Procedural Nature Growth with Cinema 4D and Octane Scatter

so largely the assets i'm going to be using in this tutorial are going to be mega scanned now i do want to put a little disclaimer at the front here if you don't have mega scans you can get it for free if you download the bridge and you try and sign in it'll ask you to sign in with epic games and if you download unreal engine and get an unreal engine license which is free and have it installed it's about 30 gigabyte which is a bit annoying but it gets you mega scans for free most of you probably knew that some of you probably already have it but just in case you don't have access to the kind of main components of what i'm going to be using for this tutorial there is an easy way to obtain it i'm going to be using a lot of these kind of rock assets one of the ones i used in the renders i did before was this rock which i liked a lot and you can use any it kind of depends what kind of result you want i think i will use a new one to just kind of let you see my process and approach um something completely new and i used a lot of these fern assets as well as the arrowhead plant but you can really use whatever you want to get the look you want anyhow i don't know what rock i'm gonna use i will probably find a new one okay so i'm just gonna go to nature rock have a look around and you see when i like look at a lot of these see these ones that have a lot around edges i'm sure they look okay but i really like ones that have these kind of sharp edges like that because when it comes to lighting you can kind of do a bit of a crawl and have one side dark and one side light and i don't know i think it just ends up a little bit more striking as opposed to something super round and boring these ones are cool and i was using some of the ones also that had and you're all more kind of ground assets as opposed to a rock and then just angling it good enough that you you couldn't really tell um okay this one's cool um or in fact i like that so i'm currently finding myself very captivated by this giant square but i don't quite know if i'm going to use that um i think something super kind of dagger-like always makes for a cool render so i'll probably actually go with this it's got hard edges and it's super long so that asset is called uh small rock which is clearly a very unique individual name which i'm sure you'll be able to find super easy you're going to want to make sure your render engine is set to octane renderer up here in the render settings otherwise bridge won't load in the octane materials and you don't really want to waste time doing that so uh if you do that in the bridge settings that will fix that and when you've downloaded it you can just hit export there and i'll export to cinema 4d you go to cinema and it's magically there okay so once you've got your very small rock or whatever rock you chose to pursue this tutorial with i'm typical me my kind of minimalist visual style i'm just gonna drop in a camera like 80 millimeters zero out rotation parameters x and y so something that's just kind of a staple in my workflow and uh for what i do i like to create very kind of almost portrait-like images um now i think one thing i've been aware of in previous tutorials is i'm i've definitely been quite bad at tailoring to the very very very very new comers to cinema 4d the 3d world um maybe not completely being the kind of person that elaborates on switching between tools and shortcuts i'm not impressing i think that's something i will try and make time for although i think it's kind of redundant to break things down um in each tutorial i it would be nice to create and there already is places to learn those things anyway once everything's centered um i'm going to scale this rock up a lot i'm and i'm actually just going to match it to the size of a cube so if you drop in a cube and then you know zoom out there and um i'm going to scale up the rock until it's like bumping the the edges there of the cube and then i'm going to push back a bit more and i'm going to come into the render settings and switch to a square frame i'm going to do three thousand by three thousand a lot of that's to kind of combat the compression of youtube i would maybe suggest doing 1080 by 10a um something or two four eight two four eight and i just did shift v then i'm just gonna bring up the opacity of the view now i'm on r20 um but whatever version of cinema you're on that might look a little bit different especially in like i think after r23 this starts look different um now here's the kind of slight time consuming part of the tutorial that i might end up skipping through so i'm going to boot up octane and just latch it onto the left here kind of assimilating a good position for the rock to sit in is um something i definitely spent probably a bit too much time on i'm gonna bring my camera back in a little bit there but i actually like where it's kind of at now um but when it comes to kind of choosing our lights and uh if i press w to re-center the axis there it can definitely take a little bit of playing with to get an angle like so i'm gonna set up a render settings here i'm gonna drop this to 248 and hitting tab to cycle through i'm gonna do a8 whack down to ga clamp and do ten and uh you can pause that and take them in if you need to not really going to change anything else as of right now now i'm going to set up lighting so i'm going to do some classic softbox lighting uh i'm going to press f2 or you can hit up here on