TUTORIAL: Corona Scatter Foliage

and welcome to another karma tutorial this time we will take a look at utilizing karana scatter to create some forest and a meadow so basically we will be using it to distribute some foliage we will be creating complete scene from scratch but I have prepared some assets which are just two trees and six small grass patches free of them is just simple grass two of them are like some tall grass with some wheat or something and one is just some dandelions so first thing I'm going to do is just to do quick test render to see if everything is okay and all our objects have some good materials and they render correctly okay so I'm going to take all my assets put them aside create a new plane make it hundred by hundred meters and Center the plane lets it increase the subdivisions so we have some more topology to work with I'm going to add a displace modifier set illuminance Center to be in the middle so 0.5 and create a noise plug noise in and start by setting displacement string to something like 20 meters now I'm going to play with displacement so to turbulence swap the colors set levels to ten and increase the size to like something like 5,000 maybe 10,000 okay this looks good and if I just look around looks like some nice terrain may be too tall but I don't like this peak right here in the middle so I'm going to offset the center of the map like this and just scrub around to find some nice nice this looks this looks quite nice and maybe increase strength slightly and now we're going to create we're going to set up some lighting but first let's just take all of our assets and push them away a little further create a new kernel son like this all right we own something like sunset at Kerensky environment we now do quick render we'll have to set up exposure for the exterior daylight that looks good okay and now we will set up our crown material so for that let's just grab Crouch arrow and sign it label it ground let's grab crown a bitmap let's go to the crown textures take this one this is how it looks so this this world we'll use and set blur to point 1 so it's bit sharper especially for the bump mapping instance it also to bump increase the bum to something like 2.5 now let's assign our ground material display the texture and increase the tiling somewhat 20 by 20 looks good and to things this is obviously quite simply simple material no reflection or something like that but it's going to be mostly covered by grass so we do not need to waste too much time on it and here you can also see telling but again it's going to be mostly covered by grass patches so we just need something that will roughly give us some color or some texturing not not some detailed material and to see how it looks we first need to enable render hidden light so that when we are in isolation mode we see what's going on and I think we can go a little harder on bump so like free maybe go a little more up close see how it looks alright that that doesn't look bad obviously we have some shadowing artifacts but that can be fixed later on if it if it will be necessary to fix in the first place okay so this is it for our kernel trail let's go again here disable the display of the texture because now we will use vertex pan modifier and we will display the vertex color we will fill the entire plane with black color get a brush set size like 20 meters set color to white and now I will just paint where I want my first to be okay so I'm just painting borders now and we'll have some medal in the middle so something like this looks good camera I will be looking from here let's again decrease to like 2 meters our brush size set it to black and just make the edges slightly irregular 5 meters so it's not so tiny just some irregularity in there okay blur it few times like this and now okay I will select yes some ugly word explained disable the display of our vertex map channel now we will grab just a current scatter so we will go here to grant create grasscutter we'll distribute it on our ground and what we will be distributing are these two trees first three second three and you can see they're in there but we need also vertex color channels since we painted vertex color and plug it in the density slot rate okay so we will now increase the schedule down to something like hundred for starters looks good and we will disable the alignment frame to normal show them as boxes and now we will randomize to rotation by 360 degrees so basically from minus 180 to 180 will slightly vary slightly increase the rotation variation also in X and y axis for the scale will go from like 70% to 100% and we'll try to create some dense forest appearance therefore we keep it this way and we render you can see there's not much of a coverage here especially around the trunks so there's a nice little trick just set minimum translation in the z-axis to something like minus 0.5 so some of the trees will be pushed further in the ground and they look like bushes and they will make forest appear a lot more dense and also let's vastly increase the amount of the trees and now if we enter we can see we have something much much nicer let's maybe ease up on the exposure make it brighter increase highlight compression slightly maybe increase contrast just slightly now for the preview purposes now let's isolate all the trees or in there again and both of the trees we are distributing which are here are sharing the same material so we need to grab just one material now we will use Corona multi map with just two colors and one is going to be like orangey