The secret of REALISTIC MATERIALS | Octane nodes explained

today we're having a deep and comprehensive look at the materials in octane render engine as I mentioned in my texture video there are a lot of ways of creating materials and a lot of ways to achieve certain effects octane is a powerful note based system I'm going to use octane three point zero eight past six so this is not an official release of a plugin yet but I will briefly mention features that they are going to introduce first of all let's have a look at the types of materials that octane offers us in live viewer click materials diffuse materials are the simplest ones they're not reflective not transparent they're dull as chalk glossy materials are same as diffuse materials but with reflective options added specular material is glass liquid any material that needs transparency octane metal material this is the newly introduced material which is not yet officially available it's only available in tests but we will have a look at it too material I am pretty excited about that one cuz you might be familiar with cinemas for the natives sketching tune shader and this is pretty much the same but for octane I'm really excited about it because I love creating storyboards in a kind of sketchy drone style and now I can do it directly in octane octane mix material is a powerful note that allows you to mix two materials together and we will take a deeper look into this node later octane upper material I have no idea what this one does yet but I can see that it works with several materials at once and last one is portal material this one helps lights to their path through tricky scenes and I feel that this material is more related to lighting tutorials rather than material tutorials so I won't talk much about this one let's start looking at particular channels in each material let's start with glossy material we already discussed bump displacement and normal maps and texture tutorials so I think there is no point talking about them again if you're interested in textures I encourage you to go and check out my textures tutorial alright glassy material diffuse channel is where you assign a color or load a texture to your material specular is where you control your reflections you can assign a color to your reflection or load a texture that will drive your reflection you can also kind of control strength of your reflection by altering float and mix values roughness allows you to control blurriness of your reflection or you can load a texture that will define which areas of that material are more or less blurred film with and film index i skiped these to you in textures tutorial because they are related to materials really film with allows you to get an effect of kind of coating around your material float parameter here controls film thickness it is particularly useful with materials like soap bubble oil petrol things like that film index works together with film width and it specifies the index of refraction of the film and this allows a better control over the effect opacity is one of the obvious ones by altering color from black to white you can make your material semi-transparent or low the texture that will drive your opacity index is a parameter that defines how shiny our material is the higher the value goes the more reflective material gets value of one will result in absolute reflectiveness it will be like a mirror common channel well this is more like general tab smooth does exactly what SS renders smoother geometry effect alpha will include your materials alpha to your final alpha if you don't have any background for instance if I have custom materials alpha and I have no background I can check alpha channel in settings check effect alpha in my material settings and have that transparency included which is very cool because it works with glass too rounded edges feature is a really nice one from optimization point of view sometimes you want beveled edges on the geometry but not always you're ready to subdivide your geometry rounded edges option gives you ability to bevel your edges without additional geometry now let's jump to specular material I need my T okay specular material well the only difference from glossy material is that specular is now called reflections and we have four additional channels dispersion transmission medium and fake shadows dispersion is the parameter that controls the effect which in real life you see in water drop on a sunlight or in a diamond I think it's obvious when you should use this channel index in case of specular material doesn't control shininess but it controls IO R which stands for index of refraction index of refraction is the way you can control the type of glass or liquid you will have for instance standard direct value for glass is 1.5 for water it's one point 35 and for air is just 1 it's pretty much like a blank material but not really it allows you to create cool effects it's a topic for a different tutorial though so it's important to consider these values if you're after realism in your works and in the description to this video I left linked to a really really really useful website the websites called refractive index dot info and it has all I or our values for any possible material this is extremely useful just save it transmission and medium channels are the channels we will talk about a bit later fake shadows hmm there's something faking acting this channel basically let's light through specularity I always use it because glass looks better and sometimes that even can increase the render times now let's create metal material that will be introduced in octane three point zero eight as this is a test version at the moment of this tutorial you might want to find more precise and up-to-date info about metal materials in octane let's have a look at the main and important things about metal material so this brdf dropdown will allow you to achieve better realism in particular situations for instance Backman would be better used with plastic materials cgx with medals and ward with cloth I haven't decently tested them yet so I don't have samples sorry we also have several new channels in this material let's go to index channel unlike specular or glossy materials metal material has two Index parameters to control and they have N and K indexes what that means let's go to our refractive index info website and check something out apart from refractive index they have extinction coefficient which happens to be this K parameter in our material as far as I understand this helps to control that kind of fernell effect over your material when you rotate it it reflects light differently apart from that we now have an easel for P channel and two specular channels and easie trophy is a long weighted feature for those of you who don't know what an easy trophy is it's that funky effect you can see on metals circular reflections anyway previously it was only achievable using bump maps but