xpReel Tutorials, Particle Advection, Cycles 4D - Part 2

[Music] hi I'm Bob Warmsley from in Cydia makers of X particles and cycles for date and in this tutorial we're going to be rendering this scene with cycles for D so we'll be building a custom material in cycles for D and using our X particles data to help mix our various shaders we'll then set up some lighting and we'll go on to the final render settings so let's get started so here's our particle animation in cinema 4d this is the scene that we built from a tutorial 1 and I've got my cache object with my emitter cached and I've deleted all those other elements that we used to simulate this scene because we don't need those anymore so what we've got is a camera from this angle which is showing the way in which these plumes are drifting upwards and we've got this nice fluid like languid motion which is looking pretty nice and pretty organic and what you want to do is you want to choose a camera angle which is going to give you kind of plenty of depth so we'll get some nice shallow depth of field effects and add a little bit of kind of parallax as the ones are moving in the background slightly differently to the ones that are moving in the foreground and this is going to give us a nice look so I'm happy with this camera angle so the scene starts and they come up and they drift up like this and then once we get to about I don't know frame around here it's starting to get a little noisy but we're going to be cutting away from this seeing that around this this this frame anyway so it doesn't really matter that they're that they're getting noisy and this within the reel is quite a short shot and it just it kind of comes up and then it cuts to the next shot so that's gonna look good so let's just lock this camera down so we don't accidentally make any changes cuz I'm happy with that position so we've got the tags cinema tags and we'll put a protection tag on the camera which means even if we try and move it we can't good and obviously we're gonna be rendering with cycles 4d so what I need to do is put a cycles 4d camera tag onto this regular cinema 4d camera so let's go to tags cycles 4d tags and we'll put a cycles camera on it right so what I'm gonna do now is we need to start building this scene and what I'll do is I'm gonna change my layout to my cycles 4d layout which has the viewport in a very small little window down here we still need that viewport I've got my material manager in this section above it this is my node editor where I'll be building my cycles 4d material and I've got my attributes my object list here well we can adjust the attributes and I've got my real-time preview in this window here so I'll just pause that for now let's put it down to ten samples and at the moment if I hit render it's a black screen and that's because we're not able to render anything because a couple of things we have got no lights in our scene and the only object in our scene is our emitter and there's no material on it so what we're going to do to build this up let's put we're gonna make an emissive material first so this is going to be the material which is going to be the blue glowing particles which are emitting that gorgeous blue light so that's where we're going to start so what I'm gonna do is go to create in the material manager and go to cycles 4d and surface and we're going to make an emission because we want something to be spitting out light and the emission is just one node it's the emission shader here it has a color and a strength so let's put that a mission on our emitter now this is gonna take a couple of seconds because what it's doing now it is I'm trying to render all of those particles and there's probably around I don't know half a million particles there and what cycles is doing is creating a sphere instance for every single particle and applying this emissive material to it I'm just gonna reduce that size down a bit so at the moment it's just a big blobby mess and that is because the radius of the sphere instance that cycles has created is way too big so it's all just becoming this big homogenized mess so what we need to do is adjust the size of that instance so the way in which we're going to do that is we need to put a tag on the emitter so we're able to make adjustments so let's go to tags cycles 40 tags and we're gonna pick the cycles instance tag okay which gives us these options now at the moment by default it creates sphere instances with 24 segments so if you imagine a sphere with 24 segments has got a lot of polygons and then that is being multiplied by half a million particles so it's having to create draw and render an awful lot of geometry to render this which is going to be very slow so we're going to do a couple of things instead of using the default spheres we're going to use cubes because cubes only have six polygons so it's far fewer so to do that what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna bring a cube into my scene I'm just gonna pause that renderer for now so here's our huge cube in our scene and we want to make this way smaller so I'm going to make that I don't know five by five by five centimeters and then go back to the instance tag I'm going to drag my cube into the objects so now the instances are going to be this cube not the spheres which means they're going to be quicker to render so if I hit play and now it's going to be instant seeing cubes instead of spheres and it's gone black why is it gone black well that's because when we're using an object to instance you have to put the material on the object itself so let's grab this emission texture and put it on our cube object so it will reload it'll redistribute and see that happened an awful