Russ Gautier @ SIGGRAPH 2019 | Maxon Cinema 4D

Russ gutiere from perception NYC perception amazing studio New York I'll let him take her from here show is real and all that fun stuff let's give him a big welcome to the max on stage thank you thank you fantastic so first of all a huge shout out to max on for once again hosting an absolutely fantastic show the lineup this year is completely ridiculous and I'm totally humbled and honored to be amongst such fantastic crew people so my name is Russ Gautier I am the associate creative director at perception in New York City and today we're going to be discussing futuristic cinematic techniques in cinema 4d but before we get started I want to jump into just a little bit about who perception is so we were founded in 2001 by Jeremy Lasky and danny gonzalez the two partners of the company we are based in the heart of New York City in midtown Manhattan we are a team of multidisciplinary designers UX artists visual effects artists everything we have general generalists all over the place and we have one unique focus and we call that science-fiction thinking this is our sort of laser focused direction what is science fiction thinking to me it's it's this idea of envisioning the future of technology and design through the lens of what's possible rather than what currently exists and it sounds like yeah that's just sort of a little a little shift but it really it really helps us kind of open the blinders in a lot of ways to to envisioning things that are past the horizon rather than what is currently out there right now so really helps it helps us kind of expand our ideas so we do this through the mediums of UX design both 2d and 3d we do animation and visual effects so we do these things in two primary categories we work on feature films and we work for large tech companies so on the feature film side of things we've most recently finished up work on Spider Man far from home we've worked on all of the Avengers movies black panther thor ragnarok the list goes on and on and on so on our website you can see our feature film montage and I have that queued up so I'm gonna let that play for you guys now [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so there's there's just a taste of of what we've done for the the worlds of film which is always very exciting on the other side of things because we really only spend about half our time working on feature films the other side of things were working with big tech companies right so if you name a big tech company we've probably worked with them so things like we worked on early development for the microsoft hololens before it was even the microsoft hololens we've worked on the Samsung Galaxy we've worked we do a lot of work in the automotive sector including some work on the on the Ford GT and many many more as you can imagine those are all highly nd8 projects that I can never talk about so what this really means though this sort of dual focus that we have we have this film work and of course you know all of the all of the big tech and tech company executives they go watch all these movies that we work on and they they ask us to bring some of that cinematic process and thinking and visualization to their their tech projects into the tech world but then also on the tech side we learn a ton through just research and development and just being mega geeks about this stuff the around like just what is possible what is actually out there what is like right on the cutting edge of now and we bring those that kind of aesthetic and those ideas and that thinking into the world of film as well so they really just kind of inform each other in this kind of endless loop of of kind of learning and growing so that's a little bit about what we do so today what I want to discuss of course is futuristic cinematic techniques in cinema 4d so I'll be going through a handful of techniques anything for you know super basic all the way up to two fairly advanced so hopefully there's something in here for everybody to to come away with from this presentation and specifically I want to focus on some of the work we did for spider-man far from home now we'll we'll get back to that in just a second but I do want to touch a little bit on why we use cinema 4d because perception is a 100 percent cinema 4d studio we we know it we love it it has been our tool of choice for forever we love working with cinema because really it's a designer's 3d tool and and at the end of the day most of the creative team at perception started as designers we are all graphic designers by trade so for us to be able to get in and and design things super quickly it's fantastic it's accessible and easy so it's really really good to pick up and and just get things visualized really quickly but it also goes super super deep so like digging into coding and Python expresso and now redshift which is some of the things that we're going to discuss today it's really it's really a fantastic tool so back to spider-man I can't show any of the scene files today because the movie is still in theaters if you haven't seen it please go see it it is a fantastic movie and we add a ton of fun working on this one but what I can do is show you guys the techniques that we used to generate some of the Holograms and so we're gonna do Holograms with redshift today because really redshift completely changed the game for the way that we tackle Holograms for feature films and for these tech projects right a huge huge shift in the way that we do what we do so redshift advantages before I dig in to actually showing stuff it's incredibly fast and flexible if you've never used it it's ridiculously fast highly scalable we're a very small studio and the fact that we can just stick a couple more video cards in a couple machines and like literally double our render output it's crazy it's it's it's it's a fascinating fascinating product it is production-ready we've used it many times on feature films and it's incredibly well integrated into cinema 4d so like as you learn cinema 4d and you