now they have a dedicated channel to create that effect specular map in metal materials will allow you to control intensity of your reflections and specular channel will allow you to add colors to your reflections one important thing I encourage you to start using in octane is octane note editor just remember that ncg and VFX world notes are always better they might be confusing at first but they allow you to achieve more complicated things faster to access octane note editor click materials octane note editor in the top left corner you have tabs that enable/disable categories and we will have a look at each category let's unclick all of them first let's click on matte this category contains all material notes octane material which will allow you to create diffuse glossy specular and metal materials mix node which will allow you to mix two materials together and upper material which I don't know what it does yet next category is called text textures these nodes are used to assign colors all colors to your materials in different ways you can load images to use as your textures or you can adjust coordinates with these nodes next category is jen-jen from generators these nodes are used to create or modify other textures a couple of very powerful and mostly used notes are here map category map from mapping these nodes allow other nodes manipulation and mixing these will be useful to control intensity of your textures and effects and stuff like that oth either these nodes allow you to transform your textures as well as change projection modes you can see there is a displacement in there but I have no idea why it's there I would put it in generators category EMS category emissions these ones allow you to create materials that globe med medium notes these nouns are mostly used with specular materials and allow you to create a fact like subsurface scattering those of you who don't know what subsurface scattering it's definitely you get when you put a flashlight behind your hand c4d category some of the native cinema4d shaders are supported by octane render engine and this category basically hosts these shaders I personally do not recommend using them because the way they work is that in final render octane transforms these shaders into textures I personally assume this process can increase render times if by whatever reasons you will decide to use these shaders there is a way to control the quality of them go to octane settings settings tab see for these shaders and here you have a drop-down menu where you can select the resolution of the baked texture alright we won't go deep into each node I encourage you to play with them but what I will do is I will talk about the most used and most powerful ones I use octane note editor to create my materials here I have node editor on the left and live view were on the right I already prepared a little scene here the scene consists of book sphere and cone let's create a simple material and I will call it sample matte i will slightly change the color so we already discussed all these nodes on the left and you kind of can orient yourself around them now i will only highlight and talk about the most useful nodes one of the most used nodes is turbulence turbulence creates black and white turbulent pattern let's assign it to our diffuse channel to see what what what is happening so we have five parameters to here power is self-explanatory offset is used for animations octaves and a mega allows you to control complexity of the pattern and gamma is gamma so I like it like that let's leave it next most useful note is noise so we have four types of noise available it's purlins turbulence which is pretty much the same turbulence we just seen but within a noise node circular type of noise again with octaves and Omega I can control the complexity of the pattern gamma controls the intensity last type of noise is called chips see you can create patterns similar to rocks or something like that that can be used in bamp to other often use nodes our projection and transform you can create transform or projection nodes by dropping them from the list on the left or by clicking dedicated buttons in texture itself so projection helps you to set up the projection type box cylindrical mesh UV pretty much the same way as you would do in cinema 4d in this particular case we don't really need it so I'm going to delete it the transform node is more useful by altering the scale value you can see I can get pretty interesting results for instance is if I go really low it looks like kind of asphalt texture and imagine what you can do this texture is procedural and it's Tyler ball seamlessly tie level you can create unbelievable things for the purpose of this particular tutorial I want to get pretty big shapes with quite prominent edges alright now it's time to talk about how to make mix nodes together here you can see there is a mix material node well this one is related to material but there is another note called mix and this one will help you mix notes together inside of one material let's create two colors drag RGB spectrum note and let's make this one orange the second RGB spectrum will be pink now let's drag newly created colors into our textures channels in mixed texture and let's connect mix texture to diffuse channel of our main material so you can see that now by default we have kind of middle mixed color between orange and pink and you see that the amount of mixing is 0.5 if I drag it all the way to the left we see that the main material becomes orange same with value of 1 it becomes fully pink now cool thing instead of value slider you can use any textures or shaders you want watch that let's drag the noise that we created previously to the amount Channel boom we already can see some effect but it's not as prominent as I would like it to be I can go to my noise node and play with the settings you can already see the benefits of that node workflow I don't have to click thousands of buttons everything is happening in one window another often used note is called fall-off map let's plug it to our diffuse channel to see what's happening so by default the mode is set to normal versus array and what that means is however you rotate the camera fall-off will remain the same and this effect is similar to cinemas for DS native fernell which was used a lot and metal reflections and all other sorts of stuff let's change the mode to normal versus vector 90 degree and now you see that fall-off is not following the camera movements anymore it stuck to one direction if I will move that book you can see that fall-off is always on top this might be useful in creating effects like dusts no dirt on top of your objects by altering minimum and maximum values you see I'm altering the intensity of the fall of fall-off skew factor changes the fall-off of the follow you can change the direction of the fall-off let's use it as a mixed texture amount see how it works you could use mix