Rendering in Mantra - All you need to know when starting with Mantra

hey guys this video will be all about the basics of Houdini's mantra mantra is a very powerful render engine and is also one of the top runners on the market we will color all you need to know when you are just starting with this render engine in this tutorial I will show you how you can set up your camera lights and materials we will go through the most important render and camera settings we will cover tools in the render view how you can render image planes also known as a Ovie's what are and how to use style sheets and light bank I will show you how to render geometry as subdivision surface and we will also talk about rounded edges feature this tutorial will be great for you if you just started to learn mantra and you want to know all the basics ok so let's start by creating some geometry we can create just big head it's just didn't disable the shader and will create all material drag and drop principal shader drag it onto the big head and there we have it now first thing you might want to create is a camera and you can do this either by going here in top right corner and pressing new camera and it will create the camera from your wheel or you can just press that start typing camera and control ctrl click and you get the same camera and now if you start moving you will get out of the camera so if you want to move the view and camera with it just go to the camera and love to you so now you can just position your camera however you like and you can also use these two cosmos and if you if you don't see them just press this button and they'll appear so you have this good Mouse which you can use and also you can camera has another gizmos and you can switch between them by right-clicking on on the trends transform gizmo and switching to for the orientation well now and the orientation handle you can switch it to a focus handle this is really cool like this is your focal point which you can see focus distance so whenever you use like depth of field and the focus will be in this point and this is your depth of field so as you can see it's changing the f-stop so this is really handy so from this point on and this point on it will be blurry and then you also have a frustum handle and with this you can can change frustum one can also set some clipping yes and back clipping if you want to so that's also really handy set it back so this is our camera okay and now we'll we'll need some lights so your lights are up here getting this Peter one of them I'm just gonna use a area light and you can set it up by looking through a light just lock it position it okay and usually with lights you don't want to adjust the intensity you want to adjust the exposure so you wanna make it brighter just adjust the exposure and if you want to turn your light completely off just set both values to 0 that's completely off and for the color you can only love the car editor in Houdini you can adjust like here's your normal you reset original value RGB you can set some pretty fine values and now the cool thing which I really like is you can you can have like these analogous colors complementary colors it's real great so you get the opposites or the ideal contrast for your color and another another settings so could play with this change the brightness you can switch between the old and new one and for for the lights generally a lot of the time you want to use black body colour temperature so you can set up in here really quickly you can also pick some colors from the scene just like that and another great thing is you can also use colors from a picture so you can use that happen okay well so my light jumped into the center of the scene oh really why but easy fix can reposition it and in here you can change like type you can switch it to limelight or disk light you can also change the size of of your lights let's go back to a good light to change the size and if you're dealing with like large exterior scenes I really loved distant light you can also use the Sun oh yeah so this this parameter is really great because if you don't have an any angle you'll get just a just some straight straight shadows and if you if you use an angle you your shadows will be a little bit blurred we I can show you later so let's just go back to the another interesting tool is the light bank you can find it in the data tree tab and change to light bank and now you see we have we all the lights listed in this step first of all let me get rid of this origin and Kannamma and you can find it in the guides tab and uncheck purging done we can turn off the grid as well and now for example I can change I can select my light rename it colored I mean what this will be right and so be your light and now I can select each one each ones I want can change the exposure or I think just the main line and fill light change the color for example and basically like change any parameters I want I saw them I can even do change in here change the light type and it's a it's really a really handy tool to let you hmm organize and set up your lights really fast so you can also turn specific lights off and you can just solo one light this is really handy if you want just debug your lighting do you render your scene so first let me just set this to something nice and now I can go to the render view and these are your objects and for rendering you'll use the hot Network and currently you can see we have known like rendering Rob in here no mantra Rob but don't worry if you click render you'll it will create one automatically or you can just create it by yourself so I'm gonna press G so I'll frame the view and here is our render now a nice trick is to press alt and square bracket to divide your view you can change it to seem you and now you'll see your scene and as you can see we are rendering from from render opera to camera and that camera is this one so it's going to set to camera one you can also switch it in here and there's