Switching from Octane to Redshift - Rendering with C4D

hello everyone and welcome my name is Vincent schwenk and this is a bit of a beginner friendly tutorial because in this video I want to explain you the best way to switch from octane to redshift and I want to talk everything what is important in redshift like the basic settings whereas certain buttons and like the easy way to go and to start with this render engine and I switched actually a couple of years ago so perhaps some of the information I'm giving you here it's a bit old or perhaps octane already updated this stuff but um yeah I will try to give you my best Impressions why I like wretch of more and as I said everything else like the basic stuff and therefore let's directly start into Cinema 4D so we are now in 04d and you can see I already have my special layout for redshift here and I created a simple scene which is currently not rendering that's why it looks a bit blurred but I want to start at the very beginning probably your Cinema 4D is looking like this and we want to create our own working space I have two of them 16x9 and one by one if I click them you can see it's easier to work in a horizontal work and space and more in a vertical way I just switched it just think the way the other way around and yeah again so we'll go into back to the start screen and first let's get some stuff so first of all I think you are not you won't see this ratchet part here because Cinema tried to implement it into their workflow so first of all we need to go to the preferences and I want this menu to be back so when you have ratchet installed or I think anyway this wretched part is now in silver 4D always but you can compare this one with yours so first of all I don't want to render with a CPU because it's incredibly slow so if you have this ticked on mostly your render renderings will be slower than with um without it so always leave this off then here's my cache folder I have 256 gigabytes of cash which is also definitely more than the default one it's good to have some cash then um let me see I think this part exactly that's the one retrof main menu in the default setting this is off but I want it to be on so that we will see this part there again and I think in the default setting the node materials for presets on but I I turned it off because I still want to work with the old espresso system it's a bit annoying and tedious UI wise but performance Wise It's still faster and I had way less bugs in the espresso workflow then in the node materials and for now I will stick with this press one anyway because everyone in the industry and everyone I know is still using the old system so I am doing the same and again then it's way easier to change shaders when you work together so this button goes off and this button goes on then you are already done with the setting here and the next thing you have this ratchet menu visible and we want to see the render viewer so that's the render viewer and at the next thing I want to see the Shader graph editor and you can see this is already the material which was applied in the beginning but we will go a bit more basic for the one we are building just the quick thing you can drag and drop like your layout like you like it I don't know like this is very handy for example and then you can just save the whole layered as something new so customize save layout as and then you have your retro working workflow so I already had that and going back to registered 101 thing then okay next thing let's first create a new material and then we will talk about everything going on so we need to create wrench of material and this was the old material but they made an update not so long ago which is called standard material and you should definitely use the standard material because it has way better energy conservation that means when um for example a glass material is rough it doesn't get too dark before that it was always too dark but now it looks more realistic and anyway the whole system is more realistic and especially subsurface scattering got way more easy so let's select the material and apply it to our object here and for now I don't want to see the materials on the side here so I can hide them and we are back into my setup here and then let's get rid of everything redshift related and let's press the play button here and this starts and stops your IPR here you can refresh your IPR this is the RT button which will will activate the rate at a real-time rendering but it's not well I I kind of don't use it so you don't have to use it as well then in this button you can preview it certain channels this button I never use show output before denoising yeah I never use this this is very handy you can render a region drag it around or you can also press shift and then left click and then you can create your own render region then you can select the camera and we are rendering in the Taylor camera so it is correct anyway you can go Auto or you can I don't know render everything from the front and let's get rid of the preview and then there's nothing or perspective or yeah whatever you want so we'll go with auto then lock the camera I actually never go with this button because the automatic will mostly work fine for me because anyway for my workflow I have this main window here and I have separated My Views I have two instead the 4 here and I'm mostly working on the right one and you can see now Auto is not the right one it's render so you can do everything on your mesh here you can also make this window big I don't know do something and the render will always stay the same so I like the separation from the two views here then let's make our rendering bigger again and we don't need to render view here on the side