the right and get all these views out but f2 gets you to the top view and you go to cameras and switch to perspective now i can dart around while the live viewer stays in one place so i'm gonna make this plane about four thousand by four thousand i'm going to drop it down and then holding shift on the bend deformer and then we're gonna grab the plane again and hold alt on the subdivision surface and then i'm going to hit the band at 90 degrees i'm going to grab the rotation tool and i'm going to push it 90 this way and then i'm going to push in 90 this way holding shift to snap there and then i'm going to drop it down massively just to get that um kind of sharp bend going through there and i'm going to pause the view because it's still into my viewport and then i'm going to increase the size of the band as well bring it down more now i'm actually just thinking when it comes to two four eight by two for it um and i'll start that back up again now if you drop in an area light and this will be under animation tags in newer versions of cinema if we go to target target the rock come back to this f2 view we set up i'm gonna push a light all the way over here now you'll notice there's not it's not really doing anything the lights are not doing much so if you come to objects and texture environment and you black this out completely now we're actually gonna get some shadows being caused because um the sky is black what we can do now is play with this light now if you add a octane camera tag we enable the camera imager turn highlight compression all the way up that's going to get rid of this kind of like nasty highlight that happens without you having to mess with exposure and gamma if you come into the light tag i'm going to change it to a thousand and then the distribution add in a fall of map and go into that and set it to 90 degrees and then we have to push the light way further back okay so i'm going to call this our basic scene set up for now and without kind of playing with the line too much i would just call this a position to move forward so now i'm going to work on the texture of the rock you might like this kind of default look i'm not massively keen on it so i'm gonna kind of just do some slight alterations that's gonna make the light here a little bit nicer and then i'm gonna kind of play with the lights and make the rock look good on its own before i add any foliage so if you're kind of only here to see how i scatter the foliage and what assets i use i the chapters will be time stamped so you can see all that and i probably should apologize now since my last tutorial i do have a iq unix mechanical keyboard really sorry for the clicking but i'm also not sorry and if you complain about it i'm gonna ban you from my tutorials so um i'm just kind of laying out the material that comes with it here the displacement's not already turned on you go to basic just like i did there turn it on i'm going to bump this up to 4k for now and the displacement and uh sometimes i kind of push it a little bit but often if you if you push it too much you just start breaking the rock really so i would really kind of keep it around the values it's set okay now the main thing i'm really going to change is the color so if you bump the gamma up kind of bring out some of the um darker areas and then bring down the saturation i'm gonna bring the gamma up a little bit more maybe see what the hue can do [Music] so i might leave that kind of quite close to where it is i'm gonna bring my saturation down to like point six until we get like more of a gray rock i just prefer that look you might not i whatever floats your boat mate but now i'm gonna come into the color correction that's attached to the roughness and i'm going to start playing with that a little bit too because that kind of affects the shine you get across the rock which does affect the way the light is going to hit it so i'm going to pop over that quickly you don't have to do much work in the texture but i'm going to make the light a bit more aggressive just kind of mess with it in a couple of different angles and situations and then i might i'm going to duplicate the rock holding control i'm going to turn off the first one mess with this at some different angles because that looks nice maybe do a couple of different things with this like i said i don't think you know it's very hard when you're recording a tutorial to say i'm gonna set up the position and then leave it and never come back i'm going to set up the lighting and cement that and never come back to it because in these workflows in 3d you're constantly darting back and forth you can't lay out that process like that so it is hard for me to kind of section it off but i do it the best i can and i'm in a really undestructive way but also a slight messy way i'm going to kind of keep saving the rotations that i like and you know you can always come back to them because with these kind of things sometimes you can push it to a place that you just never quite get back to if you don't save it so i like to kind of do that and i think i would like this angle if i wasn't going to put foliage on it okay maybe i'll go with something like this let me strain up how similar is that to the original okay quite different now this is nice we got one light and it looks great i might play with this a little bit more and i'm sorry just before you can end up hearing this guy i'm gonna turn him off nope wrong one because he's getting really loud okay sorry i had to wait a