Siggraph 2018 Rewind - Marc Potocnik: Procedural Landscaping with Cinema 4D

hello guys my name is mark mark patashnik I'm the owner of tiny but very nice animation studio and Abba own located in the western part of Germany the Rhine area in Dusseldorf and the big thanks to max on for having me again at SIGGRAPH and a big hello out to the Internet to the community and to Varina Freddie Andy and okay let's jump right into my talk but first let's have a look at my studio Rena Baron is a studio I founded back in the days in 2001 me myself I'm a designer and a Maxon lead instructor which means I ride training stuff for max on focus on shading like and rendering and my studio render Baron is focused on visualization visual effects and TV commercials since 17 years now located in this law let's have a look at the most recent work with the show real 2018 and then which I jump right into the topic [Music] [Music] so that's it for now the most reason and hopefully the best work from my studio Rena Baron in düsseldorf okay let's jump right in today we're going to talk about procedural landscaping with cinema 4d and why we are thinking about that title let's think about the sense behind it what is it it's creating rich environments rich natural environments without pixels without Louise without plugins with the native see for the shader toolset only and with a lot of cheap tricks I'm going to show you so let's see some examples first Before we jump right into the main topic example one is for German television for the TV documentary show telex under the spell of sunlight about the absorption of light under water the Vasa absorbedly energy armors hoteis leashed vets who is perfect now 500 matin is alice in blogger talked plankton death nap the slave in Schwinn did of einem kilometers diskens Finster and conversely the second example is a music video 7-minute music video we will only see an excerpt of that it's done for los angeles-based singer-songwriter Gugu SHhhh it's called two windows [Music] so as you can see this is the first full environment I created ranging from a micro to a macro scale ranging from stones and pebbles at cliffs landscapes canyons to full planets and even stars all of that is created procedurally in terms of modeling and shading third example again for TV documentary Tariq's a question of time about the principle of uranium-lead dating leashed Mandi Magnus who lands metre mega and Glide so let's teach / - non-lethal side for ganzel moose position out Jesus for helpless understated and the fourth example is a workload I recently finished for Intel it's the project Mountain Vista and it is created to benchmark the power of the brand new car I 9 CPU extreme edition so that project had some requirements for the use as a benchmark there were certain scene requirements in terms of RAM usage scene file and maximum render time per full HD frame and the scene should contain everything a 3d artist grows hair gray hair about high poly count lots of objects transparencies everything that's fun with rendering so there's a white paper for download about this project you can download old download it here for free as a PDF if you're interested take a look so here it is Mountain Vista there's a drone like camera movement across the peak and there we have the beautiful Vista into the landscape remember all of that is created procedurally in terms of modeling and shading today's main topic is let's say an enhancement of that mountain vistas scene its Mountain Vista reloaded Stanko Stanko is some kind sounding like a mountain somewhere in Austria maybe and that scene was created not with our 19 but with our 20 of cinema 4d and it is enhanced with some our 20 features mainly multi instances and it is enhanced in terms of shading lighting and it also has a handheld camera and sound and let's have a look at Stein Coby that's Mountain Vista reloaded strike over okay so how is this done let's jump right into the details the deep of that topic when you have a closer look at natural phenomenons just such as rock waves clouds we discover certain structures random like structures with different characteristics and the guy at the Pioneer which brought this to computer graphics for the first time is mr. Ken pearl in which transferred these behaviors into the terms of computer graphics in 1982 for the Disney movie Tron and if you have a closer look at that solid on the ground you might get the idea it's broken up by a noise shader so in cinema 4d we have noises since really 6 so back in the days in 2000 they were on board with in front with a plug-in called bode nut that's a screenshot from professional magazine digital production from summer 2000 and as you can see we have that drop down menu year for noise shaders so it's a pretty long story with noises and cinema 4d so let's have live demo about the family of noises okay in this scene we have a bunch of stones procedurally modeled and procedurally shaded and let's just have a look at some of the ingredients is here we click in the color channel of one of these guys and there's a layer show shader going on the layer shade is nothing but a container where you can stack and mix shaders such as we would do it in Photoshop with different transparencies different layer modes as over like overlay multiply screen just as you know it in Photoshop and we'll certain effects that you can apply maybe colorize as I did here or maybe distort you could just destroy the whole thing okay so let's have a look at the parameters of a noise that noise shader comes with a radiant and this gradient is the characteristic of the noise the pattern so here you have the color of the noise gradient the seat from where it starts randomly like pulling the wheel of fortune and here you have your drop-down menu with all those fancy fantasy names whatever nakki noise new choose whatever the guy was thinking about who created this by the way this is David Patrick farmer if I'm right so and here we have with that small tiny triangle we have a preview for all these noises and below that there are some