lot more quickly but it's this cube is way too big it's blowing out the scene because they're so large these instances so let's go to our instance tag and we can adjust the size here so let's put this down to I don't know let's let's just try let's just try 1% and see what 1% looks like okay so now we're immediately seeing the detail of our simulation because our cube was a small enough to reveal that detail so this all already without doing anything it looks quite quite nice isn't it let's put a bit of size variation in there as well let's put I don't know say 5% okay so now we have our cubes and they're emitting white light and well not quite white they're emitting this coloured light here all right and they each are emitting the same strength so now what we want to do is we want to start coloring this emission and we're going to do a couple of things the color we are going to get from a blackbody object so let's right-click in here and you've deleted that okay and we'll go right click convert a blackbody and we're going to put the color of the blackbody into the color of the emission node and it's going to update and we're getting this kind of burnt orange look and that's because that's what color comes from this temperature in a block blackbody system so what we're gonna do is we're going to keep that color but what we'll do is we'll just shift the hue so let's go right click and go to color hue saturation value and we're just not going to keep everything else the same but let's just knock this hue down and we want to kind of cyan color so there we go and we can make adjustments to that but that looks pretty decent alright so I'll tell you what I'm just going to go to show attributes and take that off because I can use my attributes in my app tube use window down here so I don't need to see my attributes in this node editor as well right I'm just going to go to an earlier frame well we've got fewer particles alright so there we go we have got our cyan colored particles and they're emitting light so now what we want to do is we want to adjust them we don't want all of them to be emitting the same strength light and so for the first time we're going to utilize the black and white color that we cashed into our particles you say our particles are black and white and this was defined by the noise pattern from where they were emitting so how do we access that information in cycles well we've got a particle information node so let's right click input particle info node and this comes in and this is all the data that we're able to farm from our particles and access within cycles 4d so that an awful lot of data in there that we can use we're just interested in the color channel because that's where we save these black and white values so what we're going to do if I just take this color value and put it into the strength of our emission object now we're getting different levels of light being emitted on the particle depending upon the black and white values of the original particle simulation all right so that is very interesting but it's not quite what we want yet because we want only some of these particles to be emitting blue light and some of the particles I don't want to be emitting any light at all and only be seen when they're reflecting that or taking on some of that blue light in kind of a diffused way so what we need to do is we want to use these black and white values but we need to clamp it a little so we're only getting some of them so the way in which we clamp that is we convert this color using a converter color ramp so if I stick that color ramp in there and we want the color not the Alpha what is happening is this I'm just gonna so this is the output if I highlight this this is coming from the particle information and it's black and white values by feeding it into this color ramp what I've done is I've effectively normalized that I've made the darkest particle black and the lightest particle white so let's hit that and it looked the same but a bit more contrasty alright so that's very useful in its own right to normalize a black and white image but what I'm able to do by adjusting this gradient I can move the white point which is gonna make them emissive and I couldn't move the black point so let's say only this section of the gradient is now going to be emissive and you see we've cut out some of the particles we no longer have as many let's just increase the size of that a little bit so we can see a bit more so this is what was being displayed and now by clamping that now we're only allowing a certain amount of those to be white which means that only that amount are now emitting this material and we can mess around with this clamp value and get different levels of blue particle depending on what we want so if you wanted slightly fewer blue particles and you'd want to just squeeze these nuts in and clamp it more and then you're taking away even more I think that something like that is going to work we want a fair amount so that's okay for now and obviously we can adjust this so we can leave our emissive part of this material there let's just right-click and hide or new sockets hide our new sockets and tidy this up so that this is our emissive section excellent right so I'm just going to hold alt and cut that so we no longer have any texture rendering from here we'll be using this a little bit later on but let's just leave it up there for now right so the next part of our node system we need to build this the second part when the second part is the rest of the particles need to be a selectively material which are going to read reflect some glints out of our scene lights which are going to give us a good look so let's start by doing that so