Rendering with Arnold in Cinema 4D

I'm Marcos Fajardo I'm the or I was the owner of solid angle now part of autodesk developing the arnold render today we have Trevor Kerr from Kerr motion design he's gonna give us a gonna show as the the latest short film that he's a work on called call of the empire and he's gonna give us a little demo about how he's being used in cinema 4d with Arnold with a plugin that we've developed for Arnold on how he'd rendered the old in Encino Freddie so I excelled the short film yesterday it looks really great and I'm you know very happy to have Trevor here sir thank you yeah thanks man thanks Marcos so my name is Trevor Kerr my website scar motion design calm I'm a freelance 3d artist and today I want to talk about two things one is actually the integration of Arnold into cinema 4d as well I also want to give an example of using them Arnold cinema 4d and X particles to scatter like massive amounts of foliage so really a hat can I see a show of hands who know cinema 4d in here oh wow I feel at home awesome and Arnold users do you guys do know 40 42 a of course okay cool so you know whether you're a beginner or a you know kind of advanced user there will be something here for you today so yeah just a little background on this piece it's a like Marco said it says Star Wars a short film self initiated project I was really an exercise for learning for myself I wanted to know kind of push the boundaries and do something like that I haven't done before it was a two-month production period mostly produced by myself and the entire piece is CG except for one shot with a TIE fighter pilot from the 501st Legion so I'm just going to go ahead and play the video there we go Oh do I Paul Young here out of your booth I'm definitely spitting audio out sorry one second guys okay got it my bad I can't set as default device well worst case scenario well here I guess without audio should I select this alright wonderful all right this isn't my computer so I apologize all right here we go for real this time all right that whole piece was made in cinema 4d and Arnold oh thank you here it's too kind so this whole piece is made in the cinema 4d and Arnold and we did a composite in nuke and oh did I go out okay never mind I'd like to just uh I guess jump in and start a start off by walking through Arnold's integration into cinema 4d and then we'll jump into how I did the foliage scattering for all of that so ah here we go alright so it seemed like not many of you are Arnold users so to get to the Arnold integration basically there are a few ways one is through the plugins menu here and we can add a bunch of objects you know to our hierarchy as well there are a few managers here but predominantly what I want to feature here is the IPR window I'm going to go ahead and launch that and just dock it here off to the side another way that we can interface with Arnold is through the render settings you know we have our standard physical everything else however we can select the Arnold renderer here and it exposes all of the parameters here so right here and sampling is where the meat of your image quality is going to be you can increase you know camera samples or the various different channels individually to optimize your render it's very simple you know just a extremely easy to look at and you know it's just very straightforward as well we have Ray depth here under environment you can add atmospheres so for example you can make a fog shader or a volume scattering shader and drop it in here there's also a background if you want in your beauty pass to have like a background image of course there's motion blur and we have both deformation and camera motion blur and shutter angle here you know is a we have this slider right here for it as well as you know enable toggle there so the other there's a third way that we can talk to Arnold and that is through what's called the are no parameters tag so what I do here to get that is just right click and find these c42 a tags and go to Arnold parameters and so what you'll see is we have a bunch of options here that are you know very specific to polygon objects so we have you know subdivision options displacement options which you can you know pipe displacement into your materials through your shaders and then export features like position reference vertex maps etc and then motion blur options now the very cool thing about the Arnold parameters tag is that if I take the parameters tag from here and just drag it over to the camera the tag changes so we have essentially one tag fits all kind of scenario happening here where essentially the tag adapts to whatever object you put it on so for example here we've got a camera now I can crank up the depth of field aspect ratio if you want kind of like a more anamorphic lens kind of look and so on and so forth so I'm going to skip past lights and go to a Ovie's so one of the other really super powerful things about Arnold is the AOV system so AOV stands for arbitrary output variable and the way we get to that is through the render settings so there's this AOV tab over here and we can bring up the AOV manager and we have quite a few uh you know preset options here z-depth which is actually measured in scene units instead of you know more traditional maybe RGB Pass we have position normal ordinary direct spec direct diffuse all these kinds of things that here you know going to want in your composite so I'm just going to select a couple of these and add them and if I hit ok what happens is we get an Arnold driver a display driver over here and you'll see all of those a OVS that I just added now very cool thing about this is I can then look at all of these IVs in my IPR here which is really good for you know diagnosing where your grain is coming from for example and then you can just you know increase the samples for for those specific channels so my favorite part about AOV is though besides this is that you can create your cut your own custom a OVS so in this material here I have a Kurt what's called a curvature shader driving both the diffuse color and diffuse weight of this standard material if I want to look at that all I have to do is a shortcut alt W and press V and it pipes my curvature shader remove this pipes my curvature shader out right to the IPR which is fantastic because now you can evaluate you know any point in your tree so the same way that I can pipe it out to beauty I can also pipe it out to an AO V so the way I could set that up is I just add a a o V right RGB node i pipe my shader into the pass-through and then from the pass-through output we go into the beauty and then whatever AOV i want to get out i just pipe so let's say i want the result of my range here so you can see I made a I kind of adjusted the the range here of that curvature shader and let's say that's what I want as my AV output so all I have to do here is a pipe it into the AV input and make sure that's connected the beauty and just type in the name so in this case we'll just call it curvature and then I go back to my AOV manager and just add a custom AOV called