then as a next thing this is the bucket rendering this is the final quality like now we have a progressive renderer so we move the camera and we have an instant update and with this one I mean I can show you and then you can see what's happening we got the buckets and now we are rendering in final quality and what means final quality so let's go on to the right to the render settings and we need to obviously change our render to redshift so this you would have to do this in the beginning I forgot to say this I think the standard is on standard so switch to redshift and then you can make your you usual adjustments for example if you want to render only one frame an animation which resolution and now we can see we are still rendering buckets so let's turn that off I have this Instagram format here already applied because I have my own render settings already adjusted here but we will skip this for now then you just go for the saving I'm going with exr's here but again for very detailed stuff and all the stuff I think I would definitely recommend you to go to my patreon And subscribe there because I will talk more about advanced stuff there so for now this is the main window you will be dealing with it's called retrift and there are two options there's basic and advanced the advanced tab We're not gonna go in here again this is patreon stuff we will just easily go with the basic stuff and we have some options for the quality so I never use very high because this is like intense renderer quality and actually I never use high and if you select the high for example you can click on this little button and you can see how accurate the Adaptive threshold is for the automatic sampling and the automatic rendering and 0.01 is mostly good enough with me especially for animations and I do a bit of denoising later in compositing so 0.01 is definitely good enough here but you have to find you in this with your computer how quick it is or how slow but we'll go with medium then denoising we won't denoise in the renderer motion blur is very important if we render animations we obviously need motion blur and if the object itself is deforming then we also need deformation blur and I will try to quickly explain what's the difference so let's pause this render here and if the object is moving around like this then it's motion blur if the object itself is deforming especially for example if there's a cloth tag on it and the object is folding in itself then ratchet wouldn't know any motion blur if you have only motioned around so you will definitely need deformation blur here as well it can be something a bit tricky it takes a bit of calculation time and you can also play around with the steps if it's not correct but I usually I don't go higher than three because as I said it's very intense for calculation there was I would always recommend first of all going only with two then obviously Global elimination we need otherwise it would look crap and then you can adjust some of um some values here you can adjust them even the basic one because they're actually super basic the combined one that's how many passes we can combine from all these things together and Global elimination passes we have seven here that's a good start and for the beginning I wouldn't change this value if you have a very dark room where you want to have a lot of GI going on then you can increase this number but then the renderer gets lower reflection with four pretty good refraction has nine in here and I think that's not the default yeah the default is 6 and that means how often a ray can go through a glass material and I will try to show you this what that means so in the standard material we can activate the glass part and let's make this a little bit bigger here so we have transition transmission on zero so let's put that up on one and then we have a glass material and let's put down the reflection to one now you can see we have only one pass of rays which can go through the glass and then it stops calculating and when it stops calculating it will render it as black so two is already quite a right because anyway we have a super flat object we won't need many passes here but let's see with three four and you can see the four gave us a few more passes here five and let's make it idle drastic 15 and now you can see all the black part is gone here let's try to find the sweet spot where the black blacks clipped away at 11 let's go for nine yeah I think somewhere around that eight gives us a little bit more black here so I think I think we could be fine with eight or nine you know then when we have nine refraction we also want to have more combined passes if we need the other ones as well and you can see this render ring looks definitely way better than the default of six and six we have this black areas but be very very careful with these numbers because ratchet is rendering glass like very slowly and the render time will increase a lot when you increase this number here and then while the same goes for reflection for example if you're very many reflective objects then you need a higher number here then the next thing is called Ray tracing RT and I usually have this off while I'm working because sometimes it takes a while it's always saying calculating RT and I have the feeling that the calculating takes a lot of time especially in the on the PC at the office where I have four 2080 cards they're a bit older and I think the ray tracing wasn't as good as that it's now so it takes a lot of time to calculate which is annoying to work but obviously if I'm finished with the project I turn this on and then most of the time the renderings are really like 20 faster so this is pretty good but I'm we are here now on a very basic scene and I am recording