because this because this part of the texture isn't going to be emitting any light we're not going to see anything in the viewport unless we put some lights in the scene so first of all let's put a general bit of lighting in by doing a cycles environment which is the same as I convert a cinema 4d sky object so we've got the cycles environment and here is our environment object in the material in the object manager and it has this background texture and by default it's a kind of an off-white color with a strength of 1 and now you can see that we can see our particles and the particles are showing up as black because there is no there's no nothing in the material in the surface so they're just showing up as black objects for now so the background instead of it just being this one matte color we are going to use a kind of a bit like a physical sky it's the cycles for the equivalent of a physical sky so to do that we need to pipe the physical sky color into the color input of the background so let's right-click and we'll go to texture sky texture which gives us this and if we pipe that into the color you'll see that we get this sky with a bit of a ground playing blue sky and a bit of Sun haze and that's going to that's going to work I just before I move on I've noticed can you see this black cube here which looks a bit odd what is it well that black cube is our cube object which we're using to instance in the instance tag and we don't obviously want to see that in our scene so what I'm going to do with that is just go to the coordinates of the cube and just put a massive value in the X hit return and that will just get rid of it I see good all right so we don't need to see this background object we just wanted to show it within the reflections of our glossy material so to hide that if we go click on the environment object and in the attributes we've got this rave visibility which is a bit like a cinema 4d compositing tag and if I just say not visible to the camera it won't render but it'll be seen in all of these channels of whatever material that we built so that's going to work right so let's go back to my material so at the moment nothing's rendering because we don't have anything plugged in to the surface so what we want to do is make a new material so I'm gonna start off by making we're going to go for shader and we're going to go for a glossy material the glossy just means are highly reflective so if I put that glossy into the surface and we'll render so now we have a white shiny material and if you look closely in the real-time preview you can see that some parts of it are blue some parts of it a yellow very faint but they're there and that's because this glossy material is reflecting the blues and yellows in that sky object so it's working so far this is being illuminated by the sky all right very good so this first glossy material is going to be we want it to be a gold color and this is this is going to be used to create some really nice glints from the scene lighting which we'll put into the scene in in the next stage so what we want to do is we want the color of this to be a kind of a gold a burnt orange gold color maybe slightly more yellow than that something along those lines okay so that looks okay that's the kind of look that we're after maybe again slightly more yellow we can make adjustments should we need to so that's going to be one of the the glossy materials the next glossy material we're going to put a gradient in and so what I'll do is let's bring in another shade glossy and I'm just gonna pipe this into the surface for now so this is a new glossy material and this one I want to have a gradient applied to it so this is what I'm gonna do I'm gonna bring in a converter color ramp and the color ramp I want it to be based off of our particle black and white values so exactly the same as we did here so if I hit this color want to show what the colour ramps doing we've got the black and white values but now instead of it being from black to white what I want to do is map a colored gradient onto those particles so what I'll do in this node settings I go to the node settings and under the color ramp I can go to preset so these are the the cinema 4d presets that you get for gradients and we could make our own or we could just use one of these quite like this flame coloured one it's not quite right but I'm going to bring that one in and now we'll see that this gradient is being mapped to the black and white values of the particles and we're getting this look in the viewport which is looking quite interesting so I'm just going to change it slightly I don't want this white and I don't want these very light values I'm going to take these away and even that one and this one I'm going to make more of a kind of burnt orange color okay so that's looking interesting and this one I'm going to put some real garish color in there right okay I like that so then what I'm gonna do is let's feed the color of this gradient into the color of the our new glossy material okay and now what we want to do is I want to mix this one with this one and so the way in which we do that I'm going to go to right click and go to shader mix shader and I'm gonna put my gold glossy in the bottom my multicolored glossy in the top and now if I hit this we'll see that we're getting a mix between those two so it's looking gold but we've got the hint of those colors coming through and at the moment let me just zoom into this node at the moment it's mixing it by a factor of 0.5 so it's equally mixing the the multicolored with the yellow instead of that what I'm gonna do is again I'm gonna go back to my black and white particle color values and I'm gonna mix it by those so the whiter