xpReel Tutorials, Procedural Growth - Cycles 4D - Part 2

[Music] hi I'm Bob through in Cydia makers of X particles and cycles for D and in this tutorial we're gonna be looking at taking the scene that we built last time out and rendering it in cycles for D here's how it looked in the X particles real we'll be building our material from scratch and using some custom black and white noise textures to mix shaders together in a very interesting way we're going to be using some of that color data that we burnt into our cache to give us some interesting transitional effects and then we'll finish up by using some depth of field and some motion blur so let's get started so here's our sell Auto coral growth scene that we built in the previous tutorial if I hit play we've got these particles floating upwards and a nice curve turbulent organic motion and then we have our coral growth making its way up and we've got a pretty simple nice camera move in there so before we go on to rendering with cycles I'm just going to do it a little bit of housekeeping here which will hopefully make our workflow more efficient so here are my 2x particle systems one for the sell Auto which is the the coral growth and this has been cached the cache is red which means it's reading from a cache and both the open V DB measure which is the mesh itself has been cached and the particles which are driving that measure have been cached as well so that means happen scrub backwards and forwards so let's just minimize that one and if we open up the system EFX which is controlling the movement of our floating particles this hasn't been cached and that means that every time we're running this through cinema 4d is having to process all of this explosion effects information to drive these particles so what we're going to do is cache this system as well so the computer's not having to waste resources doing that when it comes to rendering but we don't actually have to cash the explosion FEX simulation which if I make it visible and just come out with this camera it's this explosion which is driving these particles at woods and that is advective those black and white particles but we don't need to cash this information because we don't really need it we just need it to move these particles and then we'll just cache the position and color of those particles so it would be a much smaller cache file and it'll read and play much more quickly so to do that we'll go to other objects and we'll in this pulldown manual we'll select a cache object and I'm going to tick only in same system which means that it's only going to cache objects which it can cache within this EFX systems it's not going to try and overwrite any of these ones that we've already cached all right so before we build that I'm gonna select internal memory make sure that I've got compressed cache on build selected and then I'm going to go to this inclusion tab because I'm going to uncheck include EFX because I don't want to cache this object we don't need that data once we've recorded where the particles are moving to so that's gonna keep this light ok so that'll do so if we go back to the object tab we can now build cache and this is going to cache quite quickly because all is doing is recording the positional and the color values of these floaty particles and it's not caching all that EFX information so that's done and now the the emitter has a read cache tag the cache object has turned red which means it's reading from the cache so now what I can do I can switch off that explosion effects object so it's no longer making any calculations and now we have got a fully cached scene from the elements that we need cached so that's going to work a lot better the only other thing I'm going to do before we jump into into cycles 4d and start rendering is if you remember we have this camera move I want to replay the scene the camera is animating or woods and it's rotating on the heading and all of those key frames are being dictated by this null object this cam controller the camera itself isn't animated but because it's a child of this null which is it's moving with it but if if I dolly din with this camera active it's gonna mess up the position of it so what we're going to do is add a cinema 4d protection tag which is just gonna mean that we can't accidentally adjust this camera by mistake and we'll have this move that we've pre-recorded saved so just go to tags cinema 4d tags and we're looking for the protection tag and now even if I try and move that camera with the one two and three shortcuts for dollying and orbiting it won't work because of this protection alright and that means that our camera move is safe and we're not going to accidentally mess it up okay so now we're ready to go into cycles 4d and start rendering this so what I'm going to do is I'm going to change my layout into a screen layout that is going to be better for demonstrating cycles so I'm just gonna go to go to this saved layout here cycles 4d and I'll just explain exactly what we have here so my object manager looks exactly the same as the same object manager it's just been moved down to this corner my viewport is very very small let me just come out of that camera I've got it docked here so here's my viewport of the scene if I press play it's happening but I don't need a huge viewport in this view because I'm more interested in the cycles real-time preview so have that viewport so I can still navigate it but it's made very small down here and then the major part of the layout is I've got the cycles real-time preview window here where we're going to see the renders and I've got my material node editor here where we're going to build our materials so at the moment if I press play on the real-time preview we have a black screen that's because there are no lights in this scene so cycles can't see any of these objects that we've put in so the very first thing we're going to do is is bring in a cycles for the environment which is a little bit like a cinema 4d sky object so let's go to cycles 4d and we'll go to environment when the environment has been put into our object manager it has an environment texture tag attached to it the texture tag has been