TerraformFX - Mountain Landscape Tutorial

[Music] [Applause] hey this is bob from incidium and in this video we'll be creating a mountain range using terraform effects we'll learn how we can create these really realistic and even animatable landscapes quickly and easily inside cinema 4d so let's get started [Music] here we got a new scene so let's begin making our terraform fx landscape so we'll go to incidium let's go to terraform effects and we're going to bring in a tf terrain so let's bring that into our object manager and what you can see is we have an automatic hierarchy that has been brought in and it's giving us this uh very kind of low resolution base landscape scene so what we're going to do just to get our heads around exactly what terror form is doing and how it works is we're going to delete out all of these objects apart from our base terrain so let's just delete everything apart from our terrain and then we're going to go to the object tab of that terrain and we're going to change the display mode now by default this is set to the preset of alpine which means the lower areas are blue which are like lakes going up to grassy areas forested areas and then rocks and then snow for mountains so we're going to change away from that and we'll pick a preset of analysis black and white and this is going to help get our heads around exactly what uh terraform effects is kind of doing under the hood and how we can art direct these landscapes so as you can see our train has gone completely black so what we will do now is we're going to add some operators which are going to create our landscape so let's go to the add operator tab and we have got two different types we've got generators which create black and white values and we have filters which we can use to make adjustments so let's start with the generators so let's bring in a gradient generator click on that and now you can see something's changed we have a white to black radial gradient in our scene and if we just move the camera you can see that that has made this bump in our landscape and this is how terraform fx works you as the artist create and manipulate a black and white image which will be a height map and that image deforms this base geometry and so we can see that with this gradient of white to black we are getting this bump in our geometry so how it works is this let's go to our gradient generator we'll go to the operator tab and we have again set to 50 centimeters and what that is saying is this where the gradient is white it will be 50 centimeters tall and where it is black it will be zero centimeters tall so let's just measure that if we put the gain up to 100 it's got bigger and now this peak should be 100 centimeters tall so let's bring in a cube primitive this cube primitive is 200 centimeters tall but because its axis center is in the middle it means it's sticking up by 100 centimeters if we hit f5 for the orthographic views and let's go to the right view that'll do and we can see there that here is our cube and here is our landscape and they are both at exactly 100 centimeters on the plus y excellent let's hit f1 go back to our view and we can delete that q and so the basics of it are very simple it uses black and white maps to create our landscapes another way of viewing the map we can view it in the viewport here by going to the terrain object and using this black and white analysis preset but let's just turn off that display so we can just see the plane the base geometry underneath it we can also view what that height map looks like in a 2d way by going to the preview tab so we're in the terrain object let's hit preview and there we can see our height map so just as an experiment let's go and create a new attributes manager and we'll stick this one up here and this one is now locked on this preview panel and let's go to our gradient now and we're going to go to the properties tab and now let's make some adjustments to this gradient and see our height map um changing in real time so we've got this fall off curve from black to white value so let's kind of crush that curve up a bit and you can see look it's changed our preview and we can see how that is changed the deformation of our peak in our viewport let's put that back this has gone greater again and it's much more of a gradual um change from black to white so both the preview panel and our analysis coloring of our landscape can really give us a good indication of exactly what's going to happen and makes us be able to artistically um [Music] change and design our height map so let's just get rid of that now and what we will do is get rid of this gradient for now let's delete that so now we're back just to this terrain with no defamation whatsoever so let's have a look at now trying to create some realistic realistic looking terrains using some of the other operators so let's go to our terrain we'll go to the add operator and we're going to use a noise now a noise is going to be your go-to for getting real realistic landscape shapes but also for adding detail as well so we'll click on a noise and we've got our noise becomes a child of our terrain geometry and you can see that we have got some kind of deformation in our um in our terrain object let's have a look at our preview pane and we can see our 2d height map and you can see this is a turbulent noise let's go back to the properties and you can see yes noise type turbulence so we can do the usual things in adjusting noises we can go through different seeds which will give us different looks and we can add octaves now octaves are really going to add detail to this if we just dolly in a little bit you can see inside these kind of