The Fog Tutorial! | Cinema4D & Octane

yo what is going on everybody my name is viper and welcome to this tutorial today's tutorial is something that you guys have been asking for for a very very long time today we're having the fog tutorial in this tutorial i'm gonna be talking about everything fog um mainly how to achieve the looks that i have in my daily renders especially yeah well the fog brenders but i'm also going to go a little bit into detail on how to achieve different looks and what the different settings are gonna do so i hope that for every single viewer of you there is one setting that you enjoy but before i start the video i'd like to tell you that i stream on twitch twice a week tuesdays and saturdays so if you want to see my process and also maybe be part of art review we do art reviews on my discord channel please join my twitch channel it's in the description down below as well as the link to join the discord so let's get into the video so maybe what we should clarify right at the beginning of this tutorial is that there are three different types of fog volumes technically four but we're gonna only include three in this tutorial because the fourth one uh i almost never use and it's more for materials if you don't know what i'm talking about it's the medium setting in the octane materials which is more used for subsurface scattering um than it is for actual fog so there is the normal fog volumes there is the daylight volume and there is vdb volumes the first thing we are going to talk about is the fog volume the normal one which is the one that i use the most in my render so if we now go ahead and open up octane let's just open up the viewport really quick like that and i'm gonna change the resolution very quick as well so we don't have these ugly lines going on here you can add a fog volume by clicking inside of your octane live viewer into the objects tab and there you will see octane fog volume if you click on that there should be a box that just appears like this it has a few settings so you will have the main settings uh type which lets you just set um well the type of it if you want to have just a generator or a vdb loader um we're not going to change the tab right here at this point of time because we have the vdb volume right here as well but let's say you positioned like 25 volumes already and you forgot to set them all to vdb uh loader which actually never happened to me but let's say that happens and you want to change all the volumes to vdb loaders without repositioning everything you can just select all of them and click here go to vdb loader and you will be having a vdb loader so in the next tab the generate tab these settings are also already quite important it's the size settings for example um you can change the side settings in here i just prefer to change them using the orange handlebars right here this um this is what i usually use to scale my my fog volume but like i said you can also use these values of course if you have especially if you have a certain value that you need to have for example if you have a 300 by 300 by 400 centimeter room you can just type that in and your frog volume will automatically have the size of your room um the next setting is the voxel size the voxel size pretty much says how many voxels of fog or how many particles so to say are going to be inside of this fog volume and what size they're gonna have um which is pretty much the same because one voxel always has a certain uh a certain amount of particles in it and the bigger the voxel size or the bigger one voxel is the fewer particles are in each voxel so why is this important because depending on what size your fog volume has you have to change this uh voxel size meaning if you have a huge fog volume the voxel size has to be big as well because you don't want to increase the particles necessarily because that will crash your computer eventually so let's say you have a fog volume with a size of 30 000 by 60 000 by 100 000 you are very likely to have to use a voxel size of a thousand which will look like this as you can see there are no voxels in here right now because we only have a very small fog volume but if you change this to a very big fog volume we will see that the voxels start to reappear and as you can see we now have a pretty big five volume three four thousand by three thousand by uh six thousand but we have our axle size of one thousand um what this does it also slightly decreases the detail of the fog volume but according to the size of the fog volume the detail does not decrease because of course the fog volume is bigger so we don't need as much detail with like small little uh of small little areas um this is only important for example with vdb volumes which we're going to be talking about later and one very important thing with these voxel size settings is be very very careful not to set them too low what i mean by that is of course you have to find a sweet spot for it for it to be not heavy at the same time still appear of course but if you set it too low your cinema 4d will crash because it runs out of memory and i will demonstrate it right now as you can see we have a box less of 190 which is a little too high for this small volume but let's just make it very low and there we go i didn't get the out of memory warning for some reason but there will be a out of memory warning whenever this happens and we're back so as you can see this is why you have to be careful with the voxel size um when you use it of course the best thing is to just try slowly but i i figured out a voxel size less than like three for a fog volume this size is way too small and will very likely either crash your computer or make your scene extremely slow um so yeah try to find a sweet spot so the way that