second for my gpu to quiet down i i don't really want to risk the whole recording getting this 3080 screaming in the background i don't know how much i'd want to change the lighting i think it is good to set up the lighting preliminarily i think it is good to set up the lighting first because can any lighting you're going to make look good on a rock on his own is going to look quite nice when you add foliage and whatever details you kind of want to add something that's interesting you may have seen me use this trick before so you set your light power to 10 000 and then come to the cinema 4d details maybe do like 50 by 50. you can start pushing really really sharp shadows now you can see kind of the effects now of when i made this glossy and i don't know i kind of feel like i probably made it a little bit too glossy glossy i feel like i probably made it a little bit too glossy but just like kind of an example of how your light source is going to affect that let me come back a bit it's definitely nice it allows you to get more of these sharp shadows over stuff that's just kind of a bit softer you can always kind of go in between as well i'm gonna go for something like this and then with the background depending how kind of close you want this you can get a little bit of backlighting pushing up onto it or you can just kind of push that away and leave them in space which i think is what i'm going to go with now now i'm going to section our scene off a little bit here in the objects manager so all g i'm going to group this and call this lights i'm going to call this vg create a folder for cameras i'm going to pop this sky in the the lights folder and i'm going to group all of these call it geo and group all of these i'm gonna call it rocks and then i'm just gonna do all one or two and then save our scene and in the camera i'm gonna mess with a couple different camera angles maybe do 150 and another thing i nearly always do most of my renders and a lot of my outputs and the renders that would have got you to click on this tutorial would have been done with 300 because i'm just a bit of a maniac like that by the way this rock looks i think i want the depth of 150 okay so now i think we're in a position to start setting up this foliage with the octane scars so we'll move on to that i think this kind of concludes the lighting and scene setup i probably won't change this now maybe i'll flicker a light or two uh it may be dark in the shadows here lighting it up more again like i said it's kind of hard to know ahead of time where your mind is gonna go but i think this is a good place to begin with okay so at this stage we're going to start adding little pieces of foliage and i think this tutorial is kind of in some sort of duality i think there's probably a good level of kind of knowledge and insight and composition just in setting up the way this rock looks but for the sake of this tutorial i'm going to try and make it look more like one of the first ones i did which was kind of built of about four or five different octane scars and we have to do that we have to kind of separate the scatters to to build variation and i think it's also a kind of workflow that can become confusing quickly and as we come back around and unite it towards the end with kind of parental universal controllers that control all the the scatters at once with one effect they're um you know or two or three different fields within that it it can be quite eye-opening if you've not took that kind of angle and things before so we'll um definitely uh rush into that i think when i pause the recording because i record these in segments and i had just like played with another angle which i liked the look of uh and now if you do excuse me again this is kind of the difficult part of tutorials i'm just going to change one or two things that i think would make it look better i'm going to darken it a bit more bring down the saturation a bit more and give it more of that silver tone so i've just been tweaking little things maybe moving lights around and messing with the texture things i don't really want to leave within the tutorial because you'll feel pressure to follow it and it's not something i'm telling you is best to do for the kind of result of learning in the image it's just me being an artist and tweaking and i'm sure you're or you should be inclined to do the same thing throughout the tutorial but coming into the camera here i was thinking as i was like lighting things then i was like i mean this is kind of at the point where messing with the lighting isn't gonna give me uh the satisfaction i'm fixated on getting right now by making improvements and changes and sometimes you can feel like you need to make a change and you don't know what sometimes it'd be good to kind of pivot your attention away from specific parameters and uh you know maybe mess with your gamma and contrast or something and you think you'll often find that it can sometimes give you what you're looking for i'm gonna pop in a lot here one of the gsg ones gallery full i tend to use this on quite a lot of my images because it gives it an early punch pre-grade i think because of this lot it don't really grade much anymore but i'm gonna pop that on there and give my image that kind of pop that i was i was seeking before i move forward okay so we'll pop into bridge and within my purchased assets go to 3d plants that's not purchased 3d plants these are kind of a lot of the ones i was using i'm quite bad at using color like not