created here and if I click on it we can see the nodes of how this texture tag has been set up and in our real-time preview and this environment object is now lighting our mesh and we can see it okay so at the moment the background it's only can it's the material is just one node it's his background shader that's it and it has two controls a strength and a color now there's one little tip here and if you want to change the color of this you can double-click on this box and then change the color but it will only update once you hit OK press ok and then everything is blue in this environment and that's fine it works but it's not very efficient so a better way of adjusting the color is if you have the node highlighted its settings then appear in the normal attribute manager and if we pull this color down we can now make live adjustments and those adjustments will update immediately so it's a much more efficient way of picking colors effectively okay good so we're not actually going to use a color from this palette we're going to input a color now I want this to look like a realistic sky a bit like a physical sky in in cinema 4d rendering so what we need to do is bring in another node which is going to feed in that information so the way we do it is right click in here and we're going to go to texture and there is a sky texture so let's bring that in now in cycles 4d even if this node isn't attached to anything if you click on the output it gives you a preview of what that node will look like in the viewport so now you can see that this sky texture is brought in this kind of ground plane and then we've got this sky in the background and now this is lighting it and our object looks very different so I won't go through this massively but basically turbidity is a bit like haze so the more turbidity you have it's kind of bringing in more kind of Sun haze the less turbidity the sky will look bluer and it's kind of it you get a colder look this brings in a warmer a warmer flavor okay so that looks all right so what I'm going to do is pipe that into my color input the background node and now that's all hooked up and that's working now I want to use this background object to light the scene but I don't want to see it this isn't going to be part of our final render so what we need to do is is disable its visibility so if we go to our environment object in the object manager and go to its attributes what we can do we have this rave visibility and this is like a compositing tag in cinema 4d so if I uncheck camera the camera cannot see the background object but it is still being used to light the mesh and like the scene so there we go so if I may just made a few adjustments to this you see the lighting is changing but we're not seeing that background okay so that will do for now I'm not going to get too hung up on the background right so now what we need to do is we need to make our texture our material for our coral and it's a hugely complex look the final render for this there are kind of black shiny parts there are gold leaf parts there were the glowing blue parts as the coral grows there are bits of bump this displacement there's all sorts going on but all of that is achieved with one material and that is the beauty of this procedural node-based material building so what we need to do is is start that material off so I'm going to go this is my material manager here I'm going to go create cycles for D and I'm just gonna make an object material which brings in the material here so let's put it onto our table let's just minimize the EFX system let's open up the sell Auto Coral system and the mesh this this this material needs to go on the mesh which is the open VTB measure so here's my object material drop it on as you normally would and it's now applied to our object so the object material in cycles brings in these two nodes so this is just the output node that comes with any material and this is feeding whatever we put into the surface of our object that's the output node and then the object node uses what's called the principled shader and this is a really clever shader because it can be used to make almost any material so if I have this metallic slider set to zero this is a diffuse material and I can change the base color remember make your color adjustments here so let's give it a horrible color so we can change the base color and if we increase the roughness amount then we're going to make it a fully diffused material with one and if we bring that down the specular starts to have an effect and it can look shiny so that's a diffuse material it can be a glass material if you put transmission on to one it becomes a glass material now obviously with glass you wouldn't want any color in the base color so then if we had objects to reflect and to refract in our scene you would see this and this would look like a transparent glass material so it can do glass as well it can do subsurface scattering looks using these so if you wanted to kind of a translucent material that absorbs light and spreads and scatters that light like wax or that kind of thing you can do subsurface guttering and also you can do metal if we turn the metal slider to 100% to one it now becomes a metal object and you can play with roughness and get different metal effects so it's hugely powerful and you can apply a topcoat with a gloss you can color the gloss differently you can have bump maps for the clear coat and a different bump map for the base material and it's incredibly powerful it's a brilliant note but we're going to use it very basically we want a metal material so I'll leave the metal slide drop on one and we want it to be pretty dark and I want a hint of blue in it so something a bit like that so now if I come in a little bit let's have a look okay so I think we could be maybe a bit bit lighter a bit more blue all right and I think we could roughing it up a little bit and have it slightly less shiny okay that's good so this is our base material and there's an awful lot of ports in here it's taking up a lot of real estate in our node editor and we don't need it now we're finished with the adjustments on this one so what I can do if I right-click on it and