can you can actually learn and grow with redshift as well which is amazing it's a it's an unbelievable tool so that said I'm gonna dig into my first scene file here and what I have I have a very simple setup if I if I jump into the redshift render view here I'm going to bring this up this is something I'm going to bring up a few times throughout so I'll probably minimize it and bring it back up whatever but it's really like if you're not familiar the redshift render view is kind of your window into what redshift is going to render for you it's a it's a it's an amazing tool so I'm actually just going to I'm gonna turn off the car and I'm gonna turn off the table surface and I'm just gonna render what I currently have in here really like what I have is just this very simple image it's actually the corner of our conference room at the studio and what I'm gonna do with this is put a hologram on that table and we're gonna discuss how we can approach putting a hologram on that table and how we can make it look like it's light emissive and all that fun stuff but then we can also take that a step further which will do a little bit today as well so I have a in redshift I'm just using a dome light and that dome light isn't casting any light all it's doing is it's giving me my background so that I can put my things in the scene so I have a piece of geometry that represents my table surface and I have a car model that I threw in here and that's what we're gonna be turning into a hologram today so we're gonna discuss how to how to do that really quickly here so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to create a basic redshift material and I'm gonna throw that right onto my car and what I'm gonna do I'm just gonna bring back up that redshift render view we're just gonna look and see what that looks like here give that a quick render so you can ignore the fact that the table doesn't look like it has a material because it doesn't have material yep we're gonna get to that in a minute but what we're getting is just just this basic shader on this car model which is which is totally fine what we need to do is come up with a strategy for how to tackle doing Holograms in redshift so personally my strategy is usually to get everything into comp as quickly as I can and really kind of dial the look and Comp that's just sort of the way that I like to work it offers a great deal of flexibility but in order to do that I need the passes that I'm going to be able to use in comp done done correctly here in cinema 4d first so that's what we're gonna we're going to talk about setting up so when we think about Holograms we think about these things generally as being like a light emissive surface right the problem with just making it light emissive like if I throw an incandescent material on this car model and I give this a render now I just have like a white silhouette of a car right like I've got no detail whatsoever in there and that's that's a problem right so the very first thing that I like to do when we're thinking about working with a hologram is go to a fernell shader and so for those of you who who maybe have heard of the fernell shader or maybe not the fernell shader is is a it's a fascinating tool that really allows you to generate a look let's see if I can just throw in a throw in a sphere here or maybe we'll just do a let's do a torus that's easy we'll just shrink this guy down a little bit and I'll demonstrate what the fern illustrator is actually doing for us so what the fern illustrator does is it's it's it generates a gradient based on the angle of the faces that face towards the camera and that's that's gonna be a little easier to show than it is to tell so if I just hit the play button here I've got my I've got my fur nail shader on my basic torus right so you can see that the the the geometry that's facing towards the camera is a darker color the geometry that's facing away from the camera is getting a lighter color and this is going to really let us get a great deal of detail on this kind of like light emissive look for a hologram so let's go ahead and and throw the car back in here I'm gonna turn that car back on I'm gonna turn my I'll leave my table surface off for the moment so let's go ahead and open this up let's look at let's look at what this car looks like with the fernell shader on it's just a basic four nail chair that looks way better than it did before where it was just like a big solid white silhouette now you can actually see detail on the car which is fantastic so that's kind of step one which is which is cool the other thing I want to do I really like an AO shader it's a ou shooter is ambient occlusion and I like to throw an AO shader onto these things as well I find that if you take an aider and you invert it you can actually get a really nice kind of like additional light emissive look so a ou shader basically generates like ambient shadows but if you take this channel and you flip it in in post you can actually get some cool like very easy light emissive looks right cool so what I want to do now is think about back in this basic material that I've got I want to think about some of the passes some of the things that I'm going to need in After Effects or nuke or wherever I'm going to comp this thing what are the things that I'm going to need in order to make this thing look like a hologram so I'm gonna go up to my redshift render settings and I'm gonna go to the AOV tab and I'm just going to open my a avi manager and this is for if you've not used redshift before this is where you're going to put all of your passes that are gonna render out so you can render out things like separate reflections and specular highlights and emission passes and that kind of thing so I know because I've got an aerial light in here I definitely want to I want to capture let's see I want to get reflections for sure I want to get specular lighting and be handy we get probably emission and let's see I definitely want to do a puzzle mat as well so a puzzle mat is just a it's just a mad