curvature okay and then we just hit OK and now you can see I get that that specific note that I wanted out as a AO V which is fantastic so a few other really quick evaluations you can do there pretty interesting are in the utility shader so if I just take a look at our utility shader here and sort respect to beauty so I have a bunch of different evaluations that I can do for the surface so for example you know I can get UV and map something in post I can you know object IDs based on object name all sorts of different evaluations that I can also pump out to custom a Ovie's which is absolutely fantastic okay so the next thing I want to show you guys is that foliage scattering so the way that we're that I figured out to handle fully its foliage scattering for this particular project was from using X particles and Arnold Arnold seen source files being scattered procedurally so let me go ahead and shut down the IPR here and I'm going to go to this scene that I've built and it was close the IPR oh okay so are any of you familiar with X particles show hands okay we've got a couple people so X particles is a third party software as well in this case I use it for the scattering it's scattering capability so a really great thing about the emitter is I can take the emitter and right now it's in a very tiny rectangle shape rectangle shape down there I'm going to switch it to object mode and I can actually just drop this c40 landscape in and you're going to see that we start populating with X particles so what I want to do is there are various ways to scatter over the surface polygon area will give you just like a random sampling over the surface of the polygons but what we can do here is actually take us a cinema 4d material I'll call this scatter and drop it on our landscape object and you can add any kind of you know maps that you have or whatnot like let's say you have a you know slope from world machine or something like that and we can use that to actually drive our particle emission so in this case though I'm just going to use AC 40 noise and I'll switch this to wavy turbulence and we're going to adjust the clip here and just going to clamp these off so we have a really recognizable pattern then we'll go back into our XP emitter and switch this to texture and drag the texture tag in oops it's a little further down into the texture tag dialog so now when i emit you can see we're only emitting from the area that was white in the image okay so there are just a couple other things we have to do to make this useful for foliage scattering right now the particles are you know slowly rising we don't want trees rising at least in this particular application so what we're going to do here is if we go to object we can hit a stick particle to source object and so now you'll see they're just spawning and staying attached to their emitter so the last thing we want to do is go to emission rate and change it to shot which is going to right now it's set so that on frame 1 we will be emitting a thousand particles and this is how we're going to build our foliage scatter so this is where Arnold comes into play and what we're going to do is bring in a Arnold procedural I've gone ahead and built a prebuilt a a tree then I'm going to go ahead and load in here okay so this tree is already packed with shaders and everything it's about three million polygons and I'll go ahead and load it up in the IPR really quickly as just a quick test before we go ahead and scatter a few thousand of these there we go so with this it takes just a moment to load and you can see we have our tree here it's a fully polygonal tree three million I think it's loosely three million polygons increase the intensity of our sky just a tiny bit and there we have it so we're going to take this and then scatter it across those particles so the way that we do that is by adding the Arnold parameters tag which is going to expose Boop's that was incorrect it's going to expose these parameters so right now we would if I were to start the IPR we would be rendering the points as spheres we want to change that to custom and now we can drop anything that we want in there and essentially it's going to act like a cloner and you know copy those on to the particles so all I have to do is drag my procedural into the custom shape and then we'll reschedule okay Oh lastly I almost forgot is under emission we want to we're going to give it a radius of 100 we're going to give the variation we're going to give it a bit of a variation since we're only using one tree right now so they're not all exactly the same height and lastly under extended data in the XP emitter we're going to hit user rotation change the mode to random and we're going to give it a random heading which means it's going to randomly rotate the trees this way when when we scatter so they're not all like facing exactly the same direction and have you know the same profile so I'm just going to Reese Katter that and we'll go ahead and load up the IPR and there we go so we have a thousand trees right now three million polygons each now and you're gonna look at this and say this is a nice little cube thing you've got here but in your piece it was you know mountains and you know something that we would consider to be a little larger in scale so I've got I've gone ahead and set up just a quick example of one of the scenes from the from the piece actually using the particle system that I used on the piece just make sure I've got everything enabled there the only difference here is that I'm using seven different seven different particles that are each associated to a separate arnold procedural so i have like a few different tree types and whatnot in here so that should be it you should just be able to go ahead and hit the IPR window this does take a second but i want to call attention to the fact that i'm using a laptop to do this so it should take about ten to twelve seconds for us to see the result and then at the same time i'm going to call up a the console just so we can see exactly how many polygons were looking at across all these trees i also want to call attention to the fact that we're using less than five gig of ram to do this but if i scroll up here oh there it is right at the top there you can see visible triangles we're at nine hundred and eighty four billion polygons so and you know we can navigate this pretty well still let me go ahead and spin this down i can take a look through the camera you can see we actually have a i mean keep in mind i'm on a laptop here you know quite decent you know maneuverability and whatnot as well it's still quite responsive so I think I'm probably already past my time so that's going to do it for my presentation however I just wanted to play just a really quick recap of some of the you know so you can see just a little bit of what I just spoke about in context all right thank you you

Channel: Autodesk

Views: 41,749

Keywords: Autodesk, Solid Angle, Arnold Renderer, CInema 4D, 3D rendering

Id: xSBn_88XBa4

Length: 23min 22sec (1402 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 29 2016