put hide unused sockets it then becomes a much more manageable note brilliant that's our base coat so just before I move on if you can notice in our editor we're getting these kind of blocky edges and that's because our mesh in our object manager is it's not a very high poly mesh we kept it low poly so it would it would animate quickly so let's fix that without having to rebuild this mesh making it more dense and then recache it so what we'll do is we'll use a cinema 4d subdivision surface to do that so click on this button here which brings in a subdivision surface to our scene let's drag it down into our generator submenu and in a subdivision surface by default it's going to subdivide it two times in the preview window and three times on render which we don't need that much detail statistic that to one and we'll put our open VDB measure inside the subdivision surface and you can see now that it's much more heavily subdivided and we've smoothed out those horrible edges but it should still play relatively quickly in the viewport is still using the X particles cache but now it's being smoothed out it's not going to play as quickly because it's having to subdivide it and make those calculations but we're still getting decent performance right so this is our base texture now and that's looking quite good so what we want on the outside of this we want to simulate a of a thin film reflection those beautifully separated colors that you get on things like you know bubbles and whatnot and there is a way of there's a fantastic shader which was created by a really talented user in the cyclist 4d community and he built a group to make realistic thin film shader and it's you know it's it's about 50 of these nodes to create it and it's brilliant hugely powerful but we're just gonna cheat it for this and we're going to cheat it for a couple of reasons one because it's a really good trick it's very fast to render because they were only going to use three nodes and for this render the subtleness of the of the thin film effect this this Chiti way is going to work it doesn't need to be photo real so the way we're going to do that we're going to mix our base texture which is this one together with a highly reflective material so let's build that highly reflective material Morgause right-click shader and we're going to bring in a glossy so remember with cycles if we want to see what just this one looks like all we have to do is click the output node and there we go to preview so it's a highly highly shiny glossy metal like surface okay that's good but we don't want it to be this color we want this glossy effect to have that thin-film refracted kind of light look so the way we're going to achieve that is we're going to use a noise to color it so we're bringing the noise so right click and we need to go to texture and we want to bring in a noise texture so again let's look at this so in cycles the noise has both the factor the black and white values but also it has color data as well which is very useful so this is what we're going to use to color our to color our very glossy shader so if I just type that into the color and now look at this one so now you see for free without doing anything we're getting this suggestion of something that looks like that thin film bubble look there's a couple things we have to do to adjust this to make it right now at the moment Cycles doesn't know how to map this noise texture onto our object and we need to tell it now this is the object is an open V DB measure it doesn't have any UV coordinates so we can't use UV coordinates to tell this noise where to be mapped onto the surface so we have to do something different thankfully it's very easy then a right-click and we're going to go to an input node and we want a texture coordinate and the texture coordinate comes in here and these will tell the texture how to be mapped so if I select UV it's not working we don't have proper UV coordinates and so on this and so this is this UV map is gonna look dreadful if we try and map noise using this it won't work but what we can use is one of two we can use generated which are the coordinates generated by the object now the generated are very good and they give a good approximation of how this texture will be mapped on but sometimes if you use generated it can stretch textures sometimes and we don't want our noise to be stretched especially when this object is going through its growth period if the textures start to stretch and move it's going to shatter the illusion that it's part of that so instead of using generated which which does a good job but can stretch and Bend we're going to use object which is doing a very similar thing but it's not stretching and bending it to fit so let's put that into the vector of the noise and now if I hit this one this is how it's mapped on let's just go to the color of the noise right so I think we need this to be smaller so if we increase the scale we're going to get more noise patterns and we could increase the talent and and and faff around with this for ages but that is going to look pretty decent straight away and so it's kind of got a pretty decent look without doing much so we have this and we have our base color and what I want is you see these kind of highlights towards the edge of this mesh instead of those highlights just being this reflected light from the sky I want it to be this thin film effect so how do we do that well we need to do a couple of things I'm just gonna select these and bring them down and bring that on up so we need to mix these two shaders together so let's go to shader mix shader and I'm going to put the thin film effect into shader 2 and I'm gonna put the base material into shader 1 and then in that's going to go into the surface so at the moment is it's equally mixing them between the base and the thin film by this factor and the factors in the middle at 0.5 which means it's equally mixing both if I move that to zero it's just the base if I move it all the way to 1 it's just the thin film so let's put it back to the middle so instead of using the slider we are going to use an input into here to tell it only to apply it to the edges so to do that we're going