that that renders an RGB channel into one image so that you can have basically you have three mats in one image rather than just having to render one mat for one image so I'm going to use a material ID I'm just going to set this to one and in order to link that up and make sure that that works here I'm going to come down to my redshift material I'm going to go to the output tab under material I'm gonna set the material idea here to one as well and that way redshift knows like anything that this material is applied to just make that red in the puzzle mat so I'll show you what that what that looks like here in just a second so let's go ahead and open this back up and and fire this up I'm actually going to I'm gonna do bucket rendering because the puzzle mat won't render in progressive mode so I have to use buckets but now that I have this thing rendered out I actually have all you can see I've got under this tab I've got all my passes my emission pass is going to be empty at the moment I don't have any emissive materials on but I do have my puzzle mat and you can see that's giving me a mat for my car which is great I'm going to use that the reflections pass is fairly limited at the moment but that's going to get a little bit more robust here in just a second and then specular lighting is capturing the delighting from that area light up top cool fantastic so that's good let's talk about the the other passes that I talked about here right because we didn't really see I've got this for now pass and I've got this AO shader in here that they're not really hooked up to anything yet I want to get them involved in this too so redshift has a really nice tool called color to aov we go so what this is going to do it's basically going to parallel render all of these things all together and I'll show you what that looks like here so we're going to take the color output from my material we're gonna pipe that into the Beauty input which is basically just a pass through and we're gonna take our for now we're going to take that and that's going to go into AO V input 0 we're gonna take our AO we're gonna pipe that into AO V input 1 awesome so I'm going to take the output of this the out color and that's going to go into the surface node into the output and get that out of there so what I need to do is establish some custom names for my two incoming aov passes that I wanted my fur now on my AO so I'm going to do a add new custom AO v I'm gonna call this car for an L and AO V input 1 I'm going to call this car a oh cool so we can see that if I go back up to my a Oh V manager and render settings those actually have been automatically added into my a Ovie's which is super nice so let's go ahead and one more time open up the render view see we got here alright so I'm gonna give this a quick render so that looks totally the same that looks exactly the same as what it did before but now I also have my AO pass built in and I have my fernell pass built in so all of these are gonna render at the same time I don't need to set these up as like separate takes or separate render passes or anything like that's really really fantastic so rather than sitting here and actually you know what let's do this let's do the table surface let's get a let's get a basic shader in there for that because we haven't done that yet we're gonna do a just another basic material and I for this for this particular task I don't really care about the color of the material so much I really just care about the reflections because that's all I'm gonna use for for comping I don't want to like color the table a different color I want the table to look like the table I just want the reflections coming off of my car so before I do that I'm actually going to name my materials we're gonna call this RS car and we're gonna call this RS table it's just good process to get into for just keeping things organized so not everything is RS material 1 2 3 4 and this one I'm just gonna keep this one super super basic it's like I said I don't really care about the color and really all I care about is reflections but I do know that my table does have a little bit of like a matte surface on it so I'm going to come in here I'm gonna set this roughness up to like 0.3 just we get a little bit of a matte surface on there so let's go back to redshift render view and we'll go ahead and hit play and we'll go to the beauty so now you can see I've got a table surface out of this pass I'm I'm not going to use the beauty pass we'll we'll look at what we're gonna use here in just a minute so let's turn on my bucket rendering so there I can see my puzzle mat that's great okay reflections that's fine specular lighting so now you can see I've got this specular lighting but really all I care about with specular lighting is on the car itself on a really once specular lighting on the table we'll get to that in just a moment and then car AO and car for now now one problem I have is I've got this table in here but I'm not seeing the reflection of some of these passes on my table I want the reflection of some of these passes on my table too so that I can comp those up so what I need to do is come back in here to my a avi manager and I'm come to like let's go to my puzzle mat and tell it to reflect and refract IDs and then for car Fornell I'm going to do secondary ray visibility both probably don't need to do both but I'm going to do both just to be safe and same thing for a o so I'm gonna get all of those things in theory reflected in my table so let's take a look at what that looks like really quick awesome okay so there I'm starting to see a little bit in my car for Nell and spec lighting we knew that car a oh now I can see I've got my AO pass actually reflected in the table which is super cool and then likewise if I if I turn on my bucket rendering again and go up to puzzle mat now I actually have my puzzle mat reflected in the table as well which is kind of nice right alright cool so rather than sitting here and watching me render this thing and everything I actually have an