some different views and also second scene view refresh it this is the w I'm gonna switch it to camera and lock it so whenever I change it updates now also I'm gonna switch my so these are your render settings now let's go through the most important options so in here you can set up your camera if you wanna render and animation and just pause it if you want to render an animation you can sit set it in here no a lot of the time when I'm just setting up the render I use a red camera resolution so if I'm gonna render now you'll see my resolution is doubled and it's much more faster the senior is much faster but I have a lower resolution but in the end I can just turn it off and get the final render now for images this is where your images will be saved so that will be saved like in your hip project you can set it to any any path you want but the most important important thing is if your rendering image sequence or an animation don't forget to put this in in your in your like file name so you can have something like take dollar big a capital F f4 and what this means it has a frame number to your picture if you wouldn't have it that would have something like this it would only overwrite your one picture so you use all the previous frames so don't forget to put put it in here and what this means is this part parts the frame of the current frame you're rendering and the number four is just a padding so you'll get something like big 0 0 3 0 s 1 and s 2 and and so on so this is really important to setup if you if you're rendering an image sequence now for also an important thing like here you can find your in image planes in in Arnold you would call it an AoE so if you want some extra extra passes for compositing you can set it up in here and then you will see it you'll see it in here what's showing up in these ones because we have a really simple lighting but yeah you can see them here these are your passes okay so another important app is the render tab here you can switch between you know different rendering engines you can allow and disable depth of fields and motion blurs so the other thing if you want a motion blur is just turn up this and okay the motion blur but you need to have an animated object of course and in here if you're if you feel like your your render is noisy you can adjust pixel samples and different different parts of your render so join here and now we have the limits so if you want more refraction reflection limits or bit more diffuse limits you you can set it up in here okay moving on so and this is also an important tab here you can put in like red objects you wanna render which lights you wanna render and I can show you real quickly and this is the part where I will also introduce you to just stop the render first this is also where I introduce you to bundles you can find over here but first let's create some new objects for example box now let's create another just geometry for the rubber toy okay and we'll we'll create bundles first one will be new bundle and the first one will be toy box and we'll add the toy and box into the bundle so here rubber toy and here's our box just drag and drop it in and then we can add another bundle which could be big so I'll check and wrap it in here so here is your bundles and now if we go back to the render tab and we'll go to our render settings and so this asterisk means we are not currently rendering everything in the scene but if I want to if I want to limit it to a bundle I can just type in Oh not much will change of course I'll have to choose so I have to change it at this bundle and now if I rendered I should see I should see but this what kind of objects okay so this didn't work but we can create a bundle in here just create it yeah okay so so the issue was that you have to put a head before your bundle so it so it knows it's a bundle so box so yeah that works so yeah this is a important thing put an ad before your bundle name and now you can see well we're just rendering the bundles we've set up so this is also really handy okay so I believe these are the most important settings you will need for start the scripts yeah I don't use these too much and if you want to render your images to disk just press render to disk so easier that also what you can do is right-click on the image and click Save frame now you can save your frame is any image file format and it doesn't matter if it's the render is finished or not and now for the camera settings you will have them in here these are the transforms here you can set this person different render properties I also don't use these too much this is really happy here you have your resolution you can also use some presets see we're rendering it half alright so this is the resolution I can control our aspect ratio and this is also really handy just change my video back and and this is also really handy that you can change the icon scale so if you have a really large scene you can you can change the scale just do it in here it's probably changing the wrong camera so you can do it in here yeah I was changing the scene view camera okay so you just go to this camera now if I change it it works here we have also the and I'm by the way settings from if it whatever you choose either dismiss option or you'll just select select your camera it's not your camera right here it's identical so no worry about that and we have the focal length Bircher near far clipping you can also put in some background image so it will render it and you'll have some some pictures of ship with Houdini so if you go to your installation directory to Houdini picture your head some pictures that ship with aleni and you can show the images if you it's very good so you know what you selecting so we can change something like this to having back at background and then your background image so now if we render you should see that image in the background so and yeah you have to change into something else this looks a little bit distracting stop background