Siggraph2018 - School of Clarisse: Concepts and Fundamentals of the Clarisse workflow!

hi good morning welcome to see graph my name is Greg Greg Jennings I'm currently a li ta artist for ice tropics the makers of clarice ifx this morning I'll be giving a short overview of the main concepts and fundamentals of the clarice workflow I'll be showing you what makes Clarisse I effects a unique package so right here is the render of my scene this is what we will be looking at today I'll show you how I went through the process of building this scene let me point out that this is actually based on the Neo Tokyo pack from a 3d comm who we've been partnering with we have quite a lot to cover so let's just jump right into curries okay so this is what was the recent looks like when you open it for the first time priests and boy interface I'll just go through this real quick we have viewports with these little tabs up here that we call widgets you can treat new widgets as such by clicking the little plus sign you can also divide your viewports as you wish move things around etc etc up here you have a few of the main basic functions this is all python-based so if you just click and drag one of these into the script editor which already has something so we can just create a new one if you just drag-and-drop you'll see the script that actually corresponds to this little icon it's gonna be helpful in some cases and last but not least we have the tool bar on the left some of these tools we will be covering today okay so let's just go back to the default layout and let's start importing some geometry so Korea's imports geometry either in the Alembic or obj format and volumes under the PDB formats let's just go to import geometry and under geo buildings I'm just going to import the tower F obj okay so this is our building now the first thing I'd like to point out is if you go if you look at the attributes and go to the bottom you'll see we actually have a path with a file name and this is because none of the actual assets are saved within the Clarisse project we reference everything so if I just save this file right now and go back here and actually edit this with a notepad you'll see this is what a Clarisse project actually looks like so you can see it's very easy to understand which means it's also easy to debug if needed and then here's the Tower F obj we just have a few attributes the names of the shading groups and we have this file name right here now this is really great because it also means that because this is a super lightweight file you have automatic all receive basically every five seconds which means you virtually never lose any of your work okay so let's start doing a little bit of set dressing and go through some of the concepts so I'll just create a poly grid I think this building is pretty large okay seven kilometres high and so we'll probably just scale this down a little bit make it a little bit more realistic okay that's better now let's just increase the size of the poly grid okay so in other software packages basically if you were to start your layout you probably do copy paste you know translate rotate your buildings you know place your camera we also have instancing obviously to create instances now I'll show you that real quick because increase you can instantiate geometry but you can also instantiate materials render settings lights a lot of really cool things so as soon as I've made an instance of my building you'll see all the attributes the font turns italic and you can just right click and localizing specific attributes so in this case I'm just going to localize the transform attributes I think you just move it around but then obviously everything else is still shared between both buildings now you can also do materials so if we were just create two materials as such so I'll create a standard material let's just do two little boxes real quick and delete these oops sorry about that so I'll just zoom in on to this one create an instance actually localize this there you go so as I said everything else is still shared between both create a new material assign it if we switch to priya's mode you'll see the material is actually currently assigned to both of the boxes and then if I were to instantiate this material but then localize the mature assignment of the second box assigned us here now if I actually just localized the diffuse color I can change the color of the second cube but then all the other attributes of the materials are shared so emission reflection everything so this can be very powerful if you have similar objects sharing similar chiral qualities and stuff like that and as I mentioned you could also instantiate render settings lights over pretty much everything okay so this is like a pretty tedious way of doing things so let's just jump right in and see how we do things increase just close this for now so one of the really powerful features of threes is the ability to actually reference other Clarisse projects so in this little scene right here you'll see I just created a context called import now context and Theresa basically just ways for you to organize your scene they're like little folders we can arrange so you want to think of projects and creases one giant sandbox we can basically import assets data organize your work play around and actually treat several different images within the same project that feed off the same data so right here this little blue icon shows that this Neo Tokyo look dave project is actually your reference and you can see this up here if you look at the file name so this is pointing to another Clarisse project on disk the way you do this is you just click the file a reference file and then you just choose it so in this case I've referenced a Clarisse projects which is basically all the locked dev material assignments for all the Neo Tokyo PAC buildings if we actually open this on the side you'll see it's an exact copy of what I have I've created my materials today and my materials tonight now you might notice that here under the material linker all the training groups the assignments are pointing to the default material even though we actually have materials assigned on the tower now the way we're doing this right here is we're using a slightly different method we're using a shading layer and a shading layer is nothing more than a set of rules so basically you can