little crevasses it's quite smooth if we increase the octaves up to say 15 when i hit enter now you'll see now we've got loads more detail inside of those areas so we can do different things with this noise let's just change it actually because turbulence is a very useful noise for adding a little bit of surface detail but for getting a base bit of a landscape deformation if we choose let's go to the pull down if we choose wavy turbulence you're going to get something that looks pretty good now what wavy turbulence will give you is we've got these very nicely kind of sharp pronounced peaks and troughs and cliffs and if we have a look at the preview image you can see those in these very pronounced white areas but what you also get with this is you get these nice kind of smoothed areas and this looks um a little like either uh grassy areas or even sedimentary deposits from thousands of years of erosion so wavy turbulence is a very nice starting point uh for kind of rolling um terrains where you want kind of grass and rocky cliffs and the like so we'll leave it at that for now now there's various different things we can do with this noise if we actually select the noise and move that noise operator you can see that look we're moving that noise in our scene and we can do that on all of all of these axes so that's very interesting we can also go to our noise and we can increase the scale and if we bring that scale up this percentage up or down it's obviously adjusting the scale of that noise and let's put that back to 100 and obviously the same thing works as it did with our gradient so what it's looking at if we go to our terrain object let's activate that display once more within this noise where it's generating white values at full white it will be let's have a look at the operator 50 centimeters high and where it is black it'll be zero centimeters high so if we increase the gain up to 100 then we have much more pronounced peaks and troughs because obviously we've increased that gain and now it's looking like a much more mountainous landscape let's go to the terrain switch off that display just for now and we're getting this really kind of mountainous landscape now it doesn't look too detailed and obviously because of the shading and the kind of the specular that we get in this viewport render and it looks a little bit shiny and not particularly detailed but remember this is before we've done any lighting and we're still kind of working at the draft segments of 500. so just before we move on let's just change this a little so it's looking a little bit more pleasing in the viewport and we can also explore what it looks like just by increasing the resolution of that mesh by by pumping in more polygons so what we'll do we'll create the kind of standard way of making a kind of an outdoor daylight lighting rig we'll bring in one cinema 4d light and let's call this sun and the sunlight we will go to the general tab and let's give it a orange color and we're just going to lift it up so we can see it and what we're going to do with this light is we're going to change it from an omni light to an infinite light now an infinite light you can see that we have this handle here and this is the illumination indicator so what we need to do is rotate it so it's pointing downwards like the sun would be so let's hit r let's point that down a little [Music] and we can hit w for the world axis and then bring it around a bit there we go and then with this light let's cast some shadow so we'll go to the sun and we'll go to the shadow and we'll pick ray traced and we're not viewing those shadows in the viewports let's go to options shadows so we get those shadows they're a little bit dark so let's go to our shadow tab in our light let's reduce the density to say 85 and then we just see a little bit of that detail and there we go so let's um go to our sun we don't necessarily want to see this this light so we can go to our filter and deselect light just means we don't see that icon all right so now if we go to our terrain let's just ramp up this polygon count so we get something that looks a little a little bit more detailed let's say 1 200 in the x and 1 200 in the y and now you're seeing a much more detailed landscape very nice let's go back to our noise and we'll reduce that gain back down to 50. so there you can see we're getting something really nice and all we have done here is just put one noise modifier as a child of our original terrain we've made some adjustments let's have a look at the preview there is our preview image of our height map and we can see in our viewport what the effect of that has on our plane and we've got this really nice deformed landscape now we're going to create a nice looking uh kind of alpine landscape here but before we kind of get on to building that let's just explore some of the other things that we're able to do with our terraform fx operators so at the moment we have our noise operator which is just affecting the entire plane area but let's say that you want it just to be in the middle of that area well there's a couple of things we can do with all of our operators we can go to the masking tab and we can use cinema 4d fields so in the masking tap of our noise let's go down to our fields and let's add say a spherical field and now you can see with our spherical field we're just getting that deformation where the field is and if we get that field and move it we can decide exactly where we want that deformation to occur and of course we can animate these fields for kind of more motion graphics looks and we can get landscapes animating on and off so that's one way that we can manipulate this and kind