why not so yeah this looks really nice so let's just hop in back to our camera and just it a little bit faster and drive for a while so there we go okay and now let's talk a little bit about your render view and alt control that are in it so let me just is this oh you know what I'll just keep a little window so I can change force it to re-render so you'll start with something like this so if you want to start a render just render your scene generate it you'll get your elapsed time your estimated time and at the end you'll get you'll get your render time which will be in a second so it took 17 seconds now if you want to cancel your render just press this big red button and if you if you just want to pause the render do some changes you can go like this and if you're if your changes aren't updating you can press this refresh or alternatively like double click on the render double click just click single click on the render so here we have their settings and this is an interesting feature when you're rendering and you're setting up your materials well it's just select our big hat and here are materials we can jump through do it and you're changing for example the the color just bothered so we're changing the color to something like this and basically just setting up something in your inner shader it this one you have this option turnoff it's it's really handy because you you'll see a progressive render if you turn it off you'll get you'll get the final final render so you'll see you have to wait for for the rest of the image to appear but it's this option is good to have it turn off if your rendering in the final image because it's a bit faster because we preview it first has to render this pass then another pass and another one so it has to render more so it's it's good if for if you're entering the final image just to have it turn off it's a little bit faster and also when you're setting up your materials you can also click to force for surrender interests let's just change something bigger so it's slower and he fuel a fuel run drink you can you can click on the image and it will force buckets to concentrate around on your cursor so whenever you're interested in some part you can just clean it up with click hold it down also you can use a render region so you'll do it by holding the shift and left clicking and dragging or over the image and now it will render only in this region so whatever changes you do to render on this region so that's also really handy and if you want to disable this render region to shift click somewhere outside the image there is also if you sometimes zoom in or out and you want to frame your view you can press the shift H to fit it I think vertically not sure but it will fit your image into the view and also you can press G and this will this will home zoom your view one-to-one so you should see one-to-one scale also you have this kind of these kind of controls in here and they usually hidden with this between this line so you can press this light and your controls will appear and here are your so it was actually actually it was fit to viewport okay so so you can fit the viewport with some informations about your image and also in here you have this this relighting buffer so if you're doing some changes I believe like changing the light intensity or the color you can have it all and it should render faster so we can try that intensity exposure to be honest I don't use it that much but you might find it interesting in some cases I believe it's pretty good when you're changing colors of your your material so it's pretty quick so you can use this option and also these things are important you can if you're maybe if you're dealing with a heavy scene or you just don't want as many updates you can change its this to higher value so so your viewport or your changes won't update that fast so you get less response but more stable stable render then changes and you can also set this to something different it's in seconds by the way so whenever you change a parameter it will take like two seconds until it updates so yeah you can still feel around mm-hmm okay this color no I didn't take it takes two seconds if you set it to something different I believe the default is a black point one so you get much more faster responses that depends also how fast your machine is okay so next will we have some some controls over here you can use this zoom feature which I'll show you - all the details about your pixels and rulers and other extractions display settings so you can use this and in here we have another set of important options so if you want to view your your transparency you can clicking in here just turn off the ruler and see if you're gonna switch back to cover just press this you can isolate your called channels color channels and also you have a shortcut for it like a is for alpha c is for color some connected in here you can adjust your bright brightness of the image reset it by clicking in here I'm just gonna pause the render you can just brightness contrast saturation this is your gamma but I think if you if you wanna see the exact output like you will you will see when you're saved JPEG or something you should go to open color IO and sell it - srgb and this is how you will see your image when you save it so I tend to use this and also other thing is here your snapshots you can make a snapshot to compare your renders you just unpause it let's just change the color of our head okay just wait for a second until it renders a bit and then we can make another snapshot and I'll just compare these to another variation sell you back something like 125 these settings work for me so with this you can compare your renders okay now and let's talk a little bit about style sheets so what are style sheets and where you can find them you can find them if you go into the data tree tab which is here and you can change the material style sheets and what style sheets are are basically overrides of materials for your