in my home which has one 30 90 card and the communication is a bit quicker here so if I work at home sometimes I have this even on if the scene is not too heavy if it's too heavy I turn it off so you can see a few frames here going all good then this is the basic adjustment for your render settings which we were talking about the bucket then you can freeze tessellation and freeze geometry we will skip this you can have a look onto your clay rendering or samples but we'll go over regular but sometimes it's really useful to see for example how your light looks without any shading this one is for folks picking you can select one object in a scene click on it and then you have a focus focus to be able to see a focus you will have to apply a Retro Camera attack onto your camera and I think they are now on the camera attack itself I don't see the attack itself I have to restart Cinema because I changed my screen resolution so so we are back and now I can also see my tags here and now while this tag used to be somewhere else but now it's in the camera attack so let's apply the camera attack to our camera and we can activate the bokeh effect which is the depth of field and let's try to make this more obvious if we go very close let's get rid of our glass material then it renders way faster you can see now everything is blurred and when we picked focus by the way if you click on this little icon here you can see the full menu bar if for example your rendering window is too small so let's select the material picker sorry the focus picker and you can pick the focus now to the bouquet um I don't want to have focus and the radius I only want to use the focus because I want to be able to adjust everything by myself so the radius is kind of the intensity of the bouquet for example if I go 5 which is pretty high and you can see nearly everything is blurred and the power is how intense the bouquet itself is probably in this window it's hard to see but if you have many small objects you can see the intensity of the bouquet is stronger and yeah the rest will ignore for now but let's go with a very small value here and let's put our object back in place and again pick the focus and we have depth of field with the right Focus here then this menu picked the object so for example if I something else selected in the renderer I select this object and it automatically selects here I don't use this a lot because my structure is very organized so I'm not searching for objects but this one is pretty nice and I use it a lot especially if you have a lot of scenes you can pick the material itself so let's select another material and let's say we want to select this one we have this button activate it and just click onto the scene and on the left you can see the Shader graph automatically switched to the material which we're using here then you can put everything into a snapshot I don't use this I always use Snapshot to picture viewer so you can have many images in here and I don't know compare certain things and we'll talk about the light in a little bit but let's say we want to compare the difference between these two and then I have both of them into my picture viewer which is really nice then picture of your copy from buffer I never used that then this setting here this is I always use fit window so depending on the size this window will always scale correctly but you can also scale in the original size this is my render output size and if you want it very big you can go original size but I usually go not original fit window and if I want like a detail for example people you can duplicate your camera and I'll now go very close and see how it looks and I don't know this one wouldn't need a bouquet then you can just switch back your cameras or you can um from fixed scaling and then you can change the zoom here but my workflow is mostly fit window and then just go closer to the object if I need it the settings here I'm actually never in there so I would ignore it for now in a camera attack itself you can adjust a few things you can put on streaked flares Bloom you can play around with the exposure but I'll try to not do too much of these post effects because I could do Post effects later on in DaVinci if I want to and it's better to render a clean window and just do the effects later on but yeah if you want you can put stuff on to the camera here let's have a little talk about the lights and in my scene I want to start with the dome light that's the same as the HDR light in octane or how they're called HDR Dome dome light as well I forgot how it was called in octane in the dome light you need to go to the texture and apply an HDI here and I'm using a free one so yeah you can apply any HDR in here if you want and by the way cinnamon just crashed so that's why my material is class again and let's give it I don't know a bit of a color something like that and in the HDI you can turn the dome light around and perhaps it's even more better visible if I turn down the roughness to zero so it's very glossy and actually I need to make the material darker so you can see the reflection a bit better and let's turn the dome light around and you can see in the material that we got the dome light here and you just have to move the light around till you find an angle which works for you my usual workflow is that I only use the domai to fill up some of the shadows and give it a bit of a nice reflection and I shape the rest of the object with soft boxes so you can leave the intensity at one but I'll drop the exposure to 0.2 for example or you can go darker brighter then this this is quite handy in here we have a slider with the saturation I don't remember this in octane perhaps they have it these days but yeah it's quite nice