Megascans Scatter Techniques in C4D

[Music] what's up everyone this is dylan drop from digital native and today we're finally going to be looking into scattering techniques using some mega scan assets if you have not looked into mega scans yet i highly recommend it they have so many different textures and assets that you can download and start using in your projects for the sake of this tutorial we're going to be using a couple of assets here i'm going to be using these grass clumps the tall grass here i'm going to be using these clovers also going to be using these thin branches and these mossy twigs for our sticks and then finally i'm using the mossy stones pack for the rocks oh also for the ground we'll be using these dried leaves and sticks now importing assets with bridge is super easy just make sure that you have the cinema 4d in your engine and then just go ahead and click export and you'll see it exported successfully and we have our ground clumps here now one thing you will want to note when importing assets from bridge is that currently imported a standard texture you will need to go in and change your render engine to octane render and then export the asset and it should come in with a octane material ready to go and now for the basis of this tutorial i want to get straight into the scattering i don't want to waste any time doing these mixed materials that you will need to set up once after importing as you see here i have my first material and it's using the transmission since it's the diffuse and then i duplicated the material and made it a glossy so we have that specular and then just mix the two together so you're going to want to go through and do this for any of the grass materials that you import from bridge now since we're going to be using a lot of different assets in this project here it can help to start dividing things into layers and to do that i'm going to start with these textures here you can highlight all of your grass textures right click and add new layer and that will create a new layer here i'm going to name it grass and you can also change the color luckily this one was already green so then we can also save these to a new layer by selecting them right clicking add to layer grass and once they're in a layer you can hide the visibility with the icon here you can also do this for our branches i'm just going to name this one wood and i'll change the color to brown select our assets here add to layer wood and this will just help with some organization in your project all right so i've got all of my assets imported from bridge here's the grass got some rocks here got some sticks i'm going to be using these clovers and also some taller grass so first thing we're going to do is create a plane let's hide these for a moment i'm just going to focus on these grass clumps to start off so on the plane let's make it a little bigger i'm gonna go 1500 by a thousand five hundred and i'm going to give it some more segments 200 by 200 and then let's go ahead and add a displacer onto this plane and we'll add a noise let's make it a bit bigger go to 5000 and i'm going to change this to noki like using the nokia one and then let's crank this up till we start to see something and i think i'm just going to lower the contrast here a bit cool i think that looks nice let's add a little variation to our ground plane here turning on the hdri i'm using a free hdri from hdri haven it's a pretty good place to get some free hdris go ahead check it out okay so let's work on scattering these grass clumps here so i'm going to create a new octane scatter and i'm going to put it in the same group let's scatter onto this plane here so let's pipe it in and now we're getting some scattering going on overall looks a bit too clumpy so we're going to do a couple of things to add on top of this so now we want to add some more variation to this we're going to start with a random effector i'm going to put it in the grass group because we're going to use the same random effector for all of these grass scatters i'm going to offset them just a little bit here in the x and z and then we're gonna go into scale make it uniform and go negative one also with the rotation we're gonna pipe this one up to a thousand and then let's add our random effector into our scatter and we'll start to see a difference right away overall it looks really patchy right now so we can change that by just adding some more i'm gonna add a zero here and now already this looks pretty good get a nice distribution of grass here and looking down from the top view we've eliminated all of that patchiness we're really not looking for that much grass so i'm gonna reduce it for now and next thing we want to add is a shader and this shader effector is going to be the driving force for a lot of our scattering here we're going to be spending most of our time in the shader effector and this shader effector is going to help us kind of weave that grass in and out of certain spots so first thing we want to do in the shader let's change the scale to negative one same as the random and then let's go into shading and add a noise i'm going to use the same layout i did for the floor why not and this brightness and contrast sliders will be how you can greatly determine where these things are kind of spreading out let's make this count up to 3 000. so now the shader defector is causing it to clump up in certain spaces and be really small in others which helps with the variation in this grass if i play with the brightness some you'll see it gets bigger and we lose a lot of those spaces where it was no grass so the brightness and contrast sliders are going to be your best friend in in creating more variation within your scatter and this is all determined by the noise we used within the shader so that looks pretty good let's move on to the clovers i'm just going to copy the shader and our octane scatter and put it into the clover group so there we go we've just replaced it we'll need to replace the shader with this new one so let's make this a bit less i'm going to use a thousand for now using the same random effector as before and it looks a bit weird so let's add our ground texture in using this dried leaves texture it's going to quickly up the repetitions gives it a nice effect because we have the living grass atop and then we have some dead stuff that has fallen down over time that seems to look good so let's turn our clovers back on and now that's looking a bit more natural so let's play with this shader some i'm going to give it a new seed and we'll change the seed on the scatter now you'll see as we play with this brightness and contrast things will begin to change some just going to change the seat around in the shader give us some different scattering results and i think that looks pretty good so let's move on to the tall grass i'm going to copy the shader and scatter into the tall grass and delete the older ones and then we'll put the tall grass in the new scatter same as before let's replace the shader with our new one and we should be good to go so change the seed on both of these now we're getting some different patterns and using this tall grass is nice because it's going to allow this grass to kind of poke out the tops of our clumpy grass once that's in as well let's turn these other ones on and see what we're getting for this grass scatter now that we've got