particles are gonna be more yellow and the darker particles are gonna be more of the multicolored look so let's pipe that in and now we'll get a different look so that's interesting we've got more yellow highlights and then we've got these more multicolored ones where it is darker okay so at the moment the only thing that is making this material show up is our environment object with that background material which is giving this overall it look it actually looks it doesn't really look reflective it looks diffused and that's because we've got this 360-degree quite flat light hitting it so what we want to do now is add some glints and some hot spots to this where the cubes are kind of rotating and glinting off light and to do that we need to put a scene light into the scene so how we'll do that I'm just gonna go back to my regular layout and come out of the camera so what we need is we need a light object and we need to quite probably quite a small but strong light object and we want it to be in front of the particles kind of pointing light in this direction so we're getting glints off the particles as they tangentially rotate so what we'll do is we'll just do this with a simple plane here so it's a cinema 4d plane we're gonna hit T and scale it way down probably a bit more maybe something like that hit e for the move tool move it back and we kind of want it probably slightly above maybe move it a bit on the X and then let's hit rotate R for the rotate and let's rotate it round so it's kind of facing our particles so something like that that's going to be our light and we might need to adjust that but let's have a look so at the moment this plane isn't going to do anything because it has no material we need to give it a new emission texture so it's emitting its own light so we'll go to create cycles for D surface emission and we'll put that emission onto the plane let's go back to my cycles layout and the emission let's just make it white for now and I don't know about the strength and the hit render and we should start seeing some glints go to my camera view so let's put up the strength of this light and now we're getting these hotspots and what these are they are glints coming from our reflective material from these reflections and they're bouncing off the cubes when the cubes are facing in the right direction at the right angle to be affected by that light that's looking pretty nice so we've got two different forms of what looked like lights here we've got our emission texture and we have got our glints and light and then if we mix those together that is how we're going to get our our final material so let's go and mix these together so we've got this mix shader' and we want to mix in our emission which is our blue particles so the way we do that we're not going to mix them we want to add them on top we want this kind of to be an additive mix so let's see what we do would go to right click a shader add shader and we're going to put our reflective glint Ewan's on the bottom and our blue illuminated ones on the top now if we see the result of the add shader this is what happens we've got our blue particles with our hints and glints coming from the reflections which will flicker on and off and we can then pop that into our surface okay so that's looking pretty good so at the moment methought it getting near to the look that we want but admittedly it looks a bit sparkly and a bit odd in the viewport and that's because with this type of particle render where you can actually see the individual particles this isn't a 50-million particle simulation where the particles single particles are invisible and it becomes like one homogeneous milky particle mass this isn't that this is a kind of a lower res particle render where you're actually supposed to see individual particles and with those types of scenes the scene is made and the effect is made by a few things which are more of a compositing thing it's made by the blur caused by the depth of field it's the camera angle with a bit of parallax and also it is the way in which you color correct and you you glow add glow to the particles so that's how we're gonna get that so let's start bringing some of those elements in let's start with looking at depth of field first so we have our camera and at the moment everything is in focus because we have no depth of field set so what I want to do is set which part of our scene is going to be crisp and InFocus and to do that we'll hit the camera and in the object tab we have this focus distance amount so if I hit this pointer I can then pointer any part of my scene and it will focus in on that point so I'm gonna hit I want this bit this detailed bit here and this bit here to kind of be in focus really so I'm just gonna click on this and just guess now nothing has happened but if I now go to my cycles my 4d camera tag here I've got my depth of field settings and if I increase the size you'll start seeing that parts of it get blurred out so let's I don't know point 0 6 maybe okay so now this real one has blurred out a lot this bit is in focus and we've got various bits in and out of the focus from that's looking quite nice I'm just gonna blur out a lot more actually just so I can get a better understanding of where we are with that focus and I'm going to increase this size so I could see a bit more detail as well okay so I kind of this this has got some really nice wispy detail here and this is what I want really to be in focus so I'm gonna go back to my camera and let's see if we can get that part more in focus let's just try clicking here no that's not the right but that's a little bit too close I'm just gonna use this slider now to edge it to see if I could make a