to use an input and we're going to use a layer weight when a layer weight gives you two options you can either have Afrin al so obviously you probably know how Afrin al works it would be more reflective towards the edges of the of the of the curved object and less reflective facing you all we've got facing which is slightly different now this is going to give us a better effect so what this is saying is where it's black it's always 100% black it will be this shader our base material and where it is white it'll be the thin film so let's just pop that into our factor now look at our mix shader and there we've got it we've got so that's just Dali in a bit so the the parts that are facing us directly at the base texture and then the its falling off to this pretend thin film but it's a little bit harsh there's too much thin film I want it closer to the edges so let's just go back to this facing so we need this to be more black and then fall-off to white a bit more abruptly so there's loads of different ways of doing that but but basically we need to add contrast to this black and white gradient so the way we'll do it is in our color we can adjust the colour of this with any of these which you might be used to using in Photoshop or After Effects so we could do it with an RGB curves so let's put the curves in I'm gonna put that into the color take the factor out so with feeding the black and white from this into the color and now with the color if I add a contrast curve it will darken the black areas and we're getting more black now so let's look at what that's done to the shader and now that's pushed the thin film out just to those white bits so that's using a curve let's just delete that another way of doing it do the same thing adding contrast to that black and white map we could go to color let's we could do it with a gamma adjustment so let's put the color into the color and the color into the factor and increase the gamma and we're doing a similar thing we're kind of crushing it and then if we look at this shader we've pushed out the thin film to the very edges and that will do for our base so our base material is a black shiny reflective surface a kind of fake thin film shiny reflective surface which has only been applied to the very edges of the facing which were crushed with a gamma and we're getting this very nice effect with not that many nodes and it looks pretty cool very nice ok so what we can do now is tidy up this node tree because this is just the start this is the base so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to select all of those I'm going to right-click I'm going to put Group select it which puts them into this group and I'll just dolly in and basically the group has all of it has all of the nodes inside and we've we've we've we've stacked them into this one group which makes it tidier but we just need to do one thing for it to work so if you notice our previews gone black and that's because we need to put the mix shader' into the output of the group and then I'll come out of it so now we have this output and we need to put that into our surface there we go so we're back to square one but we have our base texture and what I can do if I rename node I can call this base Matt excellent and if I need to adjust any of those I can go back in and make adjustments to all of these nodes but at the moment I can just leave it as is and it's much cleaner so let's put our first bit of detail on this texture now so we're going to add a gold kind of leaf look to this but just have it in very kind of defined places and we're gonna start mixing these together using the same principles that we've already employed we're going to mix materials using a black and white map to dictate how the mixing happens so this is gonna be our base and we're gonna mix it with a gold color so let's get a shader and get a mixed shader in there and this will go into shader 1 and this will be the new surface output for our material so we need to get a gold material so let's build one with a principled shader and here we'll want a gold color put that into shaded too so we want a gold color and that'll do not going to faff around with this let's put the metallic up to full which will make it shiny and that'll do so right click hide our new sockets so now we're mixing a gold with our base layer this sides the base this sides the gold and in-betweens a horrible murky muddy mess so we're going to define where the gold is and where the base is by using a black and white map and we're going to get a really complex noise map to do this so let's right-click go to texture and we'll go to noise texture and there is our noise texture in our viewport and we need to map this to the object so let's go to input texture coordinates and we'll map the noise texture to the object coordinates okay so at the moment let's put the detail right up and reduce that scale - let's try three so that reduces the scale actually makes it a little bigger in the screen so that's good it's not very detailed though it's very blobby this so if we try and use this to drive this to try and drive the mix of these two materials we're not going to get very far but here's a really good trick with these noise textures now you can copy any node in cycles by holding ctrl or command so you hold it down drag it and we get a new node and if I put the color of this one into the new vector and let's have a look at this new one it immediately adds detail let's do it again color into the vector more detail this is looking good so let's try copy enough let's just try one more color into the vector look at the new one all rights and lock all that detail that we've got in there now it's kind of like a almost a marble e-type texture looking really nice but again we need lots more contrast in this for it to work so we're gonna do this contrast slightly differently this time we're not going to just use a curves or a gamma adjustment we're going to use a color ramp a grayscale color ramp which will give us the chance to clamp this in interesting ways so let's right click convert a color ramp and we're gonna put the factor into there and let's have a look so that's already darkened it slightly