all three together and you'll notice it's looking a lot nicer than that first original grass scatter we did we're getting some more variation in here do you think the clovers could be a bit more that's looking better and then i do think this grass might be a little too big so we can go into the scale of our octane scatter and just change these here i'm going to do 0.7 and there we go now the clovers are kind of peeking through the grass a bit better here okay so that's looking pretty nice if we view the top down angle here you can see we've eliminated all of that clumpiness we were getting in the beginning okay so i'm going to turn off the grass for now so we can move on to the next step and i'm going to copy the shader random and scatter into our branches here okay so let's start off with these um thin branches i'll just put the shader and scatter in there and then we'll put the branches into the new scatter once again we'll replace the shader effector with our new one also going to replace the random effector since we're in the branches now and we want to change some settings in this random effector adding some more degrees to these here will allow them to kind of peek out of the ground without it they'd be scattering flat on the ground let's turn this off so we can see the sticks of it better as you can see with those subtle bumps in the random each twig kind of has some variation it might be sticking out of the ground this is what it would look like flat so we don't want that 30 should be enough all up to you of course well i think that's already looking pretty nice let's just play with the count a little bit i'm gonna up it to 2000 and i'll play with the seed for the scatter and the shader cool i'm liking what that is looking like so let's move on to the next set of twigs here i'm going to delete my branches and let's bring in the twigs going to hide our other branches so we can see these we got a lot a lot of little wood chips here which are nice ground texture i'm currently using already has wood chips kind of in it but this will add just a extra level of detail so i'm actually going to duplicate this random effector and place it in the twigs separately i'm going to reduce the amount that they are kind of poking up through the ground for this one here we go now they're a little more flush i'm going to increase the count 3000 play with the seed once again oops and we need to replace the shader there we go i'm gonna play with this a bit we're getting some blank areas so reducing the brightness will kind of fill those areas up cool so this is what it looks like with the branches and the twigs in place this is going to be a very minor detail you're probably not going to see much of this through the grass but just adds another layer to this scatter i'm gonna put my ground plane back on go and you won't notice much of a difference but the branches are there you will see them probably in higher quality renders so let's move on we'll start with the rocks here i'm going to copy the random shader and scatter into here same as before we're going to be replacing these and boom now we got a lot of rocks scattered around let's replace the random and the shader now it looks like we have maybe too many rocks i'm gonna lower this to a thousand five hundred play with the seats once again and changing this brightness and contrast to get some smaller rocks adding some more rotation to these rocks here now it's looking pretty good probably going to play with the seed some now since we only enabled the scale in the shader it's only going to affect the size of the rocks um it's not going to affect the placement so i'll just keep playing with the seed here until i find a nice scatter like this looks pretty good i'm gonna zoom out nice we're getting some nice rocks scattered throughout the plane now all right so let's go ahead and start turning everything on now got our rocks some branches somewhere in there and lastly we'll apply our ground terrain one more time cool this is looking really nice gonna quickly save before octane craps out on us and i kind of messed up when doing this tutorial i left the max samples at a value of ten so it's not really going to get much more detail than you're seeing now whoops but you get the picture so i do think that some of these taller grass clumps are looking a little weird i'm gonna go into the scatter here actually i'm gonna go into the shader play with the contrast and brightness sum turning up the brightness made them go away so i'm dialing it back until they start to come in a little smaller than they were before and i'm gonna play with the seed all right that's looking good i'll turn my main grass back on sweet got some nice variation here in our scatter didn't take too long to set up since we used a lot of the same process throughout but yeah that'll about sum it up for the scattering portion of this tutorial like to add a tree to this scene since we're just using a plane i like to do this to just add some shadows into the scene make it seem like there are some trees around this grassy knoll i'm gonna pop into my perspective view i'm just using a tree from forester here i mean since we're not gonna see the tree you can use anything you like you can not even use a tree use something else and get some shadows i'm going to move that off to the side and change the tree i'm just going to choose this oralia tree give it some leaves there we go see now we're getting some shadows onto our view here gonna try and let's see make the trunk a bit taller here cool and that is working it's kind of breaking the tree a little bit but um we're not going to see it so who cares and as you can see we're getting some nice shadows i'm gonna move this into the top right corner i'm gonna duplicate this and i'm gonna move this one into the bottom left kind of side well there we go we're getting a nice light streak through the middle here and turning on the scatter again sweet that looks really nice um yeah i hope you guys got something from this tutorial it's what i like to use when scattering mega scan assets there's honestly so much you can do with the massive inventory of assets that they have created over the years starting with a simple scene here plan on doing a lot of tutorials like this but i thought i'd start off with the ground first before we move on to some bigger scenes so yeah hopefully you guys got something out of this tutorial and um yeah leave a comment if you guys have any suggestions on things you'd like to see love hearing what you guys have to say but yeah that's going to do it for this tutorial on some scattering techniques if you guys haven't yet go check out our store we got some free stuff in there that's it i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Digital Native

Views: 12,923

Keywords: Cinema4D, c4d, 3d, animation, ae, cs6, cc, adobe, maxon, landscape, creation, forest, nature, render, nature render, landscape creation, octane, otoy, tutorial, education, visual effects, vfx, cgi, cg, grunge, material, texture, mix material, mix materials, mix material octane, the dirt node, marvelous designer, imperfections, french monkey, model, 3d texture, node editor, nodes, octane 2020, 2020, update, whats new, megascans, scatter, megascan, mega, quixel, bridge, scattering, scan, scatter techniques

Id: 2TKZkTN93yo

Length: 25min 35sec (1535 seconds)

Published: Mon May 11 2020