difference this way so that's starting to come more into focus okay all right that's looking pretty nice so that's just that down so we can see the whole scene all right so that's looking pretty good so we're gonna have these two areas of nicely InFocus particles and everything else is gonna be out I don't want this to be such a shallow depth of field so let's pull this back down 2.06 and what I'm gonna do is add some blades now this is the blades of the shutter so this will give you different types of blurred out kind of bouquet effects I always like to have at least six so the blurred out bits are going to be hexagonal rather than discs but obviously that's that's personal preference all right so that's looking pretty good now one thing I'll draw your attention to is this these particles are being illuminated only by the blue particles which are emitting light and then we have the gold and the multicolored particles are glinting these strong glints from our scene light and the rest of these areas which are much more subtle these are just reflecting that background sky now arguably we need this to have more contrast I don't really want these more purpley less light particles to be as prominent and so if I wanted to make an adjustment to that I could just reduce the strength of the background material which is on on the sky by just reducing this strength to say 0.5 and it's gonna add much more contrast to the scene you see that's taking that out if I go down to point to even more contrast and it becomes even more subtle but actually I'm quite happy to have less contrast in this scene and to actually render out more detail I can add more contrast in the compositing stage with color correction if I need to and by rendering it like this I've got loads of information in there should I need it so I'd much rather render out in a more kind of flat own contrasted way and then add that contrast later so that's looking pretty good I'm happy with this so now we're ready to do maybe a couple of test renders before we actually put this out and render the entire scene so what we'll do is that stop that real-time preview and let's go to our render settings so if you haven't already got this set up you want to go to cycles 40 as your renderer then your cycles 4d settings first of all I'm using CUDA to render this because I've got to pretty fast cuda cards so that's going to be quicker for me I can leave my tiles on the default settings then I'm going to go down to my samples now if you're just loading this up your samples will be on for samples by default which isn't enough so we're gonna need I think 30 samples is gonna be enough here but we might need more let's just try 30 to start with so that's going to be our samples I'm not using denoising on this scene so I can leave I want to leave this seed on 0 and that means that any noise that is in the scene will be kind of animated noise from frame to frame which will give it a realistic film look so we'll leave that as it is then we're going to go down to my light paths and ray depth settings now by default your default settings will be something like that now your minimum your maximum rate balance is set to one isn't going to be enough to get the best quality here we want some glossy depth that sort of got some really good quality reflections to get a glossy depth of 4 you then have to put your max ray bouncers at 4 it's not gonna take this into account so we'll put our rate bouncers at four glossy depth at four I think that'll do for now and let's just do a test render on this so we'll go to output gonna select current frame and we're gonna do it - let's do a full render output at 1080p all right and in the save tab I'm gonna make sure you select openexr which is a 32-bit formatted file type which means that this 32-bit color image will be it'll look exactly the same when you render because it'll have the same color and light values so that's what we want to do and we're rendering current frame all right so let's give this a go so we will render to picture viewer and I'll just increase the size of this a bit let's see how long this is going to take Tyrande so it's not the end of the world we've got what 20 seconds art and what we're really looking out for here is in the blurred out areas how much noise is still there there's a fair bit of noise in this really blurred out point and in this part of the animation there's a fair bit of noise so what what we need to do so that took 37 seconds so what we need to do is make a decision is can we live with this amount of noise or do we need to up our sample amount so what I'm going to do I'm going to I'm really liking the look of this by the way that's looking nice but I think we could perhaps get away with having slightly more samples so let's do I tell you what let's do it we'll do a comparison instead of upping the samples I'm going to keep the samples exactly the same but we're going to try doing a render with denoising now I'm going to activate it and I'm gonna keep the radius to fall to 8 but what I'm going to do is reduce the strength because I only want a slight bit of denoising otherwise it might blur some of the detail out so I'm gonna put the strength down to point 1 and the only other thing I'm gonna do is change and this seed amount to 1 and if you're using denoising you don't want your any noise that is created in the scene you don't want that noise to be animated you don't want dawna to have a random seed because then the denoising is gonna change from frame to frame you're gonna get these weird blurring artifacts so by clamping this seat to one it means any noise will be the same in every single frame which means that your denoising will be consistent throughout