very important parameters going on the octaves what are their taste of tapes are just as a music the iterations of frequency in terms of noise the iteration of calculations so the more octaves the more detail you'll know is has and below that there's the space in which your noise gets applied either in UV to D so if you deform your object the noise would go with the deformation or with texture so it follows the texture Tech or in object or world both of them are 3d spaces either in reference to the coordinate system of the object or the world we know that we have some let's say gradation parameters like clipping brightness contrast and roughly that's it for noises the thing is how do I use them there are so many of them how do I get a system in it and for that we have to consider one thing noises are like a family more or less like two families they're based on parallel or on Voronoi and when you understand their relationships they're intertwining then this helps us to systematically use noises so here we have three of those relatives brothers cousins whatever the mother of all noises purlins turbulence and fpm and when we have a closer look at the detail you might see that turbulence is nothing else than a No with further octase with further iterations of calculation and fbm as well in a more contrasty way maybe so these might be brothers and that's the cousin obviously it's the same with the smear versions of them we all know it's displayed turbulence they all have a relationship between each other and with the second family of noises Voronoi it's just the same they not just look like their relatives they are relatives so if you know that it's much more easier for you to apply them where it makes sense and if you've got stuck in the jungle of noises please consult the online help of cinema 4d giving you a pretty preview and a good idea of the behavior of each noise and while we're talking about that please keep this guy in mind the electric noise with it's fish skin like structure just keep it in mind for now we will come back to that later okay strike over the in the animation I just showed you is an environment that's ranging from micro scale to macro scale from stones to pebbles to a whole landscape so let's begin with the first step with the creation of stones and pebbles covering all the ground lying there over and over and I will show you how they've been created and we also have a look at some basics and drumroll note based materials in cinema for the release 20 brand new killer feature okay here we have these guys lying around and I will just quickly show you how they are modeled as a basis I just used a sphere squashed it unproportional e to some kind of evaluate and I subordinated a displace of the former and the displace of the former can be found in the deformation menu of cinema 4d and it's capable to transfer grayscale information from shaders to a deformation so I just walk right into the tab shading and there's a layer shader going on containing for guys the first guy is just a Perlin noise just bumping that the whole thing like like a overblown potato something like that on top of that there's a high contrast the Voronoi noise punching it in a bit and on top of that another one smaller more contrasty punching it a bit further and that's the cream of the crop there's a public reaction going on it's just a colorized effect from that drop-down menu here giving it a bit more contrast the behavior so that's the modeling take a look at the shading in the way of the classical material system we have material aspects shown as channels and on the color channel we have again lay shader with not much going on just for guys again a pox on all is largely scaled with 3,000 percent this is perfect for for lava like rock like structures out of the box on top of that there's a colorize going on another noise for a bit more detail and on top as cream of the crop I mean occlusion and Emme occlusion in this case has the inverts Direction active which means it samples the inside of the volume at the inside of the of the geometry creating a one edge shader okay that's nothing too complex in terms of the classical material system we have just four guys stacked over each other that's it when we create note material such a like so and double-click on it then we have this node editor that's brand new to our 20 and inside the node editor we find that node editor window where you can navigate and connect notes with each other we have an a tree you manage on the right side giving us information for each node that you click on we have that wires which connect nodes with each other here we go and on the left side we have the list of the used nodes and that's the navigator through the jungle of notes it's the assets window let's have a look at the stone material so here we have exactly the same stone material as we had here in the classical system transfer it into the terms of node based materials so we have a noise being colorized and plucked into a layer shader a layer node and inside this lay node there's another noise stacked above and I mean occlusion with invert Direction stacked on top of that so the logic behind all this is just the same it's just let's say the language you you express your logic with just one thing when you're working with a mixed environment such as here with a classical material and beside that anode material there's one parameter you won't miss this is very important if you go to the project settings with command D there are this tiny little check box use color channel for node materials and this is normally unchecked which means you create a PBR behavior for your albedo firstly based reflection a renderer ring behavior so if you want to avoid that then check this box and you get just a normal color channel behavior for your note material okay these are a really it's a really brief introduction to notes here we go so let's move on with a modeling of that whole mountain scene and see some usual suspects it's again about systematics with noise shaders how to use them depending on