i scale this is more by how i feel and i will demonstrate how i do this and i think this is a very good way so um let's say you have a scene and you start with a small fog volume now just slowly scale up your fog volume until it starts lagging you see it's not lagging yet it's not lagging yet now it starts getting a little bit laggier and if we now change this it gets very laggy um so now slowly increase your voxel size to like just a little bit higher like that and as you can see now it's not laggy anymore and this is my main uh my main way of figuring how figuring out what voxel size i need don't know if it's the best way but it works and this way you will also most likely not have a voxel size too big because if you just click here and go to a thousand this voxel size is unnecessarily big for this fog volume you can go a little bit lower the next setting on the list is the voxel multiplier in the render which i actually never touch simply because i want my fog volume to look exactly the way that it looks like in my viewport this is a setting that you usually use when you work well when you work on your home computer and then send it off to a render slave or or a render farm which is way more powerful than your own computer um that way you can work with very low uh well with a very high voxel size but then in the end render it up with a very low uh voxel size in your render view um as i said i have never used this because i usually work with the voxel size that are rendering or vice versa i render with the box size that i work with and then there is the edge feather which is something that i do use quite often uh which essentially just does what what what it says it creates an edge feather to your uh fog volume as you can see here so what i use this for a lot is ground fog and what i mean by that is for example this scene right here which is a render inspired by cyberpunk um as you can see there is a cloud or actually this is just a fog volume with the texture in which we're gonna be looking at in a second um which has a very high edge feather so you can't really see where the fog volume starts and where it stops because it has a yeah like a feather up here so this for example is a setting that i that i don't see a lot on social media which i think is a very simple setting to make your scene look really cool is um a very very low fog volume so let's say you have um a landscape just really let's just make a landscape really quick like that and then we have some mountains in the back like this uh what you sometimes want is that the fog volume doesn't cover the whole scene right what you want uh is only cover the ground so what that does is it creates a very very thick atmosphere around your let's say main character for example let's say you have uh your main character somewhere here standing um you have an atmosphere that covers your main character but at the same time your atmosphere will not cover the background because sometimes you want your background to be seen even though there is fog especially with skies let's say you have a really cool sky texture how often have you used a fog volume with a very cool sky texture and at the end of the day the sky wasn't even visible because your fog was too thick so what you could do is either get rid of the fog which is not what we want or use a very flat fog volume that is pretty much on the surface of your well of your ground um and that lets you uh play much more with that so you can create a dense fog volume which covers your scene at the same time be have your sky and everything visible the next setting on the list is the texture which let me just reset my fog volume really quick so we're going to start with a new one there we go the texture is pretty much you can load in noises or as it says textures to sort of change the opacity and density of um of the fog volume based on set texture so for example if we load in a noise right here as you can see what it does it creates a noisy fog volume and i really enjoy this setting especially because it lets you pretty much create clouds quickly but don't let this fool you this doesn't replace vdb volumes and last but not least in this section right here we have the display type where we can set it to box or circle as you can see what that does it pretty much just changes the way that your voxels are displayed in your viewport i usually just leave it as box since i'm very used to what that looks like then the medium settings which is probably the most important settings uh for good looking fog um there are two settings in this medium uh either fog or fire i always use fog um i pretty much never use fire because i don't want to make fire uh what the fire medium does is instead of letting you add colors to your fog volume it pretty much lets you add temperature so if you have ever experimented with turbulence fd for example uh it pretty much lets you set a gradient of color for your fog volume which then determines what is fire how hot the fire is and where is smoke i cannot to say a lot about this because i like i said i almost never use it so i don't know much about it um but we're gonna cover the fog medium today so right in your volume medium you have absorption scattering and emission the most important two settings or let's say the most important three settings in this section right here are the density the absorption color and the scattering phase and i will show that to you right now and to show you how to use this i'm going to do what probably a lot of you want are waiting for right now we're going to create a night scene with a lot of fog and this is actually easier than you think but before you start this please go into path tracing i just noticed that i forgot to add path tracing to this but always use path