right so let's just have a render of that now so this will take slightly longer that previous render took what 37 seconds so this is gonna render out all of those samples in exactly the same way and once it's finished rendering the samples it'll then apply that denoising to it so it's going to take slightly longer but not too much I mean it might be 10 seconds longer if that so we're getting through this denoise some of the tiles so we're specifically looking at these more blurred out areas and let's see so we can see that it's Dino this bit and it's done a good job so you can see that there's no noise in there now and we haven't actually lost any detail from our particle part and this bit has been denied pretty nicely as well and it's had a six second hit on us and I can live with that that's I think that's pretty decent okay finally so this technique is going to be made by two post-effects that we are going to use motion blur is going to make this look fantastic and also glow now we could do both motion blur and glow in cycles 4d I'm just going to show you how we would do that I'm not gonna do use cycles for D for the final render for this I'm gonna do just a 2d motion blur and glow effect in my compositing software but let me just demonstrate how you would do motion blur you would go to your render settings cycles render settings and here under the light pattern radius menu is the motion blur menu and you would simply activate motion blur and then the controls for the motion blur take place in your cycles 4d camera tag and if I just scroll down here we have a motion blur setting so the motion blur position tells you where it's blurred from the center of the object or the beginning of the direction of movement or the end of the direction of movement normally it keep it in the center and the shutter time is how long the shutter of the camera is open for so if it's open for a longer time then the motion blur effect will be loads more if it's a shorter shutter time there won't be as much motion blur effect so what I'm gonna do I'm gonna render one motion blur frame because it's a fantastic effect in cycles but it has a big impact on your render times because it's having to effectively render three frames at once to work out that before and after positions of the particles so with it activated I'm gonna hit render so previously without motion blur we had a decent render with good quality at 1080p of 43 seconds now we're rendering the same image with motion blur and my guess is that this one is it might take twice as long to render so let's just dolly out and look at this full effect so you can immediately see that we have a motion a blur effect here for mover there we go so there's the motion blur and it's it's fantastic accurate motion blur for each particle the ones that are moving more quickly obviously are causing more of a blur than the ones moving slowly and it's looking really great it does a fantastic job of realistic motion blur the problem is that it has this hit on your render times so already we've been rendering for a minute we haven't got the entire frame done so we'll keep going and we're looking at at least double the time it could be even more so what I'll do I'm gonna stop that there because I'm not going to do motion blur in cycles and because I know for this scene that a post effect motion blur in my compositing software is going to work just as well for our purposes all right okay so we're ready to do a final render without motion blur so I'm gonna go to my output settings and I'm going to put all frames I'm then gonna go to my save settings we're going to save it make sure you hit openexr and you're going to put your save filepath here and once that's done we're just then going to render to picture viewer and fire this one out so what i'll do is i'll pause the tutorial here I'll get it rendered and I'll return when it's finished I'll tell you how long it took to render and then show you some compositing tricks in After Effects so here we are in After Effects that render took about two and a half hours to complete and here our final simulation and it's looking pretty nice and the only thing I'd say about it is that I think we've got the speed of our simulation is it's developing a little bit too quickly and I think to get more of a feel of the scene that was in the X particles real would probably want to slow down this simulation somewhat so we could do that in the explosion of X simulation speed settings but for now this is fine it's looking nice but what we're going to do is just do a couple of compositing and techniques just to make this pop a little because as it stands we're getting this nice these nice different materials working well together we've got the consistent blue glowing particles we've got these darker purple particles which are providing the nice contrast between the light and the shade and then we've got these really nice orange and multicolored glimpse coming off and these are the reflective surfaces bouncing those scene lights so it's all looking nice but it's looking a little bit too flat so let's do a couple of things in post to make this pop a wee bit so the first thing I'm going to do is just to add a little bit more contrast so we'll do that very easily by going to layer effect color correction and curves and we're just going to put the most basic of contrast curves in here so crush the blacks raise the highs and that just adds a little bit of contrast if I off and on that that's what we started with so it just I mean immediately by adding more contrast it feels like these illuminated and reflective areas a brighter so that's the first little bit a slight contrast curve and now we possibly don't need it but