the purpose you want to use them so when you're doing and scaping things you might get the idea that there's a certain principle to it big structures you create with a displacer on a high res geometry number one we will have a live demo on that right now medium structures are created with bump channel or normals channel so you don't waste an infinite amount of geometry and for albedo and small structures you use the color channel and the reflectance channel so let's have a live demo of the usual suspects and let's model a mountain real quick I prepared some best practice examples for you guys we have some let's say case studies here so for stones you might want to go with these usual suspects Hema booyah and dens these are fancy names for Voronoi based noises and when we have a look at Hema for an example this is creating some kind of spaghetti-like structure and if you crank up the low clip you get some triangular quadrangle air structures translated into a displaced áformer looking like stones or cobble stones or pebbles and it's the same with booyah who we are and tense so dance are a bit more rounded perfect for pebbles okay if you want to go with rock structures then another Voronoi noise is your friend it's bar owner three four no three is perfect for creating let's like crystalline like blocky structures but that looks pretty let's say artificial you want to distort that maybe to create something like that how do you do that just go ahead inside that setup there's a displaced deformer and there's a distorter shader coming from the shader menu effects distorter there it is and inside the distorted shader there our friend Voronoi being started by his friend blistered turbulence and this is just creating a very let's say pass like or maybe cracks like look like dried ground or damaged ground maybe and this is looking quite complex but it's really simple to create and if you want to go with rocks check out the nakki noise because out of the box naki is perfect for rock structures and if you layer both of them I'm proportionately stretched in both direction like so you get something like rock layers rock columns maybe can mix them like you want and that's it for rock so let's have a look at usual suspects for landscapes out of the box 3 noises are perfect for large-scale landscape structures we have Luca Lucas out of the box just beautiful for creating landscape you have to use it at a very large scale let's see what we have here Luca where is it here three thousand percent scale that's big and it's perfect out of the box Paco we all already seen that for stones creating let's say lava like structures like dried stone something like that marble veins maybe and on the right side we have you choose and you choose is creating these string like spaghetti like structures which could look with a little fantasy like a riverbed maybe and of course you can layer these guys here we have Luca new cheese layered and on the right side we have an example that looks like a cradle and landscape when I render that you see the grayscale map for that and how's that done it's very simple we have the displacer here inside this place there's a layer shader and inside layer shader there's Luca usual suspect and on top of that a Voronoi noise making some bubbly bumps I color correct that with a colonizer and I punch it in with an inverted version of that very Voronoi noise and on top there's a distortion and that's it that's looking complex but it isn't at all okay so let's use this knowledge for modeling a mountain I have a plane here a high-res geometry this place was subordinated and we have some shading going on here let's go to the car as a basis we have a Voronoi shader again for creating that large-scale crystal like structure on top overlaid where the multiply mode another volley and some naki and that's not looking too bad for the moment but what distracts me are those straight lines we have to break them up somehow and there comes electric nominees into the game I told you to keep it in mind that fish skin like guy I just put the whole thing here inside the distorted shader and it's now distorted by an electric noise let's see what happens with the straight lines they got smeared they got broken up they got somehow organic so that might look magic but it isn't it all is just for shaders nothing else and no chop you might add some erosion on the peak of the mountain and that's it I did that by masking some additional noise on the peak of those structures so basically that is very simple the principle is to stack and layer very basic ingredients to a very specific and complex-looking and Ruiz are like you're a chef you're cooking with water and salt and the end result is a fantastic spectacular menu so it's nothing else okay let's have a look at the shading of the mountain the shading of the mountain is somehow tech based it's a tack based approach the guise of you working with cinema 4d no texture tex texture takes out these guys here sitting in the object manager of cinema 4d and defining a texture and you can stack them and depending on their their alpha information they're just layering texture information onto your object and that is the case with the mountain a year as the first material texture tech number one we have a rock shader here going on with angle dependence structures just as I showed it to you right before the in the example as a texture tag - we have a cobblestone shader going on only in a polluted areas and at a certain altitude and last but not least for the third texture check I have to add some objects to make it visible drum roll so that is the third extra Tek only visible around objects it's a soil and roots shader with an amine occlusion dependent masking that means from a different angle we have the clumps of grass here and around the clumps of grass there's a shader going on masking it with a mean occlusion in direct neighborhood through those clumps and the structure the albedo is some kind of soil maybe roots so that doesn't look too naked clumps on naked stone does make sense there