After Effects project set up where I've already rendered and done like a little bit of a rough comp on this stuff just to show you guys kind of how how we might approach this comp strategically in After Effects I won't spend a lot of time in After Effects I really want to focus my time in cinema and redshift but I also want to show you kind of how we can go about using these passes right so I've got my my background plate now I actually shot this very purposely in our kind of bright sunny conference room because comping light emitting Holograms in a very light scene can be traditionally a very challenging task so one of the things that I like to do very first thing is take my I take my AOV of my puzzle mat we've turned this white by by just doing a shift channels and I've got a little bit of a levels adjustment on there to do some correct and then what I do is I I'm using a colored solid and what this is gonna do is it's gonna give my car a little bit of a dark background to like really kind of pop those light colors off of there which is cool so then I have my car hologram on top of that and in that comp really all that is is it's my fernell shader so I've got my two fernell shaders I've got it separated for the ground as well as for the car itself I've got my AO pass that like I said I had inverted so this is actually the a ovo AO pass but just flops so that it looks like it's emitting light rather than casting shadows the next thing I've got up here is my specular highlights and then just some additional reflection passes on top of that right so nothing nothing crazy but we're using an ADD mode we are doing a little bit of a color correct on this thing to get it into a nice kind of like cyan kind of blue right cool so this is fine but another thing that that we really like to do with this is to actually kind of see inside right so like one of the things I always think about Holograms like the the real potential of the hologram is to like kind of treat it like an x-ray like I can see a whole bunch of things going on inside this so what I'm gonna do is make a brand new I'm just gonna make an incandescent material we're going to call this RS car terior and we're gonna throw that on to my car model here and with this one what I'm gonna do I'm gonna use that Fornell again but this time I'm going to use it a little bit differently so I'm gonna bring that Fornell shader back in here and instead of using it to drive the color of my model I'm actually going to use it to drive the transparency or the alpha channel of my model and you're gonna see what that does here as soon as I get this rendered what we're gonna be able to see well we know what the puzzle man not the beauty pass there we go so now I can actually have like a x-ray vision of my car because it's using that Fornell pass it's using the same principles of the final shader but it's using it to drive the Alfa instead of the color my color is consistent it's my alpha that actually changes so that's that's pretty fun if we look at I've got a handful of these passes in here you can see we're getting it in the reflection specular lighting doesn't really have much and then of course AO and everything we're not gonna have much much a o on something that has a whole bunch of transparency to it so once again I've actually rendered that out already so we don't really have to worry about that you don't have to sit here and watch the grass grow and so this is what it ends up looking like and really all I'm doing here is I'm taking my car interior so I've got my my basic vanilla pass I've got my AO pass like I had before I've got my my specular lighting but then I'm starting to bring in this internal four nail shader which is which is really really helpful the the other thing that I ended up doing there as well is actually turning on GI so if I make a another render setting we're gonna call this for now interior and I'm gonna change up my passes here for this one I'm just gonna get rid of all of these we're gonna throw in a GI and an emission and for this one we're gonna turn on GI so we're gonna let this model cast GI onto the surface of the table because you know like I said in the beginning they you know the whole idea behind a hologram is its light emissive right like it's it's the sort of light emissive thing so you wanted to be able to cast light on the surfaces around it so if I turn on my redshift render view let's go ahead and bring that up again so here we go and now if I look at my GI pass you can see what that's doing and it's a little grainy cuz my render settings are really low but what it's doing is it's it's literally casting light from that light emissive material onto the surface of my table which is cool so I'm using that a bit as well which you can see if I jump back to this main comp here I actually have that AO pass so what I've done here is I've I've done a little bit of color correct a little levels adjustment and just turned it blue so it's you know cuz I have a blue card needs to cast some blue light right um so I actually have a couple of these already rendered out I did some animations so this is let's see actually I lied hold on we're gonna come back to that in just a second because there's one important thing that that we need to discuss and that is wireframes right so like we've got this we've got this kind of emissive base car we've you know we're seeing the sort of interior workings of it which is really cool but Holograms a lot of times at least sort of traditionally for the last several years have had some kind of a wireframe on and that's one of the things that I really want to talk about is how we can get a really nice-looking wireframe off of this car now redshift actually has a wireframe shader built into it but I actually have a different technique that I really like for making wireframes and that involves just going in here we're gonna do a we're gonna do a select children on this null so like you can see there's there's tons of parts and pieces in this thing what I want to do is select children so