the greatest that i ow on some occasions i would use forester grass for the grass but i'm going to try and keep the mega scans assets to not uh leech outside of this too much and make you go around different places maybe i'll have another trap to the end where where i trade trade a few but we're going to stick on this for now wild grass i'm sure you can find a lot of different grass in here i'm going to bring this into the scene and i'm going to show you a decent way of laying this out so they're all going to come in like this if you just alt g that um we'll call it mega scans um again sorry about my keyboard and then we'll group that we'll call it grass i'll pause this for now and then just you know pull these way way way way out of your scene and then i find that a pretty quick way of doing this is to just kind of grab the assets in the viewport and start moving them over into a line right and then once once that's done you should have everything kind of laid out here i probably have my textures now they're on all right the light will just be and then once they're all in a line i mean kind of see which ones you want to use you see we've kind of got some decent clumped ones here some taller ones smaller ones so i think it would be good to use a kind of decent variation of these i'm going to start off with this kind of medium sized patch so i'm going to drop in an octane scatter i'm not going to duplicate it i'm just going to use that patch there i'm going to press f1 i will switch this to surface come into our geo and uh drag this into the surface start octane okay cool it's immediately covered in grass and it looks great so that's nice now you can stop here if you want if you enjoy that who knows now what i'm gonna do is i'm just trying to think i want to scale this with a random effector i don't want to scale the asset itself drop it around and then you have to even though if you parent it by holding alt like i did i'm sorry i did that really quick um i think it is good to have it under the same kind of parent tree anyway i'm gonna turn off the position but i'm gonna do minus one on the scale you know i'm gonna keep minus one but i'm gonna just press t i'm just dragging across the screen i'm gonna scale this asset way down i think it can be good to mess with the scales here so you see how does this look without yeah in fact i'll leave that off for now it can be interesting i kind of like going for the smaller scale once we put the noise in the scale distribution it adds adds a bit more weight i'm going to clock an extra zero in there that's going to fill that back up again but then in the random i'm going to add like i don't know 700 on the h and that's going to stop giving you those repetitions that you your eye might begin to spot um might even just give a parameter of one on each of the random one um random positions there i might even give a parameter of one on all the positions now here's where the juicy stuff starts so before we get too far into this i'm going to drop in another asset to go with it so maybe this one a taller one scale him down and then maybe a tall one like this let's kill him then the key to getting a render that's going to be quite striking here is my new variations that add a you've heard me probably in all tutorials speak about hinting at detail this is kind of a version of that where combining all these assets together give an illusion of there being a lot more detail or maybe more one more kind of grand complex asset anyway come into your scale and add in a noise we'll change this to which anything about one i used often you start with ober i tend to go for ober a lot and then maybe increase the scale to about 500 and the low clip and the high clip if you just bring them really really close together we're going to start getting really kind of nice separations here now this again immediately we enter into the territory of messing with things endlessly i'm going to try and reduce the contrast a bit between them and i'm not sure i'm entirely happy with the scale of everything right now so i might just turn this random back on and increase my distribution sometimes it can be good to just start flicking through seeds until you find something that you like i'm gonna turn that back off again again this can be a part of the tutorial that becomes quite difficult for both of us as i just play here until i find something that i think looks good maybe i'll change this to turbulence i think that should say a little bit better for this rock surface particularly if you're going for your own rock you might indeed find that using different noises works better on the kind of structure that you've got there it can genuinely be quite difficult to find what you like especially if you like the rock before adding any foliage and get it to a place you like you can feel yourself slightly latching towards i and the visual style that you laid on the rock without any of that so i'm just going to maybe change a couple lights here and then see how that affects us now and before i start diving into adding way more assets i'm just going to duplicate that maybe see if it looks on this side i'm going to delete that light and just maybe try two big ones and i'm gonna mess with the seed again okay i like this as you can see it just it can take sometimes almost torturous tweaking you know to get this to somewhere you like maybe decrease the the power of this secondary light bring them together i can often be quite harsh on using one light source