of art direct where we want our um where we want our deformation to occur but for now let's just delete that field all right another thing we can do let's say we want to choose exactly where we want our deformation to occur well let's explore that what we'll do is let's make this noise uh inactive so now we have our flat geometry again instead of using a noise we're going to go to our terrain we're going to add an operator and in the generators this time we're going to use a spline and we're going to use this to draw on exactly where we want our deformation to occur so let's click on this spline and we'll put it above the noise we're going to put the spline first and let's go to our f5 orthographic views and we want to look at our top view so let's make that our full screen and let's just go to the display and let's just put shading so there we go so we're in top view now and we can see the top of our terrain so let's get our spline tool here our pen tool and let's just draw where we want um our mounting range so i'm just going to start a spline here i'm going to kind of curve it in that kind of way hit escape and then hit f1 to get back to our perspective view so there we have our spline so let's get our spline operator and it says let's go to our properties tab it says what spline do you want to reference so let's drag in our spline and now you can see we've got something happening it doesn't quite look right we've got these kind of blobby rises where our spline is so it's using the points of the spline to um generate this deformation so what we need to do let's go to our spline and in the intermediate points instead of making it adaptive let's just make it uniform and let's increase this count up to say i don't know 30. so now we can look you can see those individual points in our spline so we could increase this number still still until this was smooth and out but before we do that let's go into our spline operator settings and look if we increase that radius you can see that they're starting to blend together and now we have got this smooth deformation based on our spline and because it's based on our spline if we move that spline around obviously the deformation is going to move in our terrain object um so you've got full control of what you do with it you can kind of rotate that you can animate the spline should you wish um you can also take the individual spline points and we could move those in our scene and this of course is going to change the deformation that we get in our landscape but let's just leave it let's just kind of leave it at that for now so let's say that we'd like this to be our mountain range well what we could do now is layer up our operators to create the details at the moment we've just got this this smooth bump so let's get our noise and let's activate it once more and you can kind of tell a difference you can see that the back of our terrain has this bump which is the same as the bulb we've created with our spline and the rest of the terrain hasn't it's just kind of the default noise so that may be what you want or you may just want a very specific bump only having this kind of nice deformed terrain look where we have got our spline so how would you do that well this is all about how we blend these layers together so let's go to our noise we'll go to the operator tab and by default when you bring in an operator it's set to add mode the blend mode so it's adding any values on top of its base layer but if we set this to multiply it's going to multiply those values so if we set to multiply ah now that is the interesting look that we wanted so now what has happened is it's multiplied the splines 0 to one uh white to black values by the values of that noise so the only parts of this terrain that are deformed to the original 50 centimeters height are where the spline preview was white 100 and where the noise preview was white 100 and those bits will still be 50 centimeters tall anywhere else will be slightly lower because any number that is multiplied by a value less than one is going to get smaller and that is how we have cut away into our original spline bump with the noise to create this really detailed nice ridge and this of course is totally art directable we can do whatever we want with it just by adjusting that base spline and moving it about the place so we get incredible control um with just the various different blend modes and if we go back to our noise and let's go to the operator so we've tried add and multiply to get our various different blend modes if we go to normal the noise is going to ignore the spline completely it may not may as well not even exist um the noise is taking over everything if we change it to add which is the default we're still getting our noise but it's adding it on top where our ridge is so we're getting this nice ridge but we're also getting this base um deformation of our landscape let's change that to subtract and you can see we're getting a different look and so obviously these these um these blend modes are exactly the same with the blend modes that you'd be used to in after effects and in in photoshop so there's loads of information online on exactly what every one of these blend modes does and how it works but you have the all of the usual ones that you would imagine to get different looks whilst you're creating your landscapes let's put ours on add for now and now we're getting this fantastic looking terrain and we have it and we're able to direct exactly where we want to place features and this is just using two generator operators a spline and a noise so now let's move on and actually make our terrain and we're going to go for kind of