one is going to be like really green like this and let's go like 220 on the saturation and let and for the value is very very important that we will set it to 128 I will show you why so let's make sure the value of both of both these colors is 125 now let's go up Corona mix texture grab it here our tops texture is going to be our multi map our bottom texture is going to be our leaf texture and it's going to go here and also here and now if we in Corona mix texture set mix operation to ace a overlay then basically having value luminance of the color to 128 means overlay operation will not affect luminance of our texture but only the saturation of our texture and here we want to increase mix amount to 50% so durably though there will be random blending between those two cores and we want to random blending to be based on the instance alright and now if we again isolate these trees you can see now maybe maybe we need to go a little bit closer you can see now the dart trees have randomized color someone are some are more orangie somewhere or brownish some are more green so this is it basically for the randomization of our trees let's go back and again enter the scene as it is okay now let's go here let's edit our layout make it a little bit more interactive rendering friendly this is going to be my interactive rendering viewport so I'm going to enable safe frame and based on the safe way I'm going to resize the viewport and once I have resized our viewport I will set up our I will create just a camera free camera and our camera is going to be here I'm going to aim a safe frame make it shaded our interactive is going to be here and here's going to be our material editor and so we'll go to render settings and make sure our secondary solver is set to path tracing firstly because we are entering an exterior scenario and secondly because we want to improve interactivity of our interactive rendering if there was UHD cash USD cash would be would have to be pre computed before every interactive rendering change so it would slow down the feedback slightly okay so now let's save our scene just to be sure and fire up our interactive render let's now make sure it is locked to our camera view great and let's just position the camera and find some nice nice angle in our scene this all looks kind of boring to be honest so maybe place our camera like somewhere in here you may also go easier on the displacement okay this is better I'm still not completely happy with it but it's it's definitely better okay so let's find some nice spot for our camera let's go with this our force could be slightly more dense and we want to play with our light angle so this is the viewport let's lock it to this report again make sure it's locked so we can navigate this freely without losing our camera view and now let's find some nice Sun angle for our for our camera and I think this looks this looks quite nice I want to have some shadows in the foreground so there's some both shadows and sunlight in our foreground but at the same time I want to have that nice orange sunset light from the Sun yep I think this is this is what I'm I want to go with so let's disable our interactive render once again save just to make sure and now let's grab our count and our grass patches isolate them let's get another car scatter distribute on our ground and what we want to distribute are these patches and the dandelions put them in there great now for the dandelions they are going to be a really rare compared to other instances in the scene so I'm going to I'm going to set frequency just to something like 0.5 and this weed is not going to be as frequent as regular gas patches as well so let's set frequencies for them for those two wheat patches to something like point one now for the grass we want to have scale variation between 80 and 120 percent we do not want any of the grass to be under the car and we want them to be aligned to normal and we want to slightly boost the rotational very variance in X and Y and since we are going to need several hundred thousand or probably up to million of the grass patches then we're going to decrease the displays displayed a percentage something like 0.1 in our viewport and start off with something like fifty thousand scattered instances and let's do a test render and you can see we will likely need much more and also we want to we want to use this view as this is the view our render view is locked into alright so let's increase it to like five hundred thousand now this is significantly better but we still see some holes in between the grass patches so we might need to go in the end with something like eight hundred thousand and our viewport is slowing down slightly so let's again decrease this percentage you're going to further save our scene go to our camera view whoops make sure our camera is locked so we don't accidentally move it and let's do another chest render and this is starting to look pretty nice the trees are maybe a bit on the darker side so I'm going to have to do something about that let's just go here our source texture is this but it's already derived reflection glossiness so maybe make trees lighter effective but we do not want to overly effect a faction glow sense as well so let's put another output between here and here great and here we're gonna make leaves slightly brighter and more washed out okay so if I now render that looks better the green color that has been over light from the multi map may be way to saturate it so let's go with saturation like hundred and ninety right in there so these