and if I just clamp this ramp look what happens I'll get really interesting results [Music] right so we're starting to get a lot of detail out of this noise texture which has been mapped across this object and it's it's doing things that look quite good so let's just try that we'll put that into our mix shader' into the factor and how does this mix our two materials together our it's kind of working isn't it we've got areas that are gold the white bits and we've got areas which are showing through the base texture all right but it's it's a bit muddy and we don't want as much gold as this so we kind of want it we want to clamp this output further so I'm just gonna duplicate that and let's feed that into our mix right so let's not look at our new one so because we've kind of doubled this clamping process it's had much more of an impact on this one and now we can start seeing that we're getting really defined sharp detailed white highlights on this texture this looks fantastic so now when we look at the gold it's much better this is gonna look great now at the moment it looks fine I like the shape but it's looking a bit boring but later on when we introduce some bump mapping to this it's just going to immediately pop and look fantastic but as it stands I think that will do is you don't want too much gold leaf we just want little bits here and there and I think we're getting it quite nicely so look this side is a little bit bare of them actually so let's just try reducing the clamping of the second one a little to bring a bit more in yeah so now we've got a bit more and obviously just play around with this until you got a look that you're happy with but for me that's going to work that's fine for me very nice so we have our gold mix which is excellent so what else do we need to do with this well this is the kind of the base material now has pretty much finished what else is there to do well what we need to do if you remember is that we need to get the growth of the glowing elements of this of this material and the LM think that the the glowing elements grow along with the growth of the coral itself so that's going to be the next section that we're going to work on so let's bring in an emission node so shader emission so this is for emitting light obviously so if we put that arm we get this white look so we're gonna color it first we want this nice blue color so we could just go to the emission tab and color it blue and that would work but what would be better which will give us different tonal values depending on how bright it is is if we use a black body which has is just one node and it has a temperature value so let's put the temperature value down a little bit I'm gonna feed that into my color and now the emission node will be taking this color but what we can do is we can shift the hue so let's go to Collette HSV stick that in and let's just shift this hue until we get the kind of bluish color that we want something like something like that movie all right so that's going to be our color now that'll do us so now what we can do is we can use another map another black-and-white map to dictate the strength of this emission which will give us a really nice effect across our across our object and what we're going to do I'm actually going to because we've got them I'm gonna reuse these nodes here so I'm going to take I'm gonna steal and copy this ramp and I'm going to feed into it the color from this noise that we've already used so now I've got a new ramp and what I'm gonna do with that is I'm going to I'm actually going to invert it to make it different so let's right click and invert these knots and now I've got a different a very different map okay good and I'm going to make a copy of you and let's put the color into the factor and [Music] let's just mess around with this until we've got something that looks half decent so I'm planning a black bits some harsh white bits let's just have a spin around okay a bit more bright brighter okay so that's the basic light pattern so then if we put this color into the strength of our emission node we get this which is a nice effect but what we can do is we can actually create a little power control by adding a math node and this just gives a slider so we can increase or decrease the strength so let's go to converter math and we'll pop the math in and we're going to change it from add to multiply and now we have a power slider in this math node at the moment it's it's timesing it by a value less than 1 so it's reducing its effect so if we put up to 2 let's just reset that so now we've got this quite strong emission that's looking pretty good and the beauty of this is we've managed to just borrow some of the nodes that we've already used excellent so now where are we this remind mined ourselves what we've got we've got our mix texture here which is our gold flake on top of our base object and now we have this new emission so we want to mix these two together so I'm going to make a copy of this one and let's put the emission the blue light into the other one and now we have a mix of these two okay which isn't what we want what we want to do is we want the light to grow on as the coral grows on and then gently fade off so how are we going to do that well if you remember when we built this seam let me just jump into my regular view if you remember when we built this scene we colored the particles that were driving the open V DB meshes let me just make that invisible here there's particles and we colored them from black from white and then fade into black as they got older so what we want to do is we want to get the white values from these particles and feed them somehow into a map in cycles which will give us that black and white map so when it is white now we'll see that nice blue emissive material and as they go black that'll fade away so how do we do that let's go back to our cycles view alright so what we need to do we're going to feed this new map based on those particle colors into the factor of this mix shader' so we need a couple of things we need a node that's going to allow us to access that particle color information and what that node is in the textures and it is a point density