I've literally selected all of the objects under that null and I'm gonna right-click on it I'm gonna say did you know what am I looking for connect objects and what it's done if I turn off this null object what it's done is it's it's taken that entire hierarchy and it's flattened it down into a single object the reason I want to do that I'm actually going to get rid of this material we're gonna need that on there the reason I want to do that is because I want to actually grab all of the edges all of the splines that make this thing up and I want to separate those out into a separate object so I'm gonna hit control a or command a on a Mac and it's gonna in in edge mode it's gonna select all of the edges of this entire model and I'm gonna go up to mesh mesh commands edge to spline and what that's done is it's actually generated a singular spline that is all of the edges of that car model now it's a fairly dense model so this is gonna go a little slowly but I'm gonna I'm going to show you how we can take this and we can turn that into a really nice wireframe that we have a lot of control over using redshift so up under tags I'm gonna go under a redshift tag and I'm gonna drop a redshift object tag on this and you can see I've got this curve tab and that's where I'm gonna do all of my all my work here so we're gonna turn this into let's do cylinders and I'm just gonna reduce the size of this down to like 0.1 because I know that one is pretty excessive I also need a anita material so I'm going to throw on a redshift incandescent material onto my splines there we go and let's go ahead and open up the redshift render view now I will warn you this model that I have is fairly dense so it does take a second for redshift to load this all into GPU memory but once it does it's it's actually a really quick render like the actual render times are very fast it's just it has a lot of detail that it's loading in there but the great thing about this technique is it offers you a lot of flexibility you can now color all of these things with redshift shaders you can change the thickness it gives you like a spline for like controlling how thick and how thin each of these little splines end up being and it's it's just an immensely powerful tool so you can see here what we get is a really nice clean wireframe now my my wireframe here is probably a little bit a little thick those you know those could be a little bit thinner but once again I have I've already rendered this out and you know what let's do let's do this instead let's do this before we get into the render I'm actually going to get rid of all of these little selection tags because the other thing is with with the density of that I like to have a little bit of separation between my kind of x-ray view and my sort of top surface view right so what I want to do is also render a wireframe that's just the front faces of the car like if the car had no like transparent materials or anything I just want to see the wireframe of the outside of the car so I can have that as a separate pass when I get into comp so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna throw on a red shift object tag onto this car that I that I did the connect objects on and we're going to turn this into a mat we're going to enable the mat and we're gonna reduce itself all the way to zero and then we're gonna go back to our redshift render view and we are going to cook that one as well so again this is going to take just a second for all of those that dense mesh to load its way onto the video card but it will here just a moment and then we'll have a lovely kind of traditional wireframe if you will right so we'll have when we render this out we would have a wireframe that represents our interior of the car this sort of x-ray wireframe and then we would also have a wireframe for just the exterior of the car so we can kind of dial and balance those things in in after-effects as much as we want so there's a simple wire frame of the the front of the car like really clean really simple and and again because we're doing this with redshift materials we have a great deal of flexibility of how this ends up actually looking okay so once again I do have a version of this so I've got this version here has has two of the wireframes in there so it's the same thing that I've shown before except this time we have a interior we have our exterior wireframe and we have our interior wireframe as well if I can find that one that's right here so you can see I'm kind of dialing those things separately my exterior wireframe gets a lot of visual weight my interior wireframe gets dialed back a little bit just because it's it can get very very dense right and we want to we want to have a nice kind of visualization of the inside of this car cool so I actually do have some renders of these things this one this is just a turntable of this car like with some additional kind of calm sauce and some glow and stuff so you can kind of see how that how that ends up looking when it's when it's rendered out and actually has some animation and movement too you can really get a nice sense of the interior of that car and this this kind of like glowy exterior that you know looks like it's emitting light and everything so that's a that's a fairly a fairly standard hologram standard hologram if that's such a thing so one of the things that I'm always looking for and we're always kind of searching for a perception again is just how we're gonna push these things forward right what are some other ways that we can take this from being like a hologram that you know has like a wireframe of for now and we can kind of push that into into sort of future looks like what are some other things that we can do with this so I'm actually going to turn off my spline and we're gonna look specifically at this this car here one of the things that that redshift offers to us that we weren't able to do as much before is rendering very very complex geometry very quickly especially like a point and particle based geometry so what I'm going to