material and mix two materials together for instance one texture would be metal and the second texture would be dirt and you would use it on our vehicle body next super duper almighty node is called dirt let's plug it into our mix textures amount channel and see what's happening I will zoom into our book at first it looks like nothing is happening but let's increase the radius and strength you can see that on the edges of the book kind of orange dirt appears and that's exactly what this node is doing it uses geometry data to create that funky fall-off on the edges of your mesh you can mix dirt with different textures and achieve really cool results like worn edges scratched metals and edges and all sort of crazy effects another cool thing about dirt node is that it interacts with objects not only with the mesh its own as I bring the cube and it actually creates additional fall-off on our original geometry when you will start using this node you will realize whole potential because it opens unlimited ways of creating crazy effects alright let's plug our noise back I would like to make our noise as sharp as possible and I want these shapes to be sharp so I'll increase contrast in our noise node one thing I want to mention so noise is a shader it's not a texture right you would think that you can use it with let's say displacement well there is one little limit with displacement node it only accepts text from outside of of cinema4d basically loaded images so it won't work with this shader unfortunately see as a plug it in nothing happens last way of mixing nodes together is obviously using textures polygons comm I'm using that website quite often to download high quality textures look they have all sort of textures even 3d scanned ones by the way and the convenience of using this service as you can get any resolution you want and any channel you want separately so in this particular case I'm interested in a interesting pattern here I go deselect everything I don't want to select the resolution click download download the texture loaded it in my texture node and charge that in my amount channel in my mixed texture and now you see that our mixed texture node using that texture to mix our colours invert is one of the quite often used notes you just drop it on that line and it inverts your texture another benefit of using node workflow ok for last two SuperDuper powerful notes I will need to create new material because absorption medium and scattering medium are working with specular materials I will drag new octane material in call it as as as subsurface scattering in material type I'll choose specular material and here we go we have our glass I'll assign it to our objects looks as expected nice and transparent let's go to medium top here you can see two buttons absorption medium and scattering medium let's try absorption medium first basically absorption medium is a way of absorb some of the light coming through your glass or liquid especially in the places where geometry is getting more intense see if I'll scale up the book it gets darker because there is more glass you can alter the density and stuff like that all right let's unplug it and use scattering medium pretty much the same effect applied but let's increase our roughness obviously our glass became blurry but if I'll plug something into scattering channel let's say noise interesting things start to happen I'll increase the density before I do anything else let's change the light of the scene because the subsurface scattering is obviously working best when there is a light source behind the object I'm bringing in the area light putting it behind my object and straight away you can start seeing the subsurface scattering effect so the book appears not as a solid object but as a semi kind of transparent one the light got scattered in its volume check it out by altering the face slider you can change the intensity of the effect let's make it colorful you can plug textures or colors into absorption channel and then your object will have a color if I change the depth of the sphere you can see that subsurface scattering effect kicks in this technique will help you with creating objects like candles more realistic and specific plastics I don't know skin leaves or something like that let's bring our old lighting back all right so we have that funky looking glass now let's use mix material node which is actually meant to be used with materials rather than notes I'll bring our first material into the node editor of that's a mess here we go here you could see the mix node which allowed that allowed us to mix notes and this is mixed material which allows us to mix materials let's plug our first material into material number one channel and SSS material to material number two channel and let's assign that mix material to our checked something happened but it's not obvious we have our glass material reflections and our diffuse materials colors but let's plug that image texture into a mount channel of octane mix material look what happened this is where true power of octane materials lies look at that we can see the texture following the geometry behind the book and this allows you to create oh my god by now guys I hope you feel as pumped as I am looking at that you can create just anything literally anything you want let's drag our noise into a mount mixing channel this is insane how quickly you can change stuff using node workflow if I need to invert it I'll just drop the invert note in this is obviously thousand times faster than clicking all those kind of layers in native material editor of cinema 4d and switching and learning curve is comparable to European driver driving for the first time in UK but once you get get used to it you can't unlearn it you know you will just have that skill and it will massively help you to increase the quality of your work in general octane note editor is something you I would say have to start using using some of these notes I create the textures that you've seen in the intro to this video as well as all the materials in my other works of course there's post-production you know textures involved in this scene but I just wanted to demonstrate what you can achieve when you know how everything works and as I already advised in my previous video about textures always consider adding textures to your materials I hope you guys enjoyed it hope you learned something new if you did thumbs up if C G and V effects is something you are into subscribe to my channel thanks for watching peace [Music]

Channel: Andrey Lebrov

Views: 190,178

Rating: 4.9661016 out of 5

Keywords: lebrov, cg, vfx, tutorial, how to, learning, filmmaking, step up, master, octane, materials, textures, node, workflow, C4D, Cinema 4D, rendering, realistic, dirt, SSS, subsurface scattering, mix material, metal material, advanced, shader

Id: o0Ntf5upobk

Length: 26min 48sec (1608 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 28 2018