trees in there are not so crazily saturated okay this this is starting to look pretty nice I'm gonna slightly adjust our camera angle so we do not waste as much space on just plain sky so let's unlock our camera tilt it slightly lock it again let's look at our scene from the overview yep that's nice little place we got going on in there and let's now also create some rocks just so we have something else in the scene just grass and a trees okay so again let's save the scene and I don't have this part prepared too much so ho please excuse me if I if I spend some time guessing what to do okay so let's try to copy this plane and convert to editable poly select what we see in the viewport I'm going to grow the selection invert it delete what we do not see and now I'm going to isolate this and to slide it towards the camera manually so I'm going to grab both camera and this create rotate my view show the camera cone and let's go here all right let's split this in half approximately do mush mode split this in half du mich mode split this in half du mich mode and again do mix mode and our stats are saying two hundred thousand polygons so you may afford also some some turbosmooth in the end to increase the detail and since this is going to be rock is going to be sharp so if we disable smoothing we get basically some more definition for free okay quit the isolation save our scene just to be sure grab this also this now I'm going to create some procedural Network but first let's put on this placement and let's go with cellular and output output is going to be our adapter and I'm going to plug it here basically I'm using this just so I so whenever I am plugging something in the displacement modifier I have to plug it just here in the material editor I don't have to go all the way here plug it into here it's just closer especially when I have my material editor on the audio monitor and so plug in the cellular increase it to like three meters for start and let's just play with this a little bit and set these two chips fractal 10 non-adaptive increase the size to like thousand and those are some nice rocks okay let's grab the displacement and let's angle all those rocks in the same direction so they look somewhat interesting I'm going to put my material editor aside so I see what I'm doing and let's also bring back our scene so free meters is way too much let's go with 2 meters 1 meter and maybe rotate this all the way around yep this looks interesting let's play with it more but first change the color so oops so let's let's put in another material changing color doesn't work because we have already material assigned I want to see just rocks so the rock basically doesn't blend with the with the ground and let's just keep rotating around until we find something that I like and this this could work nicely gonna add another table smooth and disable the smooth result it looks a little lumpy so maybe oops maybe do not rotate the displace as much this looks nice and we can play with the luminance Center point four point five okay so this is our base for the rocks I can isolate it going on disabled service mode for now so it's a bit faster and let's mix the cellular with something let's go with perhaps noise plug-in the fractal as many iterations we can just go like this point one so we stretch it plug in another one okay well let's let's first put this one back and tweak it a little bit more so clamp it slightly and now duplicate is mix them together plug them in there but let's rotate one let's stretch 1 in the other direction mix them 5050 so we get something like this up front we can see how it looks and let's go ahead and mix this with our original cellular texture and again play with the displays okay so I'm starting to get satisfied with the way those rocks look but maybe ease up on the strength you know further again skew the stones look round now let's try to render it along with our grass scatter oh this these are trees I think yep I want to grass so this is grass okay yep we got some stones so all we need to do now is shade those stones and we are good to go okay so first let's optimize our stones which means we will select the stones and the ground we'll duplicate the ground collapse it add shell to it oops like this and now our duplicated ground has some some volume so we will use volume select inside of a mesh object which is going to be our ground and it's going to select faces go and take a little while because this is quite heavy operation I hope it doesn't crash oh it doesn't look very positive does it let's give it a while okay so we are back I actually had to shut down max so let's forget about this little idea of optimizing the stones and let's just keep it that way max is really not very real reliable when using these complex operation on operations on high poly meshes okay so oops good didn't crash again I'm going to delete volume select and I'm going to just use the pro optimizer straight ahead without cutting away our our move are the parts of the mesh that were below the ground so let's calculate our mesh and see how money how much how many polygons can we how many polygons can we reduce it to without losing too much detail this is going to take a while as well but hopefully it's not going to crash there we go so going to our camera and observing the amount of detail we have we can try to go like 230 percent and as you can see we have lost just slight slight detail but our poly count has dropped significantly so I'm going to collapse it as it is and now I'm going to just text straight I