a mountain range look and so we're not going to need our spline as we've explored you can create and sculpt your mountains precisely the shape that you want using falloffs and splines and other operators but we're going to use just our natural noise to get the landscape so let's take our noise and we'll make a couple of adjustments first of all we had moved this noise around remember just to demonstrate that you can move these um noise operators so let's just go to the coordinates and reset that back to zero and then we'll go to the operator settings and we want to make kind of a mountainous range and so the gains not quite enough here so let's put this up to say 80 centimeters all right so even here this is looking like quite a nice range of mountains um let's make some adjustments though we'll go to the noise to the properties and let's just scale that up a bit okay so we've got some mountainous areas there but lots of flat areas it's not really the look that we're after so we could try just putting some um different seeds in let's put a random seed number in and see where we get so that looks pretty nice um yeah i think we'll stick with that that's looking very good all right so now what we need to do we have this what looks like quite a realistic um quite realistic landscape here but what we're able to do is heighten the realism here by simulating the erosion that would have occurred over thousands tens of thousands millions of years to kind of create this uh rocky mountainous landscape and so to do that we need a filter so let's go to our terrain object go to add operator we've got a number of filters here that we can use to adjust this height map one of which is an erosion filter so let's click on that and you can see that our terrain has changed somewhat and that's because by default this erosion filter is set there's various different modes by default it's set to thermal weathering which simulates the heating and cooling of the rock and how that then makes it kind of crack and crumble in a road so we're not actually going to use thermal weathering we're going to keep that off because our base mesh looks fairly realistic anyway so we're not going to bother with that but what we are going to bother with is some hydraulic erosion now this is going to simulate rain pouring down and then that water flowing down the sides of our landscape as it's obviously pulled down by gravity so let's do that we've got two different types of hydraulic erosion and the first one we'll look at is the hydraulic 2d particles so let's click that as the mode we'll keep everything default but let's activate that filter now and if you have a look at our landscape after a second or so you can see that we now have these kind of eroded water channels and it's looking pretty interesting if we just kind of a b that we take our landscape and switch that filter off that's what it was and now we've got these kind of accentuated channels of erosion where rain over a long period of time has kind of carved out these channels and deposited the silt at the bottom so that's pretty nice if we go back to that erosion filter we can change some of the settings for example at the moment it's set to 10 000 particles which is simulating this if we put this up obviously there's going to be a more pronounced effect let's put 50 000 particles this will take longer to simulate because obviously it's simulating five times the data but now you can see look it's really cut into that landscape much more now we've got that set to um 50 000 particles and if we look from this kind of bird's eye view you can really see how those um hydraulic erosion channels have cut away at that rock it looks very very cool and if we switch off that filter that's what we had and there we have our erosion so a very powerful tool and also in 2d particle mode incredibly fast to simulate so that's very nice let's switch that one off though and we will bring in another erosion filter and this one will set to hydraulic x particles now this is a full 3d particle solve which is using x particles to actually pour down this 3d uh geometry uh to carve away um their uh erosion so let's take uh some of those settings let's put our particle count to say 50 000 and if we follow my mouse down to the bottom left of the screen you can see we're calculating hydraulic erosion and it's going through all of those particles and it's doing it frame by frame up to 30 that's the lifetime of those particles now you'll see with the three dimensional solve the x particles solve it's a far more subtle effect with our mostly default settings if we switch that filter off and then on again you can see obviously we are getting that erosion if you concentrate your eye in this area this is our channel that has been eroded and if you keep your eye there and i'll switch it off that is what we had before the erosion and this is had with the erosion so it carves out the channels and deposits the silt at the bottom and that's looking really cool but what we can do to make this a much more accurate simulation is that we can get those x particles those 50 000 particles to interact with each other in a more fluid light way and the way we do that is we can we can activate a fluid pbd dynamic solve and the way we do that is just by checking liquid on so now it's recalculating this it's going to take a little longer to calculate because it's running a full fluid pbd solve here but now those particles are going to behave in a more fluid like way so what we can do now we've activated liquid in the x particle solve we can increase the iterations and remember with all dynamic simulations the more iterations you run the more