texture and what this is going to do we are going to be able to kind of create a volume radius around each particle inheriting the color of that particle and it will create this black and white volume which will animate over time so what we need to do with this point density texture we need to tell it which object you're getting your information from and we've got this object box here and it's the emitter so let's drag in this emitter and we need to tell it which particle which put a dated you want to get from that object we want to get the particle color which is what we set and if I hit color at the moment this node isn't doing anything what we need to do is a couple of things take off normalize and I'll do it here so it's more obvious so we've taken off this normalize and we need to map it to world space and we need the interpolation to be cubic okay and let's just move this on a little bit and we can see it starting to happen but the radius is way too big so the white particles is blocking out all of the black ones because the radius around them is huge so if I decrease the radius you'll see that we're starting to reveal the true colors and then what we want to do is reduce the voxel size which will help with the detail and make it kind of higher res so I would say probably a voxel size and let's get it away down at one and a radius of four right so now what we have got we've got a shader which as we play it is growing on with the same obviously following the shape of the coral and as they're getting older they're fading to black which is definitely what we want so so we're getting there this is looking good so what we need to do is treat this a little bit because it's not quite right just yet so let's take that color and let's put it into a color ramp so we can kind of make adjustments so we'll pop it in so now we're in the color ramp we can do some clamping so in fact we've got such a bright value here what we could do it we could do with reducing this so a quick way of reducing it without before we put it into the ramp is we can just we can multiply it by an amount less than 1 and it will it'll reduce it so let's just try that converter math pop it in let's change it to multiply and now we're multiplying it by a value of less than 1 okay and then in our color ramp let's bring this down and we'll change this would just we might we're gonna just this let's just bring this white value down a little bit okay so now we have this animating three-dimensional black and white map which we can use to drive the mixing of these two materials so let's see what happens we'll take the color of that put it into the factor and there we go so what we have now is if we just dolly in a bit we've got our original base material we have the gold flecks and then animating on we have this emissive material so let's just try I'll just switch off the subdivision surface which will make us process a bit more quickly and let's just true this will chug a bit but let's just see so now we've got this we've got this glowing texture which grows on as the coral develops but then disappears leaving behind it the base material okay so that's working good so let's take that off so now we need to start making a few adjustments and we need to get some bump going on here so we're just dalian again this is looking very nice but it's all kind of flat shiny surfaces and a bit of bump detailing is is really going to make the difference here and make this look fantastic so how we do the bump is if I just zoom in on my node editor so at the moment our shader which we've set up is going into the surface of the output node and we've got this displacement node here displacement port so what we need to do is input a black and white texture into this displacement and it's going to create the displacement for us so let's just go into the material settings and we've got a material settings part and here there is a displacement method pulldown and we can have bump true or both now true means displacement rather than just bump mapping where actually that the polygons are being displaced and moved whereas bump is just the illusion of displacement now true a displacement only works if in your render settings I've got my render settings docked up here if in your render settings you have in your cycles 4d settings you need to have let's move up you need to have features experimental selected otherwise that displacement won't work but it'll just bill just resort back to doing just normal bump mapping but for us that is what we are going to be doing we're going to be doing bump mapping so I'll just keep it on bump so what we need is a black and white map now we could make a new one out of the noises in a similar way in which we made the previous but we've already made so we could probably reuse one of these maps that we've already made so I'm just gonna have a look at some of the outputs of some of these noises now black is going to be no bump applied and white is gonna be 100% bump and then gray anywhere in between so what we want is we want a fair bit of white but we want lots of variation between whites and grays and it's it's nice to have quite a few patches of black of areas where there isn't any bump going on at all and it'll really make that that the bump pop then so this I think there's too much black in this one which means it's gonna be too many areas where there isn't enough bump going on so let's go in the one before it so now this one looks a bit more promising so let's just let's just put that one in and see what kind of bump this map gives us so all I need to do is take this output and put it into the displacement data like that let's have a look at what this bump is going to do now it's probably going to be a bit harsh and just get a bit closer so it's gone very dark and we've lost all of the reflections and that's because there's so much bump on this material now so what we need to do is reduce these reduce the strength of that bump but we can see we've got some nice reflective elements here now you see this this hole here where there isn't any bump and it's got the shiny reflective surface and then the other parts that don't you can see it in this this part as