and then i'll come back into that a little bit later so now we have kind of one scatter setup now if we call this grass i'm gonna call this grass random and in fact let's detach that random there and put this in a group and call it random and then i'll open up these make sure this is all open i've just noticed you see the grass being reversal slightly lifted off here by the random if you just zero out the one on the y there that'll store that now you'll see why i've done this a little bit later but what we're going to do for now is duplicate this scatter delete the assets within it and we'll turn off and we'll go and look for another kind of leaf we want to use so now i'm probably going to find things that are a little bit bigger than grass but more scarce so we're not going to do something as dense but we're going to kind of maybe go for a little bit more scale within it so i'm just kind of looking here and the cat palms are nice and thatching grass is nice some of the archangels i think i'll use i'm tempted to use some of the the climbers here but i've been using the ferns a lot so i think i'm gonna stay on that wave right now and we'll just drag these over with our assets and thankfully we only have three and we'll call this firm drop that in there now i'm just gonna maybe take that small one i'm gonna pop that in here turn this scatter on i'm gonna come down back to like a thousand maybe less even 500 and then duplicate the random and drag it in there and turn off the first random maybe do minus two and we'll scale down the asset quite a massive amount now before we do any more tweaks i'm going to come into the node editor and i'm going to mess with the texture slightly so in the color i want the green to kind of have a slight more similarity to the rest of the scene so that could often be messing with the hue i find that bumping that almost fixes it straight away it can also be things like messing with the gamma of the roughness to get a shine that you want or to take away a shine that you're not keen on so i think from here if we come into the distribution of the noise what's good about this now is we can kind of increase this and have it bleed onto areas which creates a just a more detailed look overall you know maybe change the scale a little bit to like 450 and then always if you want to you can change the seat completely i think sometimes that can be quite a great addition but i also think it's good to keep the seat the same and like i said just change these kind of parameters that are controlling the boundaries and allow it to kind of populate different areas and that can come out really nice but i'm still finding this fern material to be a little bit just a little bit washed out compared to everything else so i'm maybe going to bump up the saturation okay there we go just took a few little tweaks and uh it's going to put me in a position that i quite like i bring down the game i just just a tad more maybe get 1.3 there okay and then we will although we're going to put other assets in there see what other ones we can do now i'm going to do this a little bit quicker now i i've tried to keep a slight pause back as i've been adding things in but i'm going to start doing this a little bit quicker now that you've seen the process so i'm going to drop these bug march march crash let's not bother with that i'm gonna group them and drag them over spread them out i think i really like this one with that kind of curl there so i'm going to drop that into that fern scatter scale him down that was cool i'm gonna mess with the material because this is something i should have mentioned on the fern it was like way too light going through him like way too much light passing through him right now especially just because of power my lights just bumping up the gamma on that translucency into the transmission kind of dodges that effect and then um what was he called jesus christ bog okay uh golden bug and then uh we'll go back into the bridge i kinda want some flowers now something you know so add some lily turfs put a little bit of color in there come on it's called sketchy visuals for a reason and drag him out start spreading them out okay i think i'll go for maybe this one pop them in there in fact maybe not because there's not as much color in that as i thought there might be okay that's better scaling down i'm going to come into that material find the color correction and bump up the saturation there not really seeing the color i wanted to see but oh well maybe i'll just drop in another one no i'll leave that i'm going to delete them out of the scene because i don't think i'll come back to the to them besides the one i used maybe we'll take a look at these crown beard um sunflowers now that's what i'm gonna call them sunflowers just press f2 bring them out here just to save time at this point probably just going to grab one and scale it without laying them out in the scene okay now i think what i want to do here before i do that i'm going to bring him back out i'm going to duplicate this phone i'm going to call it flower now the reason i'm doing that is because at this point it's beginning and i'm going to actually i'm just going to delete those it's when you bring new assets into the the scatter it starts to place them in spaces already got other assets and it begins to get to the point where you don't really have much of any of them so that's where kind of the the stacking comes in really useful so i'm going to take that flower and i'm going