tracing for these things because uh direct lighting fog volumes tend to use very very bad uh sometimes if you get lucky they look good but not really so what i'm going to do is i'm going to create a black and black hdr environment add a color and go for a very very dark light blue it sounds weird a very dark light blue but um sort of like this um what you're going to do then is simply i'm going to add a couple of aerial lights to have at least a light source let's add a light source here and maybe also well no let's add it to right here so we're going to put the camera right here where we're going to have backlight um but it should be outside of the camera view there we go now that we have the camera inside the inside our viewport let's actually put the arrow light somewhere else so it's not visible so now the arrow light is up here and it's shining onto our fog volume but we still have a black screen why because our density is too high and our fog volume is pretty much black um so what we're gonna do is um can we go into the medium first of all decrease the density up until we can see something which is about this and then what i use a lot is a white absorption color so we go in here we have a white absorption color so this absorption color setting uh right here this absorption it's actually just called absorption um i usually leave the rgb spectrum in there because i want to change the color of my fog volume with an rgb spectrum you can obviously also change that to red or green or whatever you desire it changes the color of your fog volume then what you want to do is maybe increase the area light's brightness because what the look we're going for right now just to clarify is we want to have a very bright spot over here and it gets darker the the further away it gets from the light so let's just make the a little brighter actually you know what let's place some objects in here so you can actually see what we're doing because i believe that um well fog is only truly making a difference if we have objects in there so here we have our uh objects inside of our fog volume uh one more thing that i would advise all of you is if you have a scene like this as you can see um it looks like it's brighter in the back and that is true because the fog volume just stops so make sure that your fog volume covers all of your scene or at least everything that um that could react to your light what i also often like to do with fog volumes is place my camera outside of it which in here doesn't make much sense but place your camera outside of the fog volume if you have a certain object or a character right in front of your camera which you want to have the full visibility full detail just place your character slightly out of the outside of the fog volume as well as the camera and then add like i said earlier a ground fog volume which just covers let's say the feet or maybe even the whole character but with very very low density so there we go this is our scene so far uh we have a little i decreased the power of my airline a little bit to add that and now to the magic setting which which i um actually use quite often almost in every single of my renders play with a scattering phase the scattering phase can make a really big difference in what your fog volume would look will look like so what the scattering phase does it pretty much um determines how how close to the light the scattering will take place meaning that let's say you have a an area like where we have it and now if i increase the the scattering phase the fog will be less visible here and more visible here which actually means that light will be scattered more towards your light source then we might ask why would i want this and not this simple answer this setting is very very important if you want to create god rays which we're going to do next but we're going to use a daylight for that and not an aerial light you can of course also use an area light but just keep in mind that your air light has to be very small to create god rays so i said that in my previous tutorial about uh well god rays only where we did that using air light the smaller your light source is the more defined and more detailed and sharp your god rays will be so if you do it with an air light you will have to have a very bright area light but very small so let's delete the area light and also the octane sky to do that and then maybe create a few more objects to actually you know make the god race visible actually we could use a tree for that might be the better idea and also i'm gonna increase the pillars a little bit so we have some more obstacles for the light just like that and here we go and now let's add a daylight i'm going to change the daylight so it's very low and shines directly at us which is gonna be early in the morning and then change the direction to let's say this maybe a little bit behind the pillar because uh the problem with with sometimes that is that um you will have amazing god rays and everything but if your sun is um directly visible for example wait let's change this a little bit to this let's say your sun is directly visible like that and you add your fog volume to this um sometimes in the final render you will have a small white circle that is visible which is the sun so what i also like to do is place the sun behind an object just slightly because obviously it still lights your scene perfectly and you will not have this white circle in your scene but over here i can see that it it's not there but attention if you use a bloom effect in this one you will get these glares or well if you turn off the glare you will still have this very very bright bloom if that is what you want of course it's perfectly fine i most of the time don't like that so again i place the sun slightly