well so we want it we want to reduce the effects of this bump a little so we haven't got a slider there isn't a bump severity amount or anything like that so all we need to do is put in a multiply math node and that will give us the strength slider so let's go to converter math let's zoom in a little bit and let's change that to multiply and we want to stick it in there and now we were able to reduce the amount of that bump by just reducing this second value so let's try point one all right so straight away that that looks quite nice doesn't it that's just totally out a bit let's change that value again point one so that's looking better we've got areas of bump now and if we go to the gold sections you'll be able to see that we're getting so much nice detail in this bump it looks really really cool and then we've got these areas where there isn't any bump happening and that is the the black areas have got no bump so that's looking really good and that just it's amazing the difference that that bump makes to the overall look okay good so at the moment this scene is only been lit by our environment objects which is being hidden from the camera at the moment but that's our environment object and that's our only light source and what that's doing is it's giving us this nice edge lightness around here which looks which looks good but we could do with with bringing some lights in some additional lights in to help light the front parts of this object so what we can do what I'll do is I'll let's jump back into the [Music] regular layouts while we position our lights and then I can go back into to the cycle so on when we start looking at the render and how it's looking so here we are back in our scene and it's just darling out so let's make my mesh visible and I'll just scrub through to about right so this is our scene and our cameras at this angle and we need some lighting perhaps if from this direction and also perhaps from behind to help kind of illuminates the edges somewhat so let's do that so we'll go to the cycles menu and we'll go to a cycles light and this light let's make it an area light and we rotate it and this one's going to be a kind of a a light to the rear there we go all right that looks good so let's just see what if any difference that is going to make to our render so we'll jump back to our cycles view and now we have got this light let's look through the camera that we'll be using and let's increase the intensity of this light so it's giving us these highlights around here let's just come out of that camera again and let's get closer to it so it's giving us more kind of highlights around this section of turn the light off and they're off turn it back on so that's looking quite good like that just going to give it the slightest touch of the blue hue let's go a bit blue okay so that's looking nice very good and I think we could perhaps have a light coming down from above so I'll just jump back to my layout so what I can do is hold ctrl and grab this and then rotate our for the rotate tool point it downwards kind of like lighting from above or look quite dramatic alright this one I don't want that color I'm gonna just give it to try it with a warmer color and just see right so let's go back to our cycles 4d view it's Dali right in and see what this light gives us so this light is bringing some really nice reflections onto the onto the gold and that's shadowing it a little bit more and just giving us way more detail so we go back to my camera view and now this is starting to look like the effect that we're after this is this is looking decent okay so what happens is our growth comes on with our glowing coral the glowing subsides to leave behind the gold leaf and this would be one render where were kind of far out following the glow growth and then I guess a different render a different shot would be much more of a closer as its as its growing and seeing the gold leaf develop so that's looking I'm very pleased with that I think we can leave that alone for the time being and let's come away from that one and I'm going to call that coral material finished we might do some tweaking a bit later but that is going to be called finished so the final thing we need to set up before we can really start thinking about the final render is we need to get these particles rendered and included into the scene and then we need to set up some shallow depth-of-field to get those working for us and see what that final look is going to be so that's the next thing to build is the particles so to get good feedback let's switch off our cell auto system because we don't need to see that we're just going to be looking at our particles and we'll come out of our camera alright so at the moment obviously we're not rendering these particles we can't see them in our real-time preview so we need to give them a material first to be able to do that so let's go to create cycles for D and we're going to make an emission material because we want these particles to emit light so let's click on that and we have our new node structure so if I put this material emission material on our floatees emitter now we have particles not what we want yet but they are rendering and there we go coming into the viewport there we go so we have a start so by default cycles for D creates sphere instances for every particle and without the correct tag we've got no control over what these are like but if we put an X particles instance tag on this emitter we can then control exactly what it is instancing and how that set up so let's do that so I'll highlight the emitter and we'll go to tags cycles 4d tags instance tag so now by default its spheres the spheres have 24 segments which if you start to have a lot of particles in your scene it's having to create a lot of geometry in these instances which isn't great also got a size multiplier so we can reduce the size of those particles and then we can give them a random size as well which is nice but here's the powerful thing we can also put objects in here and we can instance objects so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna instance cubes instead of spheres because they're much lower geometry so they'll run