father your objects so first of all let's just set up our view of it you can just pull stronger so let's go camera it's for example and now let's let's make two more materials this one we'll call this change your name so what's called a red sheet red shader now let's go back to the palette so let's call this blue this one will be green let's make the blue material blue and the green material green now and let's create a global alright so which will overact all our objects to the green shader so let's just create a new style sheet you can call it green look but a description news - so we create our style now this is like a group for all your all the other styles you could you could have like I know different materials for different targets so this is like a group for all the materials at first this was a little bit confusing to me but in the end it's a very simple and now you may you make a specific style and within this style you have to set a target for which style is it is mate so you'll make a target and actually even better is you can set target objects from your real pro viewport selection or you can set specific components so let's just do the target objects big hit and now press Enter so here's our here's our target and so we we specifically specifically we specified our target and now we'll have to tell the style like what all rights do I want to make so I'll just right-click and hot over right and I want to set material and I won't set the material to to our green shader and now if I render you'll see that the pig head will change to the green material even even if the pig head we have the red material this over art makes it cream and if we go to to our renderer and we would disable this this bundle restriction now should render all the objects in our scene and you'll see only the pig is green because we specified our target to be to be this this object if we you can also mute the rat so you'll have I need to refresh it just pause it and hit under again and now there shouldn't be any any overrides in our image so renders back I cried the red shadow reassigned so but if we if we delete the target which is our big hat Grantland it shoot over at all all the objects in the scene so let's let's try to do that let's delete the condition and now we generate the scene and now since it doesn't have a specific target we okay so maybe this wasn't a smart thing to do okay for some reason my my stash sheet is not working if you look at scene view you can see it's supplying not very sure why this is happening so if you want to overwrite biomaterial hold all the objects you have to order it unfortunately by hand for now maybe maybe there's a way but I don't know about it yet this trait in your target so some time before this election take go now if we go to render you should see all our objects turn green now and if you want to apply now right - just some specific part of your model you can do it with groups and locally so I'll just turn all these of this style off so we'll get back to our default materials and let's say we want to all right the nose with some green color so you can do it if you go to your jam tree to get we can add dashi parameter also if you have some groups already set up you can you can use this creates a turret from Istanbul right and it will create create your overrides and you can assign assign new materials to them or whatever you like but now we're gonna do just by hand so our starship parameter on a style that's odd target of the abroad selection for example this or if you have some group groups ready you can use some groups now we are part and overwrite and all rod will be a set material and set it to the crematorium you can see in the viewport mouse is green so should go to the review and hit render change camera resolution tonight we'll see we polarize it's in the material of the nose we render and there it is now another important thing is that go to your vendor operator when driving mantra one so you can set which style sheets you want to use and you can set it in the rendering and render tab so declare statutes is that you wanna declare all the style sheets so you don't have to change this but this line says that it's going to use all the style sheets and statutes work like this the the bottom ones let's just duplicate one copy and paste so the bottom one will override it the top one and these targets will be all written by the global ones and let's say you want to use just some specific style sheets so you can go but I think this works just for a global global of star sheets so let's make let's make it look let's turn ball of them on and with the style we're set material overrides to to the blue and I think I have to have my record objects this and also for the green three no and we go back to the render view hit render our bottom bottom look alright the the top one it's not visible in the viewport but you can see works like this so and let's say you just want you have multiple looks and you just want to use some specific one so you can go to your render drop and just delete this and apply the one you want it's a green look so now if I hit render I should see only the green green oak style so that's about this basics of stylesheets now I'll put some links in the description Houdini has a really great tutorials on this topic so if you're interested in this I recommend you to watch them and another thing you need to know when rendering is how you render your object as a subdivision so you just disable all these looks it's just a control middle mouse button to revert it defaults and let's go to our scene view position the camera tool is cute now currently you see the the cube has no subdivisions so if you want to if you want to have a visible in the viewport you can they're like this but I'm pretty sure it won't just to be sure let's apply out some material for example the the blue one let's hit render pretty sure it's paid to won't render as a subdivision yeah so this is just for the