do is I'm going to use a matrix object which is kind of part of the mograph toolset it's it's sort of in that realm I'm gonna use this to generate thinking particles and then we're going to render those thinking particles with a great deal of density very very quickly which is extremely exciting so we're gonna throw on this matrix object I'm gonna set this to object mode and right now it's set to generate matrices only I want to generate thinking particles and I do want to take my car model and drop that right into the object and by default this is set up to distribute over the surface so it's at the moment it's distributing 20 particles over the surface of this car I want to set this to vertex so what it's going to do is it's going to put one of those particles on every single vertex in the model which is super cool now in the past what you had to do is actually clone some objects onto this you had physical geometry to render you don't need to do that anymore with redshifts it's absolutely fantastic so what I'm going to do is I'm going to come up to simulate thinking particles I'm going to drop in a particle geometry object and what that is that's the thing that's actually going to render that's going to take those thinking particles and it's going to basically give redshift a thing to look at to render but I need to connect those things up i right now the matrix and the particle geometry they're not talking to each other yet so I need to make them talk to each other in order to do that then go up to simulate thinking particles thinking particle settings and in this particle geometry I have a particle group field I'm just going to grab this all and I'm gonna drop that right into there and then same thing on the matrix subject I'm just gonna grab the all and I'm gonna drop it into the TP group cool okay so right now it's not going to render anything because I've in fact I can prove that to you if I open up redshift redshift renderview bring this open and all I'm gonna see is is the table oh right I've got my car turned on let's turn that off and I need to see that right now so all I have is the table I don't have any particles rendering yet and that's because what I need to do is on this particle geometry I want to drop on another redshift object tag and now you can see I've got this particles option on my redshift object tag because it knows that it's on a particle object and this is what it's supposed to be rendering right now it's set to disabled I want to make that point instances and I'm gonna set this to like I don't know a point oh five we're gonna make these really really small points I love like a lot of detail a lot of really dense detail just makes me happy so we're going to go back to our rent redshift render view and we're gonna give this a quick render we're gonna see what we get boom all right so let's let's give it a material because right now it doesn't have any material it's not gonna do any good we're gonna use the same redshift incandescent material that I used for the wireframes but there you can see I have a great deal of particles I've got a lot of density in there and it renders lightning fast which is super super cool so it's a really interesting way of generating something that essentially does the job of the wireframe which is to show me this like detailed kind of technical interior of the car without being a wireframe something something else which is cool so of course I do have that sort of pre-made so you see what that looks like when we when we comped that up you get this like like it feels just different from a wireframe right like it just has a little bit more interesting look to it and of course I do have a animated render of that which I'll show you cool so there's there's my vertex particle car tumbling around in our conference room cool but that's not all that we can do with with this whole thinking particles thing right like we can we can do a lot more than that so let's let's look at some different ways that we can distribute these points on this car right now we're set to vertex so it's putting each of these you know it's putting a particle on every vertex what I'm going to do is set this to a surface and you can see that what's what's left over this is it's a an artifact of thinking particles what you need to do in order to kind of reset the thinking particles just go forward a frame and then jump back to frame 0 it's just thinking particles so what we need to do is you're gonna crank up this number right now I've got 20 let's try let's try 10,000 let's just throw 10,000 on there and see what that does for us see we get cool there's 10,000 points on the car no problem all right let's try 100,000 let's throw a hundred thousand points on that car and we're gonna hit the refresh button so redshift refreshes okay so there's a hundred thousand points on that car cool that's rendered ridiculously lightning fast because all of that geometry is being instance to render time let's try half a million particles let's try 500,000 see we get there we go so there's half a million particles cloned onto the surface of that car in [Music] 0.38 seconds which is ridiculous it's ridiculously fast so this kind of gives us a cool like almost like a lidar scan kind of look to it right and I can take that and again in in comp I've got a comped version of that of course so this is this is just a still comp with all of those points kind of wrapped onto the car I think this one is actually a million points the one that I rendered here but redshift has no problem handling all of that geometry now these could be spheres or they could be triangles or squares or whatever you want like these can be custom shapes as well I'm just using spheres because they're they're so small you're never gonna notice if it's anything else so of course I do have a render of this as well and this render I did I comped on a little bit of a sweep as well so if I set that to repeat you can kind of see how that works so basically it's you know it's sweeping across the surface of the car and