realistic the result so if we increase these iterations to say five it's going to take an awful lot longer to simulate so if you follow my cursor down to the bottom left again you can see that again we're calculating the hydraulic erosion it's running through and it's gone through all uh 30 frames and then it's gone back again and started again with a second iteration and now it's going to go back again to the third iteration and it's going to keep doing that until we've completed the amount of iterations that we've set in this instance we have set five iterations and what you're going to see from this is we're going to get that really accurate solve but with the more iterations the more it's going to have carved out those um hydraulic channels from our landscape so there we go so now you can really see these fantastically accurate and realistic kind of shoots and channels so if we switch off that erosion filter that's what we had now switch it on so there we've got this amazing realistic real fluid like motion which has caused this hydraulic erosion so that's looking absolutely fantastic so we're pretty much there with the design of our landscape we'll get some um texture on there to make it look more like this kind of mountain skate that we've gone for but one thing just to point out at this point and demonstrate is that obviously this is a landscape generating tool which is fantastic for scenes that require these amazing real estate landscapes but it can also be used um for kind of motion graphics for uh fui for hood elements because we could animate lots of these effects that we have been working on so for example if we wanted to animate and and demonstrate as part of a a motion graphics project um the effects of hydraulic erosion we could animate this on so let's just demonstrate that quickly what we could do let's take our hydraulic 3d hydraulic erosion filter let's go to the masking and we're going to add a mask so let's add a linear field and this linear field let's make some adjustments let's give it a plus y okay and if we just move that field up now you'll see that because we've moved that field up we have no effects of hydraulic erosion whatsoever if i switch it off and on we're not seeing anything but then if we animate our field down that hydraulic erosion is animating on and cutting away into our landscape up to full and now we have it at full capacity so now if we on off our erosion you can see there it was and there is the actual eroded landscape and so we could animate on this hydraulic erosion and all of the effects in our terraform fx system with things like fields to create these amazingly animated landscapes let's just delete that field because we're not going to use that all right so now what we're going to do is we can make actually some adjustments to this so one thing to bear in mind with our hydraulic erosion which is you know a full solve that that has to take place before we can see the effect if we make any alterations to anything above it in our hierarchy like if we change the noise obviously it would need to recalculate that hydraulic erosion because that base geometry has changed so the simulation would be completely different so once you've got your hydraulic erosion looking as you want it if you don't want it to continually be re simulating then you need to leave the objects above it which are driving its simulation you need to leave them as they are but we can make adjustments to anything that come below this erosion and it won't need to re-simulate and we can still make some um adjustments to kind of art direct this scene so for example let's just say that we're not we're happy with the overall look but we would like these kind of peaks and these peaks to be a little bit more pronounced and have some more of a kind of a valley effect so how might we do that well this is entirely procedural so we can make those adjustments so let's go to our terrain let's go to our add operator and we're going to choose another filter and this time we're going to use a curve now this works just like a curves adjustment in photoshop or after effects and you can see look by default we have this curve in our curves graph and look what that has done to our landscape it's completely flattened off these lower areas and given us more peaks and maybe we think that's too severe well let's make some adjustments if we click on this and move this in it's not going to uh crush those low bits down as much and then if we take our top um point if we pull it across we're gonna make much more of like a like a desert style plateau on top and now we're making these valleys if we move this closer to the point it's going to follow and if we want really spiky peaks we can kind of have something like this and now we've really created a spike in the middle of our terrain so that's something that we can do with curves let's just make that less severe because we want most of that detail in maybe we'll leave it something like that so if we switch that curve on and off that is without the curve and that is with the curve all right so let's say we're happy with that but we just wish had a little bit more oomph a little bit more gain now remember if we increase the gain in the noise we're gonna have to re-simulate all of that hydraulic erosion information but maybe we could do something after the event like our curves adjustment well let's go to our terrain and let's add a adjustment so we'll add an adjustment layer and look in this adjustment layer we can just increase the gain and that's coming after the curve so we're able to get much more mountainous looking areas and that's excellent now one thing to to be to be careful