guess or create some new material for it so let's go with crown material name it stones put on a bitmap and I think I want something like like this perhaps decrease the blur apply to the mesh we have no UVs like super optimizer so just put on box mapping if I under the preview and doesn't look bad but maybe maybe I'm gonna use some different texture oh let's try this one yeah this this looks better increase the tiling further now let's use these textures also for bump mapping increase the bump mapping slightly now I'm going to put in a karana AO that's because it will fake the appearance that the rocks have some deeper crevasses in them even when in reality they don't so if I put this into an oak loaded color and render you will see it apart it appears a bit deeper in those cracks but maybe to create this two point one meters and increase the color spread so we just amplify those cracks and not not not dark on the stone overall and let's also make it slightly reflective so like 0.32 0.20 cents point to actual let's drive glossiness with this and let's turn off diffuse just so we see the reflection glossiness and turn the fuse back on and render again and actually I will want to mask reflection by ambient occlusion as well so let's just duplicate it put it here it's not a really optimal way to do it but for the sake of time we have left let's just do it this way okay and before we go to the final diffuse I'm going to increase the contrast of D of our stone texture so it looks more harsh like this and let's go back to our scene and render it once again yep we got some nice rocks there are maybe too dark overall but we can just tweak that all right so let's set the focus of our camera to rock in front which is I think this one yep and let's go to the depth of field and able it let's go let's try like to point a F stop and see if we can get this foreground slightly blurred maybe just to increase the resolution and the small region to see how blurry is our foreground it's slide but it looks good all right so I'm going to cancel this I'm going to cancel the region hopefully I did yep I did and I'm going to render this and once this scene is fully rendered then I'm going to resume this video and I'm going to try some quick post-processing in Photoshop okay so I'm back the scene is rendering for about nine minutes and it looks already quite clean it's just 32 passes but I I can tell it it's already it's a I don't see noise anywhere like eye catching grain so I would this this is the kind of quality I wouldn't be ashamed to hand off to a client so I'm going to stop the render here fire photoshop and in the meanwhile I'm going to save this whoops Photoshop stole the the focus I'm going to save this as trees that tiff eight color no often idiot there we go and let's put it here okay and now I'm going to improvise because I haven't prepared for this part so what I would do general is just duplicate a layer I'm gonna go destructively here collapsing the layer all the time because it saves time it's the destructive workflow but it's it's a lot faster so I won't be it won't take too much time I'm going to blur this oops I didn't want to do that filter blur Gaussian blur let's set it to like 50 pixels so we get some foggy kind of mood but not too much so let's make opacity like 35 now let's add slide vignette some curves now some color balance so in the highlights we're going to shift it towards color tones shadows towards warmer tones and general saturation should go slightly lower we can see the trees in the background are blurred by the top field so this is our area of focus okay but before I focus on that I'm going to duplicate this saturate this blur it maybe with motion blur that's that could be interesting let's try it let's try go for something like god race and let's add it through linear dodge but let's also put levels on it and we should be able to make make it somewhat contrasting like this and crease the opacity yep this looks nice go to brightness contrast overall adjustment but we do not want lets guy to be all white so let's not overdo it this looks nice and now I'm going to just a get gradient if I find it here we go from white to black oops this is what I didn't want to do flatten image and here I'm gonna grab radial gradient I might need to invert it and here here is when where I want to have some focal points so I will just set it to overlay I want to bring focus to this area so I will bring this area make it lighter brighter and make the rest of the image slightly dark let's see what Photoshop things about sequin above the contrast so let's try all the contrast it could go like 50/50 so I'll blend it 50/50 with mine and some final boost in the curves yep and even more adjustments we can use the good old cliche chromatic aberration and sharpen it slightly all right I think you final copy all of this and I revert this is what what we had before this is what we have now I think this is quite a change and that it really helped to slightly increase the realism of the output so let's get it yeah so I'm happy with the result and I think this is it for for the tutorial so basically from scratch we had just a two trees and a few grass clamps and in less than an hour I think we've managed to create this nice picture so this is it for the tutorial and see you next time

Channel: CoronaRenderer

Views: 190,282

Keywords: Corona, Renderer, Rendering, 3ds Max, Foliage, Scatter, Instancing, Tutorial

Id: 5qR2ibKQ1-8

Length: 43min 2sec (2582 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 16 2015