it's showing you this kind of like internal lidar scan of what's going on in the car in this very kind of like organic and noisy Sirte way which i think is pretty fun cool so again we can we can kind of take this a step further as well I actually have a completely different scene set up where I've got this sort of mix mo model it's just this guy running right like that's all it is just a guy running but I can use the same exact technique over here because I've got a nice closed volume if I throw in my matrix object and let's set this to object mode we're gonna make this guy the object so I'm gonna do that cool and let's do instead of surface let's time let's do volume this time so we're gonna put clones we're gonna put these thinking particles inside the volume so again I need to set this up to render to generate thinking particles I need to come up to my simulate and go to particle geometry and I need to of course hook up all of these things together so that they talk nicely realizing I'm running a little low on time so I'm going to go rather swiftly through this okay so again we're going to drop on our redshift object tag and we're gonna set particle to point instance we're going to set that to I don't know point oh five Ginn is probably fine okay so let's do this let's set this to something reasonable like twenty five thousand particles on the inside of that guy now one thing I do need to do is change the particle priority you'll notice like if I hit if I hit play right now you know maybe twenty five thousand little excessive let's start with twenty five hundred just for the moment and we'll come back to will crank that number up here in a second if I set that that seems to actually be working okay might be making a liar out of me today but really you should be set this to after effectors and that way any effectors you have because of course we're dealing with mograph objects at this point so we can use effectors for all this stuff any effectors you want you can throw them on here and it and it works really really well but you want to make sure that you change particle priority to after effectors that way the effectors get processed first and then the particles get generated so you can see I've got my running guy here I've got these particles being generated inside let's go ahead and crank up this number a little bit let's take it back up to 25,000 we'll open up our red shift render view and and give this a quick render because there is one more thing I want to jam through pretty quickly for you guys so here's the volume of this guy filled with 25,000 particles let's let's make that a little more interesting let's do 250,000 particles and see how that goes so we'll just wait for that to think about what it's doing I'm hoping that I didn't hit play and crash this thing let's see if that's going to take just a second because it's it's currently reading all the geometry but basically the idea is we can take all of this really dense geometry and we can actually render this very very quickly once once we have this going it it operates very fast alright so here we go it's gonna now it's going to unlock for me maybe let's see generating all that geo inside that volume so it's basically like scattering inside of a volume so you can scatter on the surface you can scatter inside the volume and the render times are are absolutely ridiculous and it seems like I might have made this a little mad unfortunately but there is something else that I want to talk to you guys about it's just completely different from all of this stuff so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna I'm actually just gonna ditch these for the moment and we're going to start back with our with our regular mocap guy at jump forward or jump back we're just gonna get rid of all of the thinking particles here eventually while that is thinking about what it's doing it certainly seems to be moving a little slowly at the moment what we're gonna be doing is we're gonna be looking at a completely different way of visualizing a hologram like what is what's something completely different that we can do with this what I'm gonna do is throw in a mograph cloner and i'm gonna set this to grid array and we're gonna drop in say a moo text object so let's get this in here and I'm just gonna put a for the moment I'm just gonna put an X in there we're gonna set the depth down this is something really small I really need that to be too big point one is fine five centimeters is fine we'll just make it really small what we're gonna do is we're going to turn this hologram into some 3d ASCII art which is really really cool this is something that we could not have done before our xx like in the advent of fields and everything it really allows a great deal of really really cool possibilities especially when it comes to generating these kinds of holograms and things so I'm going to take my cloner object just going to look from the side let's let's add a few more clones and in this thing let's say we're gonna do 10 and X I'll keep this thing pretty light so we'll do like 20 in Y and 40 in Z there we go and and what I want to do is I want to put this grid array kind of around my character here so what we're gonna do is we're gonna use our running guy model as a field to actually affect those clones that that we have going on in here whoa all right cool so what what I want to do is change the instance mode to multi instance and the viewport mode two points and that way I can just work really really swiftly I don't have to worry about rendering all that geometry in the viewport so I want to make sure that this ends up right around my character here I'm just gonna set this up here and I want to bring this in let's say let's make this like a tee so that it's it's just nicely around my running guy model and I do want to make this say twice as wide let's say 400 centimeters okay so there I have I have my running guy model all right cool so what I want to do is I want to be able to affect these clones and because I'm running a little bit short