especially if your dome light is too saturated you can just drop down the saturation by 50 and now you can see that the colors are a bit desaturated here so going back again with the bright material and let's see let's activate the rim light and I only want to see the room light you can see that there's teeny tiny bit happening for the room light it's a basic area light and you can press shift C and type for area area light and here we go and on top of the area light I have a Target tag and I just have a Target to my Sentinel which is currently not in the center but let's change that so my object is not in the center and it's the accordion minutes are pretty off so I could actually press alt zero and then we have a PSR reset and then we can on the left just adjust our camera here so now we are all in zero zero zero which is always pretty nice to work and now I only have to work onto my rotation to find like some interesting angle and or was the actually the other side was a bit more interesting with this fold I liked it something like that cool so we wanted to talk about our Rim light and the rim light well first of all my lights are hidden so let's turn them back on so I have a light coming from the top right and it's quite from the back so it's it's a rim light I would say but it's doing a little bit too little so therefore let's scale it up and the bigger a light source is the softer the light is and the smaller the smaller the light is the harder the Shadows are and I want it a bit softer so I'm making it a bit bigger and putting it a bit closer and now we can see we have a little bit of something going on from the back then let's turn on the top light as well and because our object is very small we can also move the lights closer and the closer we are going with the light the more the differences between like the top where we hit a lot of light as you can see the bottom doesn't nearly get any light the light fall off is always very quick and to show you this again we can put everything in the picture viewer and let's move the light like pretty far away and let's drop make the intensity a bit more strong and we need to move the light a bit more to the front and now you can see the light intensity from top to the bottom is nearly the same so we have a lot of light here and less here and now it's more even so depending on your art style you have to adjust your lights but probably you know this from octane as well this is nothing new here then this looks pretty nice here I would say then the let's activate our dome light again so we got the nice GI bouncing here and let's make it darker to even something like -1 and I would say this looks pretty good then let's hide the lights again then let's have a look onto our material so now we need to focus onto the left part the Shader graph and I don't do much on the right part here so we can scale this a little bit down and usually you have more space I don't have too much because I cranked up the resolution for the scaling so for the recording so that you see something okay then the one on the left probably if you open this this is gonna look like this because I have this node panel deactivated because I don't need it because you can also if you are in here you can press shift c as well and then you can just type anything which you have in mind for example bump and then you can I can drop this in here and I know all the stuff so it's quicker for me to just shift C and type everything but I would say for the beginning it's really good that they have everything in here and you can open the stuff and see what notes are in there and just select the ones you need and drag and drop them in here for example the bump has a bump blender and a bump map you can just drag and drop displacement display some blender same things okay then we want to start with the material and that's a texture and we need a texture so we can drag and drop the thing in here and then we need to load a texture into the path and let's try to just recreate any 3D material and probably all of you are having a lot of texture materials and I will go and I will actually try to recreate one of the materials which I did for my texture pack and let's start with the diffuse material then I want to show you the coolest thing which ratchet has which I 10 doesn't and I'm using this like a thousand times a day and you can preview this material on itself so you can put this to the output and then we can see how the material itself looks and I'm using this so often that I even created a shortcut for this and that's pretty nice so you can go to customize and customize palette and the thing you want to search is connect node to Output so connect node to output and this is the one here and you can see there's already a shortcut I created a c so you select this one you assign the shortcut which you want in my case I used a c then you assign it and you can directly execute it but just you need to click assign and then you can close it and for me that means that every time I have a material I can preview it is so for example we will definitely need more than the diffuse for example we will need I don't know the roughness and you can also just drag and drop materials onto existing Fields into the path here then we selected press C and then we have a preview for our roughness then what do we do with all the stuff so the diffuse material goes into the base color then let's reconnect our material with the output then we need to create a bump map and for the bump map we need a normal material by the way if Cinema forgot how where the object is line you can also just click locate image and then it's opening the folder where are the files are and then we can select the normal map and just drag and