behind an object so as you can see we just we just placed our sun in turned on our fog volume and what we have we already have some small god rays what you can do now is you could decrease the sun size like that as you can see we have even sharper god rays now uh you could increase the sun power a little bit uh which over here doesn't really work because it pretty much just creates a white sky so let's keep it at one and then the rest of the settings you will have to do in the fog volume and we only get the god rays because we had the scattering phase very high up so if we put that back to zero you see what happens we have pretty much no god rays and the scene overall looks quite boring you could fix that by sometimes adding brightness to your sun but sometimes like you say here it just overblows the whole scene so if you want to keep the exact same uh power that you have because let's say you already lit your scene and everything looks great and you don't want to change the whole lighting because of the fog volume you go in here scattering phase put the scattering face up and boom you have god rays and very vibrant lighting um let's add a couple of more trees actually so we have some some um some more god rays just like that maybe let's go maybe we could go with different trees no but this is good enough as you can see we've got some cool god rays um i also have an image that shows this even better for example this image right here that i made about a couple of years ago which is the exact same technique that i just showed you with one simple difference what i did is i added to my fog volume i added a color which was a very light orange so with colors in fog volumes you will have to be very very careful i'm just going to demonstrate it right here let's use a orange color of 30 which over here looks almost like skin tone right if we use that our scene becomes very orange which actually here looks quite nice i gotta be honest about but um what i usually do is i use a very very very light orange color so like between five and ten percent only and the next setting and last setting that we're going to talk about with the fog volume uh regarding god rays is how to create god rays in scenes that don't have the sun shining directly at the camera uh for example yesterday i made a render a the last of us fan art which has this god ray in it which is a very very simple step as well there is not a lot of fog in the scene right there is only the god rays and this is something that is a very delicate setting but i'm gonna share that setting with you right now so i'm gonna quickly build a room with a window in it and i'll just cut to that i'll be right back so i'm back right here we have a room with a little window in it nothing too special one thing that i would recommend you do if you do interior scenes like this what i did is i added a little wall in front of the camera so it closes down the room and then added an obj an octane object tag and then turned off the camera visibility so as you can see my scene still reacts to this plane but my camera can see through it that way you can create a sort of closed room look but still having your camera outside of the room for example if you want to have a very very high focal length shot of a small room which is usually not possible because you will go out of the wall this is how you do it just as a side note so um let's create god rays in this scene god rays are simple to make but they have a delicate setting so you have a sweet spot that you have to hit but they're very easy to make so what we're going to do is we're going to add our fog volume let's just put it into the scene i'm going to cover the whole scene with it let's just go like this that and then a little bit deeper like this maybe no this is good enough maybe a little bit bigger let me just change my voxel size a little bit more because we learned bigger fog volumes bigger box and sizes so it's not slightly bigger go in here there we go that is perfect and now let's add our daylight turn off the fog volume for a second just so we see where our daylight will shine which is actually already pretty good but i want a little bit of a sharper angle so we're gonna make it a little bit more mourning just like that so our light is somewhere here and shines directly onto the floor so technically we should have four big god rays shining directly at these four squares so how do we do this for these i usually use a very high power in my daylight settings so um i usually use like between three and five which might look a little bright but actually as you can see i don't know what you think but i even think that without the god race a high power looks better i have for these interior scenes next let's reactivate our fog volume and as you can see we can't see anything because again we have a very high density and and our color is grey so it will multiply into this very very dark color let's go with white we can change it later of course to something a little bit uh more orange let's say let me actually check one thing i believe that yes i did a little mistake and that was that my fog volume was actually outside of the room that's why it was so white i was like why is it but here we go so this is what we have now now let's go into our density settings what we want to do is we have to have a very very low setting so uh let's go maybe with let's see um yeah zero point maybe even less so let's say we have let me make that back wall white because um our goal right now is that we have god rays but our uh back wall for example uh is still visible a lot so it's not obscured by the fog so we have to find a very low setting let's go with maybe 0.1 as you can see 0.1 lets us create this very cool look where we can see the back wall very