has to be some soil and root going on okay before we jump right into the shading of the mountain we have to waste some thoughts on BST FS meaning by directional scattering distribution function while that looks very complex and sounds very complex it means just it's about the spreading of light from the brightest point to a terminator meaning the border between day and night and the function describing that behavior is a BS DF and Ilocano channel of cinema 4d we have two of them available Lambert and or Ania and Lambert is just functioning with the principle that lights gets weaker the sharper the anger gets so we have that darkening around the edges and in contrary to that or Anaya calculates some micro facets so the light doesn't get too weak as it reaches the silhouette of the sphere and you might get the idea which model the full moon has of course or Ania so this is a model which calculates a free nail and micro facets and what works for the full moon also works for a mountain this is Lambert looking like glossing maybe plastic like maybe and here we have our own eye are looking more satin ated rough sophisticated so that's the right let's say haptic for a mountain instead of just throw them some plastic on it or an eye is the place to go for mountain ok live demo noise fest I will just show you what I stacked in there to create the illusion of a proper hopefully proper mountain shader okay without further ado what looks complex might be complex but I I won't bore you with that that's the wrong shade sorry I mean that here ok ok complex as well but a bit more ordinated so we begin with a color and a large-scale structure done with epoxy noise and it's looking like that pretty good for the more but we need some more rock behavior some of Pharos massed on specific areas of my terrain and that's looking like that we have furrows going on only or mostly going on in the almost vertical areas of the mountain this is done by masking with a fall-off shader additional to that we have some dust shading going on as if our mountain is kind of dusty that's done by a free nail shader and additional to that some one of edges some cobblestone work some parcels may be going on here at almost horizontal areas and in the end we get a complex result looking like this with all those ingredients is turned on and all of these might look are quite nice but it's nothing without proper bump mapping or normals maybe and inside my bump channel year we have layer as well some complex stuff going on but always keep in mind it's only complex when you stack very simple very basic ingredients and components together it just doesn't get complex it's just more or less multiplication of simple so maybe okay and with a bump channel the whole thing looks like that okay we have a poor ante as in quality here nevermind but you get the idea so BAM channel is doing a very important job here and when you have a closer look at that area here you remember maybe the electric noise with its fish skin like structure I told you that this is used this electric noise is used here to distort my pump information and this is how it looks if it doesn't it's boring and with distortion it just looks like the ground the rock layers are smeared depending on the topology of the rock so it's a much more natural appearance just by distorting my bumper information with an electric noise okay let's go ahead now we come to let's say we enter the relaxation mode after complex stuff we will see now something that looks complex but is ridiculously simple it's all the landscape stuff going on in the background here what looks complex like we have riverbeds here we have that kind of beach maybe Hills mountains going on all of that is looking very complex but it's ridiculously simplest just let's have a life look at that it's just one noise ladies and gentlemen one insanely large scaled noise called you choose with a hundred fifty thousand percent that riverbed noise basically and this noise is thrown into a colorizer with some banding going on and that's creating that Canyon like Tourette's like structure it's just the colorizer with additional knots moved to each other to narrowing some areas to broaden some areas and to create these structures here and on top of that there's just another noise going on with eleven percent opacity multiply mode it's our good old friend Luca and that's it that's the whole landscape so it's very simple okay now we're talking about multi instances multi instances is one of the new pillow features of release 20 and if you ask me it's my favorite feature because multi instances shine where render instances fail I guarantee so let's have a look at some scene stats here we have the landscape go on the landscape and all the terrain stuff is already reaching nine million polygons then we have 140,000 trees in that scene with 600,000 polygons each and another stuff like trees in the foreground houses grass flows blah blah blah blah and so on we reach in the end ninety billion seven hundred ninety three million eight hundred ninety nine polygons and that's insane you couldn't do that with previous releases of cinema 4d it's just the sheer amount of polygons here that really where we are multi instance is really shine so let's compare multi-instance to previous versions of instancing in cinema 4d we all know the classic instances they are playing duplicates of the original and they have the same Ram footprint render instances duplicate the original as well but have a less Ram footprint much much smaller and footprint and they are not capable of doing deformation or time offset let's say random time offset when being used as notes clones sorry multi instances from audiences only the position is stored and they have a very small and reasonable Ram footprint and as with render instance there's no deformation or time offset and now dynamics because only the position is stored so you won't run into that message anymore not enough memory that's pain okay here we have a screen shot of RAM usage of the Steinberg machine it's only twenty eight