drop it in here then we need to connect our normal object with the bump input the bump input goes into this blue top thingy here and then you can select where it should go or there's another way when you know in the wait where I never do it like this so you can also just drag and drop things to this window here for example in the reflect we can just drag drag and drop the reflection roughness to the output but in this case we want to use the bump output and the bump output is in base property geometry and then we need to select the bump input then you can see everything's updating but it will look wrong because two things first of all this is a normal map and in a bump map we have selected height field this is the black and white bump so we need to switch this to normal and then when we switch everything to normal we need to also change the color space in this case we can use Auto which is a bit unfortunate we need to go and switch it to raw and if we switch it to Raw everything looks nice again so we have these we have that next thing we can adjust the reflection roughness and there's one thing I really like to do is to create a ramp and we select the material put it again the blue part put it into the input thing and then we select the output and put it into the reflection roughness and the cool thing about this ramp is that let's press C to preview this material and it's a bit like a color correction I mean this is the same as an octane a black material is 100 glossiness and a white material is 100 matte let's preview our material and let's say we want it to be a bit more reflective that means we just need to add a bit more from the black part in here now it's probably hard to see because it's a cloth and we have so much bump going on but the material is a bit more reflective now but let's say I want to only adjust it a little bit then we are good with this and let's have a look onto our whole thing then the next thing we want to create a displacement so I still have my displacement node here or you can press shift C and type displacement or you can just drag and drop it from the side and the displacement this is the only only thing which is not connected to the material itself you need to connect the displacement to the output So Into the Blue part and then the first slide is already called displacement and displacement is a bit different than an octane um because it depends on the tessellation so it depends on how many polygons the object itself has and our object here is not so high polite but let's see well first of all we need another material and oh again you forgot the path that's unfortunate so let's open this window again and drag and drop our displacement and let's have a look onto the actual displacement material it has only very little displacement so there's very little contrast in this image and I want to increase the contrast so we got more displacement and it's a bit easier to show here so therefore I will duplicate the ramp and I will put the texture into the ram then into displacement and then into the object then we can increase the contrast and we definitely need a bit more from the white because the material is pretty black and the cool thing again about redshift is that you don't have to guess how much you have to put one slider to the other slider for example if I would have thought yeah this is perfect put it into this displacement and nothing would work because it's just all black so we definitely need to put the white areas a bit more in and now you can start to see that we have a good contrast here and now we have a lot of displacement perhaps the contrast is even a bit too strong and let's make it something like this and in general I gotten good notice that you have an average gray value for the displacement so let's select the standard material again preview it by pressing C and then you're probably wondering like why isn't anything happening I have a scale of 10 which is huge and nothing is happening and that's because you need to assign a wrench of tag to the object as well so let's select the object and let's see where the tag is these days so as I said there was a redshift menu with all the texts but I need to search as well because in my default scene the texts are already in the scene but now they're in render text and in the middle we have redshift object then we need to go to the geometry part and also your retro attack will definitely look different that's because I have a preset here and the ah exactly that's the default one let's work with the default so we need to overwrite our tessellation that means we need to enable the tessellation and we need to enable the displacement then I never use green space adaptivity um that well the complex topic I will leave this out for now let's just turn this off I want to move subdivisions and my minimum Edge Edge length will be zero and for now let's try with the maximum subdivisions of three and we are now but perhaps you get the feeling that we are just guessing random values but there's a very nice way to see that so in the Shader I'll select the wireframe let's press C again which is my shortcut to preview how the geometry actually looks and this is now my mesh and you can see it's pretty pretty highly detailed there's a lot of tessellation going on so let's zoom out again and this is just with one tessellation with two with three that's what we had and with four and I would say with four we are already at a place where you have to be very careful I mean in our case if you have a very low poly mesh then some other values would work for you as well but you can see the mesh is like super detailed now the thing is why I'm showing you this is um I don't know let's say we have one mesh and let's preview