of is that when you are making such adjustments after you've done some realistic erosion the more you adjust the less realistic this erosion has been because it's not eroding what is the the base geometry that we're looking at so you don't want to go too over the top on this but you can certainly make tweaks to this um to enhance the look of the um of the landscape that you are creating so let's just switch off both that curve and that adjustment so this is what we had and then with our curves and our adjustments we've managed just to raise up those mountains a little and of course we can make lots and lots of um adjustments to this being procedural you can layer up as much as you like okay so now we have that let's have a go at um giving this a little bit of texture and a material so what we will do is we will go to our terrain we'll go to our object and we will enable our display now remember we had this set to analysis black and white and um what we want to do is actually kind of artistically give this a look now so if we go into the presets we could just put any gradient and it'll apply that gradient to the height map but we could change this to a preset let's pick a himalaya preset so that's immediately looking pretty nice let's just make a few more adjustments though um that water is perhaps a little bit too high let's bring that down so just adjust these knots let's bring these plane areas down a little bit something like that bring this down and then have a little bit more of a snow cap on top it's looking good and there we go so now we have created a really interesting [Music] realistically sculpted himalayan terrain and of course it's all procedural we can make infinite adjustments um another feature we have in our terrain object if we go to the object tab we can actually create this as a solid terrain at the moment you'll see it's just this deformed effectively a deformed plane if we hit solid we now get a solid base which is looking very cool and just to remind you that earlier on we were looking at the various different uh noise patterns and um adjustments and we were looking at the preview so if we go to the pre if we have the noise selected and we go to this preview we're previewing just that original noise but of course lots of things have happened since that noise so we can either go to other individual layers that we can go to adjustment layer so this is showing how we have increased the gain we can go to that curves layer we can go to the erosion now the erosion layer is interesting because with the two hydraulic erosion models we can go to the source and we can pick an altitude map we can pick a slope map and we can also pick these fields masks but look we have an erode map which is a map of that hydraulic erosion and we also have a deposit map as well and we can also see the cumulative effect of all of these maps if we go to the top terrain and go to preview this is all of those maps combined and this is our height map so this can be exported as a high quality image file and then you can use this in your external render engine if you want to displace a plane at render time you don't even have to do any of this live in the viewport in cinema 4d this can be exported for any external 3d software very high quality bitmap image and one final thing is in your chosen renderer you're able to access all of these different maps that can be previewed and output using a very special shader so let's just demonstrate that uh we'll just use for ease sake we'll use the standard render in cinema 4d so let's just double click to make a new material and we'll open those material settings and let's go to let's just in the color channel let's go to texture and if we go to incidium we have a terrain operator shader so let's open that and let's click on this terrain operator shader and look it has a link and what it's asking for is you need to drag in one of these operators so we can either drag in an individual operator so let's just pick this one we could pick this adjustment map we could pick um the erosion deposit map or we could pick if we wanted to pick the entire lot we could go just to the terrain itself let's drag in the terrain into here and now this black to white gradient will be mapped to the altitude so let's just move that along and in our in our terrain let's remove the display we'll put our material on the terrain and now you can see our black to white gradient has been mapped to that terrain map for altitude but we could pick slope if we'd prefer and now we're getting this black to white gradient mapped to this slope and of course you can change that black to white gradient to be a color gradient you can use that for a matte or for a mask the the the options and the possibilities are pretty endless with the power of being able to access all of these various different maps on an individual basis or on a full terrain object basis so that's it that is setting up a basic landscape using terraform effects and you can see that very quickly and very easily you can get some pretty stunning [Music] results

Channel: INSYDIUM LTD

Views: 9,725

Rating: 4.9078946 out of 5

Keywords: X-Particles, INSYDIUM, C4D, Cinema4D, Cinema 4D, MAXON, VFX, MotionGraphics, Update, Sneak Peek, Cinema, 4D, xparticles, particles, simulation, cgi, vfx, mograph, motion graphics, 3d, 4d, effex, visual fx, software, tutorials, tutorial, tip, hint, help, quicktip, trick, hints, Terraform4d, terraformfx, terraform tutorial, terraformfx for cinema4d, insydium fused, fused tutorial, INSYDIUM Fused, fuse, mountain range tutorial

Id: ifwFEGPMgyM

Length: 42min 28sec (2548 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 26 2021