gigabytes of RAM that's nothing okay let's see some compression in terms of performance Randa instances and release nineteen and multi instances with much more clones in release twenty preparation time is faster overall render time is faster and the ramp footprint is slightly higher but that's a deal I'm more than happy to accept so let's have a look live at multi instances here we go so there's one important thing about the usage of instances no matter of you using R and answers or multi instances it's how do you how do you scatter them how do you distribute them over your object of interest in this case I just painted manually some polygon selections on my high res geometry in other cases I just did it a bit more yeah with a with a wider brush maybe left some area blank and inside these areas there's a shaded effect are going on just a quick glance at the shader effector it's restricting all those instances let me just turn that on we're quick where is it here we are the trees in the landscape just a second remember 140,000 objects area so all those trees are masked to a certain altitude by a 3d gradient and on top of that there's a noise going on and this noise is multiplied and when you have a closer look at that noise just looking like fields maybe re cultural fears from the plane seen from a plane maybe so that is multiplied on top creating those maybe field like structures here and as cream of the crop there's another 3d gradient going on adding some more trees to the shoreline of the river just a second come on come on okay it should be there the interesting thing about multi instances is that you have certain viewport modes I just do I just show that for you for the trees and foreground and we have that viewport mode here right next to the instances drop-down menu you can choose if you want to want your moti instance displayed as points that's the most efficient display mode or as bounding boxes or as full-blown objects so bounding box would look like that okay you got it and of course points is the most performant saving viewport mode so let's have a look at the lighting and rendering of the stein Koga scene it's about credibility in two different flavors because there are two different render engines used for the fan rendering of that animation but first of all let's have a look at the sunlight the lighting process here we have only the sunlight it's an infinite light with area shadows and all those dark areas here have something something going on like self illumination maybe I call this shader set up shadow luminance if you want to know more about it check my cigarette talk 2015 on diversity there's a tutorial ok there's no we have some sky domes going on to hemispheric area lights huge area lights in a hemispheric shape for separate diffuse lighting and specular lighting giving the whole scene a nice daylight and last but not least 10 manually placed area lights with area shadows so called bounce lights to create the illusion of indirect light means there's local elimination only no globe elimination that gives you a good sleep while rendering because there are no artifacts no flickering it's quite fast and it does its job so for the choice of weapons physical render or standard render there are some considerations to be made here we have a render frame with plants on the ground relying on alpha map information relying on transparency and transparency casting area shadows is always a bad choice sometimes you can't go around but if you can't please avoid that because it's really slowing down the render process check that with out alpha maps okay looking silly I know that but render time is cut into half and I've got a point there I guess so compared to standard renderer ground plans with alpha Maps the render time is much lower and 166 minutes for frame is just ridiculous so standard render for the foreground is a no-go in that case I chose physical render for the foreground because we have smooth yet detailed results and it's faster than the standard render at the cost of a higher ramp footprint but that's a deal I'm happy to accept it's perfect for the program so let's have a look by the way at the different looks of the internal render engines in cinema 4d this is the standard renderer and to my mind all those procedural things going on here are over sharpened and and to crisp they're looking artificial and physical render has a much more natural look and much more high quality in terms of anti-aliasing so that is the choice for the ascending that Hill and for foreground different looks and different speeds of render engines so what do I do about the background all those stuff with the trees 140,000 trees in background physically render didn't even starts to render because it tried to put all of those geometry into the RAM and that took forever after 30 minutes I aborted that so which render engine could solve the problem it's easy for the background I use the standard renderer it it immediately immediately it started to render the scene after maybe 15 seconds and speed and quality are perfect for large-scale environments like these for the foreground I chose physical render because there's speed and quality for procedural structures a high quality anti analyzing and a good speed and friendly ring for sample based stuff so the overall outcome is a combination of both like this remember 90 billion polygons okay I guess we took a ride through the valley of noises now so thanks for watching and take a look at my website www.africanelements.org [Music]

Channel: Cineversity

Views: 23,891

Keywords: 3d, 3d software, c4d, c4d tutorial, cinema 4d, cinema 4d tutorial, cinema4d, maxon, tutorial, c4d live, c4dlive, siggraph, siggraph 2018, siggraph 2018 rewind, siggraph c4dlive, siggraph maxon, siggraph rewind, c4d new features, c4d r20, c4d r20 features, c4d r20 news, c4d updates, cinema 4d new features, cinema 4d updates, cinema4d r20, new features, new in r20, release 20, release 2018

Id: ok0hzbB9xRQ

Length: 46min 7sec (2767 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 30 2018