on time I'm gonna run through this really really quickly what we're gonna do is we're going to use a plane effector and the plane effector is going to allow us to pipe in fields into into this thing but by default the plane effector actually is moving all of the positions of my particles I don't want that I'm going to turn that off but I do want to turn on modify clone I'm going to crank that up to 100% that's gonna be really important for the fields to actually affect what clones we have going on in here so I'm going to go under the fall-off tab and I'm gonna drag my mocap guy right into the fall-off tab here and that's gonna allow me to to basically pass data from my from the points on the mocap guy onto the points in the cloner you can kind of see what's going on there if I change this color on my mocap guy to something that might be a little bit more visible like a like a nice bright red you can see that the points around my mocap guy are now being affected and that's you know that changes as as he moves and animates those things change as well so we're going to use that data to drive what clone shows up around my cap guy and we're gonna make some some interesting kind of ASCII art hologram out of that as well so what I'm gonna do here let's go ahead and turn off the color because I don't want it to affect color I only want it to affect data and that's that's what this this little sine wave thing is here so get if I give this a quick render in the render view we're probably just gonna see a whole bunch of a bunch of X's and no guy all right well that's not really gonna do what I want to do is come up here to the cloner and I'm gonna duplicate this and I'm gonna make I'm gonna make this one a just a period so I've got a period and I've got an X and I'm gonna set this from iterate I'm gonna set it to blend so let's go ahead back into my redshift render view go ahead and give this a render dude to dupe there we go so now I've got periods everywhere except right around my guy so I've got all these X's right around my guy so we're starting to get somewhere we're starting to get something interesting but I really like the idea of using the density of the character itself to kind of communicate this idea of fall off from our character so what I'm gonna do is actually I'm gonna I'm going to not use a letter I'm going to use so I'm gonna say like the most dense one I'm going to use is like a hashtag or a pound sign and then from the bottom to the top that's how the density is essentially going to fall off what I'm going to do is kind of create an ASCII gradient if you will so this is going to be let's use an @ sign for the next one we're gonna use let's use like a question mark so I'm just going to keep duplicating these and and selecting characters that have less and less kind of visual density like a like a ford slash and then the next one might be a asterisk and I've got my period at the very end so let's go ahead and look at what that looks like now who helps if I hit the play button there we go cool so now I've got a lot of a lot of different characters here and it kind of falls off from the center outwards my problem is that I've got a bit of a visualisation issue because it's all white it's all kind of stacked on top of itself and I want to I want to basically add a little bit of a fall off into the distance so for that I'm gonna go back to my plane effector go back to my fall off tab and I'm going to use a linear field did you do right here and the linear field I am going to tell it to effect color I don't want it to affect the data so I'm going to turn that off the linear field here I'm going to basically set this to like a dark gray and if I look from the side perspective here I can actually see where my linear field sits in space and that's basically creating a gradient from white to that dark gray here and so I want to just kind of squeeze this in here and now if I give this another render we should see a bit more of a fall-off into depth there yes so we're starting to get a little bit more visualization of some of these objects up front now one of the things that I can do is in my plane effector if I go back to my mocap guy here go to my layer and maybe set this radius down to like five so it's not quite as not quite as dense now this this is a pretty like this this mesh this grid array that I have in here lacks a lot of density so like you'd really want to get this dense I just want to be able to move quickly here for you guys so if I go back to my linear field maybe what we do is change this color make it a little bit darker come on buddy there we go so we can go a little bit darker on this we can really start to to kind of see where that comes into play there and then if I keep this open and keep it running should be able to go like almost real-time frame by frame and actually see that guy running through that field now of course I do have a render of this already set up and because I'm pretty much out of time I'll just show you guys what that ends up looking like after a little bit of post-processing and and glow and a little bit of a color change so there's a there's a completely different way of looking at at the way that a hologram can be produced using redshift in and r20 in ways that we could it would be very very difficult to do this prior to the existence of fields now we have a kind of 3d ASCII art hologram running through a volumetric field if we will so that said thank you very much for watching thank you to everybody online as well please feel free to see more at experience perception calm and follow us on Twitter perceptions Twitter is at exp underscore perception and my Twitter is at robot astronaut underscore so please give us a follow and keep in touch thank you very much

Channel: Maxon

Views: 64,213

Rating: 4.968051 out of 5

Keywords: c4d, cinema 4d, r20, release 20, sculpting, bodypaint 3d, maxon, modeling, modelling, 3d, animation, rendering

Id: 2ZDLiyH05Ac

Length: 53min 21sec (3201 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 26 2019