clearly we can't see it clearly because the room is dark but i mean it's not foggy in the back but we still have god rays and now what you can do to even enhance this look is again play with the scattering phase a little bit make it a little bit higher so as you can see what that does it scatters the light more towards the window right here so as you can see we have more out the window and less fog down here which is pretty much exactly what we're looking for now what you can also do um depending on your look uh you can create you can reduce the sun size to almost zero which creates extremely sharp shadows or create a bigger sun size like i don't know 25 which gives you these very very very diffused god rays but of course you will also have very diffused shadows so not not ideal most of the time but um i'll leave the sun size at one for these type of god rays usually and that's how you create these awesome looking god rays that come from windows very simple to make what i also like to add often to this is a high bloom effect like this which just you know just creates this more moody look and i almost stood up with every single of my scenes so that's it with the fog volumes now uh we go over to very quickly a second setting um that i was talking about earlier which is the daylight fog which i absolutely don't like to use but i think i should at least say why and i'll talk a little bit about it so if you go into your daylight what you have here is a medium tab which is exactly the same medium tab as you saw from the fog volume so let me go into the add fog what that will do is pretty much add fog but the problem with this is in my opinion the fog in the daylight always looks very flat as you can see um if we do this and put the cube in it it looks like this whereas as you saw from earlier on with the fog volume it looks very different then last but at least on the list we have vdbs and if you don't know what vdbs are vdb actually stands for volumetric data blocks or volumetric database uh which pretty much uh is well data which is bdb files that determine or that control the density over a fog volume so big shout out to patrick 40 at this point because i'm going to use his clouds his vdbs link in the description if you want to get them he just released a pack with a bunch of vdbs which i think look amazing so it's the clouds essentials volume one and as you can see they come with thumbnails so you know which cloud you want to pick so i think a nice one would be maybe cloud 18 so let's just load in the vdb volume right here and i think uh right at the beginning you will notice that you don't see anything the reason for that is for some reason octane always scales your cloud is very small so what you want to do is import unit change that from meters to a very big one i usually use hectometers or even kilometers but i think for this tutorial hectometers would be good enough actually it's even too big let's try decameters okay that community seems about fine so as you can see now our cloud is roughly the size of our boundaries just like that maybe we should add a little light to this we can actually see something just like that and obviously also cast shadows which looks pretty nice but as you can see it's not super detailed and it doesn't look as nice as maybe in the thumbnail lid so there are two options now to to increase the density in a fog about in a vdb volume um one of which is the density as of course but the other one is decreasing the volume stack length and what the volume step length does it pretty much increases the detail of the cloud so as you can see uh if we go if you go closer to this we do have rough shapes and everything and something that does look indeed very nice but if we would to increase this um this density by a lot you will start to see some small blocks in it so let's just decrease the volume step length a little bit and you will see that as you can see the the density of the cloud changes now it's already a little denser and what we can do now let me just change that to white because we want a nice cloud and now let's go into our density settings and go to something crazy like 250. as you can see our cloud is already a lot denser now we can even increase it with the density settings a lot more but yeah this is what vdbs do and then of course also here you have the exact same settings as you have in your uh fog volume so you can also increase the scattering phase to create god rays inside of clouds which is kind of cool i think isn't it and then the most awesome thing about that is if you let's say have a lot of clouds and then you put all the clouds into a big fog volume with a very low density of course because it will be very heavy and then shine light through it you will have god rays casted by the clouds and god ray is coming from the clouds so you have like this awesome god majestic look which i think david arya for example is the master in so at the end of this tutorial i would like to share a bunch of cool fog and light settings for different scenes and every days i made i'm just gonna show you the image and then the settings for the fog and the light so you can just copy paste and hopefully your scene will look the same so here we go so here we have the last of us render from early on we have a north offset of minus 0.37 this of course you can't copy paste because it depends on how your scene is orientated but then inside our fog volume what we do have is we have a voxel set of 43 the whole scene is about 1 000 by 1 000 by 1 000 centimeters and then inside our medium we have a density of 0.014665 well like i could just read the first couple of digits and a scattering phase of 0.327 and an absorption color of white the next we have underwater looks which is a lot more difficult