top right you guys will see hue saturation and brightness hsb if i mouse over the darkest part of my footage you can see that the brightness is about six percent five six percent and the saturation is around you know seventy percent it's a little all over the place eighty percent but if i go to my robot and i find the darkest point on my robot maybe this hand here you know saying ten percent it might be a little bright i need to match that so the darkest part here was six and the darkest part here is about ten you know so you could bring that down but up in here in the neck area it's like seven nine it's not that bad it's the same for the highlights too you want to make sure that your highlights the brightness is about 93 on my robot and the brightest part of the image is about 96 97 here so that matches up pretty nicely and same for saturation let's take a look at this purple color here i'm looking at this s value right here saturation value it looks like it's 63 if i go up to some of these oranges on the tree it's around 60 to 70 which is not bad at all so that's how i'm matching my saturation and brightness values and finally i just have a little reflection pass on this robot you can see on the edge of his helmet here there's a little bit of something just kind of brightening up and blending it into the sky a little bit more now shadows obviously we need shadows so here's that soft shadow pass that's rendered out and that really grounds our robot to the floor here and this is something that you can come in here with a levels effect and go to the alpha setting and just crank this up and down a little bit to adjust it since we have that sunlight pass on our robot i actually rendered out a hard shadow as well so if i open that up you can see here that the hard shadow just kind of turns on in this little sunspot area and i have that hooked up as an alpha matte to this shadow mat basically so this shadow mat if i make a black solid and i make it 3d all i'm doing here is basically hitting w holding shift to rotate it down flat on the ground and i'm moving it back here and then drawing with the elliptical mask tool a mask around here and i'm just saying like the area that i'm going to select is the area where the shadow is going to be able to play and that works because i have this shadow layer beneath this shadow matte layer and you want to set the shadow layer to alpha and that's going to say whatever is inside of that black space this shadow will be visible anywhere outside of that black space and it will be invisible so i can adjust this by hitting m and kind of working the expansion if i want to have the shadow kind of creep up towards his legs a little bit more or i can creep it back in towards the bushes a little bit yeah that makes a huge difference and finally the very last thing i'm doing is adding a little reflection of this robot underneath or to take off all these effects here you can see i basically just rendered out a mirror that i'm using a color key effect to get rid of the white edge blurring it a bit and tinting it to the color of the ground rippling it to distort it and adjusting the opacity so it's very very subtle but it's in there and it adds a little bit to the realism there and finally i'm just going back to the footage here you guys can see that i'm adding motion blur with an effect called rsmb or real smart motion blur and that matches it up to our robot nicely if you guys got some sweet renders to show me hit me up on instagram or twitter at underscore punisher underscore and for the last year i've been building a discord server for a community of artists just like you guys and we do weekly challenges last week's theme was giant and the renders that came from that are insane you guys are getting so good your skills are growing so much after consistently working the point of this channel is to learn and grow together and you guys have definitely done that and it's been a blast doing it with you guys now in the next couple weeks i want to do another render montage and if you guys missed the first one it's basically a huge montage of renders from other artists who i've given a template to basically to create a piece of art and i combined them all together and the work was stunning it blew me away i gave away a bunch of cool prizes some graphics cards and i want this second montage to be even bigger even better and have bigger prizes as well so subscribe if you guys don't want to miss that and every saturday i'm doing live streams for you guys in cinema 4d we're learning and we're growing our passion together you got to do it consistently that's the that's the key that's the way you get better but guys this has been a long video i'm exhausted it's the night before i upload it right now and i still got a lot of work to do so i'ma bounce guys thanks for your time thanks for learning with me i'll catch you guys soon peace you

Channel: pwnisher

Views: 230,818

Rating: 4.9883571 out of 5

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Id: H8JD8XIncfA

Length: 40min 46sec (2446 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 14 2021