specify either an object location on disk a context or a specific shading group and say in this case anything with the shading group metal red will receive the metal red material now you can also create a master shading layer and basically sub layer children shading layers which can be really nice and elegant way to construct the scene so a good way to show this is actually you can just see here I've I've created a rule with star so this is gonna pick up everything I'm gonna assign the matte black material and then any shading group called glass will pick up the second matte white material so the way I constructed the scene actually is by actually instead of just scattering individual buildings I actually created little blocks for my city so as you can see I've imported a few reference files as such and then I have a new context called setup with four different blocks of buildings that I manually laid out with roads neon signs scattered you could obviously take this to a whole new level of complexity in this case i just created four different blocks and let me just show you the way i'm actually setting this up so I have a little context here called layout where I have all my my blocks as combiners and then right here I have what we call a group now a group in Clarisse unlike other DCC packages is just a list of objects so you can actually define the list of objects with rules you have inclusion rules exclusion rules and then the resulting filter right here so in this particular case I'm saying just pick up anything that's in this context and just outside of here I have a new combiner block to combiner instead of adding a list of objects and having to manually add every object every time I basically just call this list of objects and things will just update naturally so as I said we have a few blocks here block two this is what block before looks like so I tried to create a little bit of variation there you go now once you have that remember my scene is still empty so if I drag and drop my scene context to the 3d viewport you'll see I actually have no geometry loaded for the time being so let's start building a city together I'll right-click new geometry point array and we'll just create a grid so it's say five kilometres by five kilometres and let's start with ten by ten okay so we now have a nice little point cloud next I'll create a scatter ax as the geometry support I'll choose the point array that we just created and for the geometries I'll add the combiners that I set up previously so we can just search for that so you can see why it's useful to actually just pull in four main combiners versus all these single geometries now it also means that if I make any change in my layout of building blocks this will actually reflect in my final image so this is key to you know Clarice's workflow it's really trying to be as sorry about that wrong one that you so this is really key to Clarice's workflow it's basically making things as a non-destructive as possible so okay so we scattered randomly these four building blocks now I can go back to my point array and I can kind of just adjust the count and get feedback instantly so let's say 50 by 50 that looks pretty good maybe 51 okay something like that okay back to the scatter oh we can start introducing a little bit of variance so rotation variance on the y axis and then the step would be 90 okay so if you click up here on the Hut this will give you information on the current scene so we currently have four billion polygons and the 3d viewport right now and we can actually switch to progressive rendering if we want now it gets a lighting everything so once you have once you've started off with a basic scatterer like this you can kind of like look for a nice few points now in the case of the image that I showed at the beginning of this presentation I chose a viewpoint something like this looking down once you like your viewpoint you can just create a camera by clicking this little icon up here now in this particular case imagine you're pretty happy with this basic layout but you'd like to add like a hero assets right here so what we'll do for that is we'll punch out a hole in our scattering so I'll come back here now to punch out a hole you have you can either use a map that you paint or you can also just create a scope so oops so we need to create a scope and a scope texture the scope texture will call the scope object okay and then in the scatter row we'll plug this into the decimate value okay let's make this a little bit bigger so let's make it 100 by 120 by a hundred and now I can just snap this here somewhere okay so this is actually punching out a hole in my geometry so the really nice way about this is basically what you want to think about is you know in production you'll be creating a huge environment with you know foliage rocks everything so you want to try and have something that works pretty fast you want to get like you know the first broad strokes and then you can say like if you have a character that's interacting with some of the palm trees and stuff like that you can basically punch a hole out then do another scope that's inverted so you actually just retrieve the geometry that's in this hole send that to Houdini do all the effects simulations the interactions with your characters and then just reload this into Clarice's and lambic so let's just move on and see how we can add some hero assets to the scene so once we have this I'll just switch to my hero asset scene right here so this is exactly the same thing except I just chosen slightly different camera angle with a 15 millimeter lens and what I did is I have my hero assets context right here and I'll just toggle this on and so what I did is I just manually placed a few buildings here and this tower up here now one other thing to notice is if you actually click on this tower you'll see I always tend to work with combiners now combined is basically the groups of geometries that you can manually add here as the list or that you can pull in using a group which is a list of objects now the Neo Tokyo kept a 3d comm pack actually ships with this tower right here I don't know if you can notice but there's a few gaps in the geometry the shading groups were a little a little simple there are a few AC blocks that I felt were probably not high-res enough and you know we just wanted to swap this out for something else and