our material again and one mesh definitely clean enough that the geometry is all smoothed out on all edges in this case it's the same at the subdivision surface but it's quicker because the tessellation happens in the render engine but for displacement the more subdivisions we have in the displacement the nicer the displacement looks then you can see there's one problem that our Clauses are kinda moving into each other and that's because the default displacement goes from zero to one so we only have a positive displacement but we want the displacement to go like into the object a little bit and out to the object so my first try is always go like in the exact middle so the middle is to go minus 0.5 and positive 0.5 and then we can see where we're starting so you can see the problems gone where we have the geometry intersecting here but now we have too much negative displacement going on here so let's try to go with 0.3 and 0.7 so we have a bit of a negative displacement but mostly positive but in this case we still have problems and that's really this Pro geometry is quite unique because it's so flat at some parts and um in general 0.5 and 0.5 works very very well but let's go with palm bottom 0.8 and 0.2 and this does the trick for here now we don't have any displacement poking through the material itself and that's all looking nice then let's also drop down the scale for the texture we don't need a displacement of 10. I would say like two or three is pretty enough here and three is already a quite a high value then as the next thing I have the feeling that the scale for this material is not correct so we just select all the textures here and then in remap we can adjust the scale and the higher the number the smaller the scale list so I'm doubling the number so the scale for the material will be 50 smaller that's perhaps a little bit too small so let's try out something like 1.7 and 1.7 looks pretty nice and let's get a bit closer and now I will try to illustrate you the difference what is happening with the tessellation so let's put this guy into the bridge into the picture viewer select the wrench of tag again now we have one subdivision let's make it to two and let's give it a few samples put it into the picture viewer and let's make it Wow Let's Make A Tree I hope he didn't start to calculate 16 that's like I would crash the PC probably and let's also try four it's pretty hard to see actually in this example that the quality for this placement would get definitely better with the with more tessellation perhaps we need for now just another displacement material which has a lot of information and a lot of details and let's see so I I have another material now which is more like a noise and mud and let's also scale down a bit smaller and let's go into this placement and go for a really high value then let's see so we now still have four tessellation let's put that into the picture viewer and in comparison to one tessellation well it's actually not as drastic as I thought you just can see it in these little areas I should open another scene but promise me or trust me this is really very important to fine tune your displacement but if you are good with a small number then definitely go with the small values because then it renders quicker but let's go back with my cloth material here and this looks weird because obviously we have way too much displacement and let's drop it down to something like two and then I would say it looks pretty nice so let's try to give ourselves a very quick recap we got the lights cameras right of text and render settings some default settings this menu this menu um the camera tags gone because the last crash but you don't need it just if you want to apply the stuff which we talked about and then in the material there's a lot of stuff to adjust and play around well I will I'm actually talking about all the stuff and on patreon but perhaps one additional thing which I want to show you because it's so nice and like really quick it's subsurface scattering this is pretty new and I know that redshift had the random work before um as sorry octane did have the random walk before redshift but no it's also here and it's like super nice and quick to work with just a few adjustments for a subscribe subsurface material it's always nicer to have more light from the the back so I'm just adjusting a little bit from lights here and so now we got yellow in the color and in the radius let's I don't know go for a red material and now you can see how quickly and easy the scattering goes you can adjust the amount of the scattering so for example now the cloth material is still pretty much in the game but we have a little bit of scattering going on you can go 100 and you can adjust the scale so if you have a small value you can see they're only very few areas where the scattering is happening if you go with a higher value like the whole objects gets to scatter and you can of course even go higher than the clip values here and I don't know let's go with some Pinky and you can see it's super intuitive and very quick yeah and it's definitely fun to play around with I would say for the other stuff you can just play around or watch other tutorials but in general it's quite easy to see what is happening when you do something in here but I would say at this point the story is already longer than expected and I definitely want to say thanks to everyone who was watching this and I hope to see you in the future and have a great time bye bye

Channel: vincent schwenk

Views: 17,554

Keywords: 3d, octane, redshift, tutorial, animation, shader, material, rendering, c4d, cinema4d, cgi

Id: RCm7wn8DN6o

Length: 37min 31sec (2251 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 24 2022