display and if you want to render it subdivide the ball you just hit this render another subdivision you have sort of quality and now you'll see if I change the axis divisions so get this round cube and also Houdini's principle shader has one interesting feature which is called like round round edges and I can show what it does now let's create just a new shader that's just the cube let's go back to our objects to this and I see we have this basic cube and I can change the divisions to default should be true by two by two and let's just disable the subdivision and now if you would want to have like a beveled edge you would either have to bevel them in geometry or you can do it over the shader and it's very simple just Ranger you look and just go to the shader go to the bump normals and activate this feature and now when we render our cube it will have rounded edges so this is really nice because now you don't have to model all these all these tiny technique levels you can make it a bit smaller so it's what you see so this is a real great feature but notice that the silhouette or the shape of the cube hasn't changed so you still have sharp corners it was just just a normal trick so you use it it looks like it's rounded about infection in fact it's just shading and also a great thing is that it rounds like two edges our rods edges of connecting connecting geometry maybe maybe it's better if I just show it so let's just disable this background shouldn't see it and let's just create some cheap kept your hands position it's or in the center and so now as you can see my tube is just just positioned in the middle of the in the middle of the cube it's not connected or anything and this won't work until it's part of one object so I'll just get the box and the tube and enlarge them combine them together so now the single object but still as you can see there it's a bit hard to see with this background background image so so it's it's not boolean or anything or cut it but but now if I go to the render view and since we have this okay so we have to set our material but now if we have this rounded edge radius turned on and just minimize this and I hit render you'll see that it will bevel the connecting geometry like where those two objects meet and you can set it in here whether you want just a concave or convex shapes and you see like now we get this this really nice beveled edge and we didn't have to connect anything so I can just make a snapshot and turn the feature off and now you'll see is just just really sharp [Music] and we have a really nice geometry and we didn't have to model anything complicated so this is a really great feature of the principal shader and let's just talk a little bit about materials for this just poster editor for this he was this big head for demonstrations so materials in Houdini are really simple generally you want to you find with a principal shader and it can reproduce all different looks of materials here you have handy presets and if you wanna change your material to to the preset tool or you can you can just quickly write in here and one thing I want to show you is what I really like is that the preview and the render match really good so I go to the render view switch here just to the scene view and just disable the background image and now you if i hit render you'll see that the what you see in viewport really closely matches to what you get in the final render in here your basic parameters your base color control tea roughness Roth Nazario of your materials anisotropy section metalness it's really easy to turn our material tools metallic or nonmetallic we're just slides you just slide the metallic slider and there you have it let's go clay shader as you can see it's really closely matches what you see in the final render let me have all these different presets so transparency now if you want to create a glass like objects do it with transparency don't use the opacity because the opacity will do what it says it just make it more invisible whereas with transparency you get all the reflections and three things that you need to make a good glass material also have this subsurface scattering parameters this is to simulate like the clothes microfibers and there's also Houdini has also a really good in that tutorial on this so if you're interested in all the material parameters I recommend you to watch it and you have a pretty good preset in here and one thing that I also really love is the viewport displacement so now you look at this material and you'll go to the shader and the displacement you can you can adjust the display the size of the displacement directly in your viewport so you can do it in here and this is this real cool you see directly in your viewport and don't worry about spaces like this in the final render it will be closed like you see these spaces but if you go to the final render you will see it's costly just for the viewport just render this and you can turn it on and off with this checkbox and as you can see there's no hole or is there yeah I believe I believe it's closed okay guys so this is it this is all you need to know when you're starting rendering when Houdini's mantra we went through all the basic stuff you need to know so have fun rendering hope you find it useful thanks for watching and see you next time

Channel: Houdini 123

Views: 26,917

Rating: 4.9448276 out of 5

Keywords: houdini 16, houdini 16.5, rendering, workflow, mantra, camera, light, settings, ROP, style sheets, light bank, bundles, material, principled shader, rounded edge, displacement, background image, render view controls, subdivision surface, metalnes, material settings, Houdini, houdini 3d, Sidefx, 3d tutorial, how to 3d, learn 3d, how do I learn houdini, step by step 3d tutorial, quick 3d tutorial, fast 3d tutorial, easy 3d tutorial, learn houdini fast easy, houdini beginner tutorial

Id: LMEmVOZB5sA

Length: 62min 52sec (3772 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 03 2018