actually but um it's also just a fog volume as you can see right here uh it has a absorption color of a very light blue and then we have a density of 0.075 and a scattering phase of 0.26 the the main setting that i share here is we have a very dark octane sky with just a color and multiple area light actually as you can see we have a very big area light for the main light a smaller area light for shadow triggering and then some just smaller ambient lights to get some more highlights for example this area light uh reacts only to this figure right here which creates the highlight on the figure and so on um and the settings and brightnesses for these area lights are uh most of the time all just white with a very cold temperature and a rather low uh power so we have a power 50 then we got a power of 24 power of 71 then we go area with a power of 11 which i think the power of 11 is yeah that's the one that lights my diver and then we got another air light which is the spot area light from the diver itself and then um a relatively low light shining at the back right here next we have the thick uh 20s fog or like in this case it's like an 80s drug deal scene for example um the see here we have a very thick fog and um there is one key setting to this as well of course a very thick fog we have 17 then we have a white fog volume and a scattering phase of 0.71 then uh we have a bunch of area lights actually two which is one lighting this whole scene from the side and then we have one one at the top right here looking down pretty much shining creating contrast between the fog volume and the bridge um but also over here as you can see we have a very high bloom power which as you can see in this image also the fog emits bloom which creates a super hazy and like almo almost mystic fog fog look so if you're looking for a very very very misty very there's this crazy surreal fog most of the time it's a lot of bloom but you have to be careful with this because if you have any light source any visible lighters in your scene this light source will completely blow out then we have one example for vdb volumes uh we should just let the scene load for a second because it seems to be quite a heavy scene actually there we go uh so this is the forest that i made with a bunch of fog volumes in it as you can see we have um vdb volume so we have three vdb volumes uh i think they're all by patrick 4d if i'm not wrong oh no actually they are from mitch meyer so also shout out to mitch myers vdb collection link in description down below i used it for many years it's a great vdb collection as well so in here in our vdb section uh all the vdbs have the exact same settings so we have 0.02 in the density which is very low but as you can see we have a lower step length which as we learned earlier on adds a little bit of detail and also a lot of density so we have a step length of 1.7 uh then we have a scattering a absorption color of a very light orange also covered earlier in tutorial very light orange not too bright and a scattering phase of zero which is the default value because we don't want to have a lot of great rays in this and then my light settings are just a simple octane daylight with a very very high power uh and that's all just a very high power and the last setting when we're sharing is a little more realistic fog setting because as you as you may be noticed all the past ones were the typical fog renders but on realistic scenery even if you don't see fog there is fog everywhere pretty much because there is always a little bit of atmosphere so what i like to do is i add a very very subtle fog volume into my scene for example right here there is a fog volume with a density of 0.2 which is very low and a very like the default step length so it's not super dense as well scattering phase of 0.5 so also not too high because we don't want the light to be just only one place of the screen and now we have a nice little almost yellow looking fog volume absorption color and for the daylight we use a high power of two again i like to use high powers with daylights for my fog scenes as long as my sky is not visible and fun fact about this whole scene the whole backdrop is not 3d it's just an image as you can see here we have a bunch of trees but then i selected an image that has the same trees desaturated a little bit so it has the same colors as my uh as my trees and foreground but just that's another topic i hope that you enjoyed this this video um this was everything i know about fog volumes everything i do to create my looks i hope it wasn't too chaotic it was it's a it's a pretty uh big topic overall so it was a little difficult for me to know where to start and where to begin if you have anything to add to it or any more questions just feel free to to ask in the comment section down below um i will also obviously leave a bunch of uh timestamps so you don't have to you know if you only care about the settings in the last part of the video you can just skip to that which now is pretty much a little obsolete to say because you already watched the whole video but um nevertheless i hope you enjoyed the video i hope that this sums everything up that you wanted to know about the fog volumes that i know about my scenes and everything so yeah that was everything for today if you enjoyed the video make sure to like and subscribe and i'll see you guys next time bye

Channel: TheDizzyViper

Views: 11,482

Keywords: C4D, Octane, Render, OctaneRender, Tutorial, How to, Best, Pro, Advanced, TheDizzyViper, DizzyViper, Dizzy Viper, Beeple, 3D, Scifi, Fog, Fog tutorial, God rays, Godrays octane, Fog octane, Fog c4d, Fog tutorial c4d, Fog tutorial Octane

Id: _12GMlPhkXs

Length: 35min 26sec (2126 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 14 2021