to actually put him in the new one mainly because i liked a lot of these the ones that had too much transmission was the bog and as you can see now that's immediately kind of planting more pink in there so with that sunflower i'm gonna pop him back in there now too and then i can even maybe at that point bring up the amount that we have as well again this just gives you more controls and you can see now we're kind of getting to a point where there's a really really lush amount of variation and it just begins to get a very united look almost and you can keep pushing this farther and farther there's a lot of different assets i used to use i even on a couple would bring in in fact now quickly i'm just gonna group these call them sunflower i would even mess with maybe bringing in for example here press f1 and i'm just gonna pull one out here maybe get a different one the rest i would even have a little play with uh and i only did this on one or two of the ones i did i don't really want to hide the fact that i did this we play with hand placing them to create these kind of effects and i think this is something that is good as much as a procedural technique is great sometimes you can finish things so i'm gonna get rid of this translucency i'm gonna bump the saturation change the hue a little bit and kind of get out of these yellow tones change the gamma that's really the translucency though being a bit annoying change the roughness slightly and bypass that and be an occlusion multiply there we go starting to fit in a bit now it was a difficult one even so we still know it's a really difficult texture i think it's all this though as gray as a procedural technique can be sometimes hand placing these is just going to give you a level of finesse that adds to the elusive infinite detail that your image might have i know the only thing i'm not enjoying is the kind of grass that's around those uh pink pink ones that i added in so the lily turf maybe tweak that a little bit okay so i'm going to close up these iv [Music] now you can keep stacking these you can keep adding them i think for the sake of this tutorial i'm not really going to take it any further i think i'm just going to explore one last chapter of adding a mass controller of over these with effectors and i'm seeing what we can do with okay so a little lesson on takes if you've never used them if you just come below the objects and take manager i'm just going to hit this button twice and i'm just going to call this 001 i'm going to call this 002 now in oo2 i'm just going to hit this blue button there if we turn off this iv for now now here we're going to do something juicy so if you look at the way our in fact i'll do it with the way it is right now let's go to mograph effector and plane now what we're going to do in your three octane scours or how many however many you have in the effectors channel drop the same plane and all of them okay now it's currently exploded everything but we don't want that so turn off the position turn on scale turn on uniform scale and absolute scale changes to minus one it's going to completely get rid of everything pretty magical right come to fall off let's drop in a spherical field now we have something that can control where it is now it's not going to work exactly like that currently it's controlling where it isn't which i don't want i want it to control where it is so just add on where this co it says clamp here just want to add an invert i do miss the old field so i'm not gonna lie it's much better now you can see that we can have it at the top of the rock like that move it down have it at the bottom you can have it shifting now turn on both gpus that was quicker pretty cool right see i could have that settle in at the top there have it just kind of on the left side just on the bottom you can duplicate the fields as well so if we wanted it at the top there and we wanted to add another field move that down could have at the top and the bomb seriously super simple setup but also a very advanced move to do if you're a beginner like seriously quite um quite advanced and i think being able to leverage things like this for for speed and animation and doing all sorts of stuff is great now on top of that main controller you can see if we snap back here um if we go back to that old one so i'm gonna leave this tutorial here and uh thank you for sticking by me in the hiatus if you've seen my tutorials in the past i spent almost all of last year just caught up in freelance projects and it feels good to be back to doing this again and i hope it brings you immense value even if you're an advanced user and you just want to pull a tiny little part from somewhere in my workflow then i hope it helps you as usual all the assets featured in this tutorial will be on my store and with that being said i will see you in the next tutorial

Channel: Sketchy Visuals.

Views: 97,604

Keywords: Procedural Nature Growth with Cinema 4D and Octane Scatter, Nature growth procedural with cinema 4d and octane scatter, procedural nature growth cinema 4d octane, nature growth procedural cinema 4d octane, procedural nature growth cinema 4d octane tutorial, nature growth procedural tutorial, cinema 4d tutorial, cinema 4d nature, octane nature, octane nature tutorial, cinema 4d octane tutorial, megascans, megascans tutorial, cinema, 4d, octane, quixel, nature, tutorial, sketchy visuals, r25

Id: BtDteUJjqq4

Length: 46min 51sec (2811 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 17 2022