let's just try adding a very subtle glow effect onto this to see if we can make these brighter areas pop even more now don't overdo this because we'll lose detail but let's just see if we can put a little bit of glow in there to make it look a bit nicer so we'll go to effect stylize and glow now that's too much at the moment but you can see with that glow it's really making that look illuminated but we're losing some detail here in these highlighted sections so this is this is way too much so I'm just going to increase the intensity so we can see exactly how this glows affecting the scene so we have this glow threshold and this is which what brightness the scene has to be before the glow is introduced so if I put that at 0% ever the glow is just applied everywhere and if I raise this the glow is only being it's only affecting areas that have certain light values so now if we put this really near the top it's only the really light sections which are being affected by the glow okay let's put this glow down now to the default of one and we'll will on and off it so this is it on that's the off so it's just making those bright bits pop out a little bit more and making it feel more luminous and I think we could just pop it back up again so we can see so what the glow radius dictates how much it is spread so if you want it to be a really wide overall glow you want a wider glow radius and if you want it to be a more kind of a pinpoint glow you want to bring this glow radius down so I'm gonna put the glow radius down to about two which is really tight and now if I on/off it you can see it's just making it pop a little bit without losing too much detail and then I'm gonna bring down the intensity we don't need that much so now we have this really subtle glow on and off on and off and I think that is enough to make this just pop a little bit more and that's looking nice okay so that's looking good so the final thing I want to do is add a little bit of motion blur the sum of these particles in this scene we're actually moving quite quickly as they're developing and at the moment there's no motion blur at all they are perfectly pinpoint crisp those that are in focus so you can get third-party plugins that do motion blur and that they're fantastic and you can get motion vectors out the cinema for to ensure that your blue is super accurate and that they're excellent plugins to use but if you just want kind of basic motion blur there is a new in built one in after-effects which came in in the last few releases and in certain situations it works really really well and we're gonna try that one today so what we do is we go to effect time and actually before we do that let's pre compose this layer with our effects on and that's the stage that you need to do first so if you right click on here and we're going to go to pre compose we're gonna move all attributes into the new composition and hit OK and this is now its own composition now and this composition is where we're going to apply the motion blur so we'll go to effect time and we're going to pick pixel motion blur and what I'm going to do is and I'm going to ramp up the settings so you can see what this motion blur is doing so the shutter angle is going to dictate how much motion blur you have so let's just put this up to say a thousand ok so now in the areas where the particles are moving we're getting this motion blur but you can see how we're getting these stepping artifacts because there's not enough information to stretch up this blur this far so to close down those stretching artifacts we need more samples at the moment there are only five samples between the two positions if we boost this up to say 30 it's gonna take way longer to render but it'll smooth out those blurred transitions so if your rump it ramping up your shutter angle you're gonna need to have many more shutter samples however we don't need that money because I only want a slightest little bit of motion blur on this I want it to be a very subtle effect so I don't want to lose the detail so the shutter angle I'm gonna put it down just to say I don't know 200 and I think that is just gonna be enough so the faster-moving particles are gonna have a little bit of blur as they're moving and no more so I'm gonna go a little bit more maybe 250 okay and that's it that's gonna be done okay so very simple compositing techniques that which will make quite a lot of difference a curves to contrast a tinies tinies little bit of glow and then some inbuilt After Effects picture pixel motion blur so I'll render this one out and then we'll play it back in real time and we can have a look at the effects so here's our finished Rando with those subtle compositing effects rendered out and you can see that that contrasts the glow and the motion blur just helps this scene pop a little bit more it makes it feel really luminous and gives you that feeling of realistic movement so that's it for this tutorial that is rendering our particle advection seen using cycles 4d if you want loads more X particles and cycles for T tutorials please go to the insidious here you can hit subscribe and then you'll immediately get all of our brand new material as soon as it's released so until next time I'll see you later [Music] you

Channel: INSYDIUM LTD

Views: 19,095

Keywords: MAXON, Cinema, 4D, C4D, X-Particles, xparticles, particles, simulation, cgi, vfx, mograph, motion graphics, motion design, design, cycles, cycles 4d, computer fx, fx, INSYDIUM, digital art, motion, motiongraphics, 3d, 4d, effex, visual fx, software, tutorials, tutorial, tip, hint, help, quicktip, trick, hints

Id: YUW7NqPDk6Y

Length: 48min 23sec (2903 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 14 2018