now because combiners are basically placeholders for any geometry is actually super easy without destroying any of your layout to basically just swap this for what I called Tower F hero which has high res antennas different surfacing different shaders different shading groups and stuff like that and then we also decided to add a cooling tower on top just to give it a little bit more detail so in the same way imagine like working with towns like this if you were to manually place you know 40 50 hero towers in your scene and then the AI director suddenly wants to switch it out for something else well it's really simple you know to just find that in your combiner switch this out for new geometry thus not losing any of your your set dressing or if you actually go to the actual obj remember increase we don't actually save any of the assets within the project it's just a file path so you could actually just point this path to a new geometry and update your whole final layout and as I mentioned projects and creases are basically just a giant sandbox we can do whatever you want organize your scene with contexts and stuff like that so imagine the time that used to be saving if you had you know say ten shots feeding off you know similar data you could just switch this out for this new hero assets and all your ten shots would be updated accordingly now the cool thing about referencing as I showed it up here when you reference a project increase you can basically because it's a Clarisse project you could reference anything you want so you could reference the look dev you could reference a lights lighting scenarios you could reference light path expressions render settings whatever you wish now because you can always update these projects it means that working in a team increase is super effective you can surf your set dressing in your lining and then you know start off with basic materials and then the lay out the look Deb artists could you know just gradually updates the look dev and you just have to basically go up here and do the file reload resources and get all the new updates same goes for geometries for everything else so now that we've seen this let's look at something else so in my little import context which is my base context I'm gonna reference a new file now so a reference file and I have a project called trees so I'm gonna reference this and as you can see it's right here so I still have all the information of my original trees project you can always override anything you want in this particular case what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna choose one of these trees that's already looked Devon and I will just combined it here okay call this tree and now I'm going to use another tool called the clone stamp tool so if you double click this will open the tool options you can actually choose your source and here I'll just choose my tree now the cool thing is now you can just basically click and so the first tree will take a little bit of time to just update but then you can just basically start clone stamping your trees so this is like a super effective way like if you have small pebbles you want to do like hero set-dressing now you can also just click and hold the e key rotates are to scale it up so this is like a super quick way of just saying trees and stuff so you could just do this for a while but let's let's just jump straight to the final shot okay so I shouldn't mention everything we've been doing so far has been in the 3d view pods so this is a fully ray traced 3d viewport we can actually turn off volumes for now okay and we can also use the Nvidia optics denoiser okay and then it will just start refining and refining now throughout this presentation we saw the non-destructive workflow where we import assets we set up our building blocks and then we feed this data into our final scene as you can see I scattered these neon signs in the streets below so this also means that if I go right up here and I look for my point clouds oops sorry point to powder I can just select these and kind of bump up the point counts from 5,000 to say 10,000 and instantly get an update in my final scene let's put this back to something a little lower the city's on fire okay so last but not least let's take a look at the volumes are real quick and I'll turn off this volume right here now the reason I like to show this is because volumes and curries are actually super easy to work with they're basically like just any other geometry you can just move them around in the viewport get instant lighting feedback with gie occlusion and everything else so in this particular case you know you could start off with a volume like this and it's really easily place your volumes in your scene copy/paste them move them around and get all the interactivity straight in your 3d viewport okay this is the optics denoise are kicking in again okay now in terms of the final render settings I split out my render layers into three layers for the two volumes and the environment background you can also set up a Ovie's using the AOV editor super simple just click on a layer choose from the presets basically choose any AOV you like just hit the plus sign and those automatically get added to your final image render you can also create light path expressions set up here so you could this is actually using tags on the lights so you could do lp's as well and the way this is working to separate your your three layers is using these visibility groups so you can actually define and what actually gets rendered and what influencing the shadows ray-tracing lowboy illumination okay well hopefully this gave you a brief overview of workflow or one of the work those in Therese again the key points non-destructive procedural workload and final reminder this is the final image that we came up with and a few more renders using the Neo Tokyo back special thanks to Kip Bosch obviously interweb squid one of our main partners and all the artists that actually helped with some of the assets thank you very much I'll be available for questions thanks have a great day

Channel: Isotropix

Views: 20,745

Rating: 4.9661016 out of 5

Keywords: Clarisse, 3d, computer, graphics, software, interactive, rendering, compositing, raytracing, texturing, Isotropix, Siggraph 2018

Id: scz9REdOy8E

Length: 24min 1sec (1441 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 30 2018