quicker and render quicker and these are going to be so small and they're gonna be blurred out with the depth of field that they're not going to look like cubes anyway so let's just bring in a cinema 4d cube let's put the emission material on the cube and then we'll drag the cube into the objects and now it's all gone white because it's making these huge cubes because they're 200 meters across so let's just put this down turn a little 5 centimeters okay good and now we can reduce the size multiplier down to tiny little spheres cubes and then we'll get a bit of a random size so now it should run more efficiently because the instances aren't as kind of polygon intensive so there's our floaties very nice so we need to get some decent color so we're going to do the same color trick as we did with the glowing elements of our coral we're going to use a black body and then kind of shift the hue so let's go to converter black body and put that into the color Channel so now we've got these orange runs reduce the tab so now we want to do a kind of a huge shift so we'll go to color HSV and we'll just shift the hue it's about around here wasn't it that we got our kind of blue maybe drop this saturation a tad okay so that's going to be the color but now we want these to have a varied emission strength we don't want them all to be emitting the same intensity and that's why we gave the particles these colors these random colors from black to white we're gonna use that to drive how strong they're emitting this light so what we need to do is get feed that particle information into cycles so we need to spoke with a special node for that let's go to right-click and it is a input particle info node and we can get or farm all of this data that is contained within the particles and use it in cycles we only need the color because we colored them black too right so let's take this color well let's just pipe it directly into the strength and see what happens so there we go so the white particles are giving off a certain amount of intensity and the black particles are giving off much less and then they're kind of ramping in between so already we've got nice variation looks better but we haven't got any control over this strength so what we want to do is do the same old trick as putting in a math multiply node which will then give us a strength slider so let's right click converter math will change this to multiply pop it in and now we have this slider which can control the intensity and put it up make them brighter there we go so that's much better and now we've got these floaties that are organically moving and looking nice good so depending on you seen depending on your camera and its setup and the the level of depth of field blur you may want to put spheres in and not have this very kind of cubic look but if you can get away with cubes much better because it's it's much lighter to to process so let's go back into our camera so we'll go back into our camera from which we'll be rendering let's switch back on the the Kuril system and we'll get a better idea of how these look so they're going floating around and as we're moving up they kind of do in their thing and looking very nice alright so let's just add some depth of field now so at the moment this camera doesn't have any cycles controls and to access the cycle settings like depth of field and motion blur and the other things that you're able to do we need to give it a cycles 4d tag so we'll go to tags cycles 4d tags and a camera tag and this camera tag then unlocks these cycles 4d settings with depth of field motion blur parameters and also some post effects like vignetting and bloom and glare so the way it works is this if I increase in the depth of field bit the size of the radius will get blur and everything's being blurred out now and if I increase the blades these are the blades of the shutter and this will give you these really nice kind of bouquet effects if we give it a say six so now we have got nice hexagonal Baca particles which look fantastic but the problem here is our coral is completely out of focus we're not focusing on the correct area so to do that you go into the camera settings a regular cinema 4d camera settings and in the object tag you have your focal distance that this is the area that's in focus and if I click this out this arrow I can click on any part of my scene and the camera will focus in on that section so let's click on the mesh here and now the mesh is in focus and we've got some of the closer and further away particles out of focus and the ones close to the mesh obviously are more in focus so this is looking this is looking good there's one coming right across the front of the camera and that's looking nice no I think these are a little bit too big now that we're kind of blurred them out so let's go back to our particle instance tag and reduce this size multiplier down to maybe five and the size variation to about 15 okay I think that's looking better and I'm just going to jump back into my regular layout so I can get a better view of our mesh and I'm going to focus in on say this section here okay jump back to cycles okay so now we have got these nice particles doing their thing as we go up and that will do for now so obviously you can make adjustments to this you can adjust the brightness in this section here and bring them down a bit we think they're too bright you could adjust the color you could be just do a little bit more work but for us for this scene these are going to work fine for us so that's looking pretty good so the last stage now is to set up the settings for the final render to put this out so what I'm going to do I'm going to change my layout again to a slightly different one which is gonna give us a bigger area in which to play around in so we can have a really good look at this real-time preview to make sure we're getting the right render setting so I'm gonna stick this up to 100 so I've got this set of 50 samples in my real time preview and what we're looking for is finding out how many samples we need to set it to so that probably the most blurry areas aren't particularly noisy these blurred out particles are where you're going to see the noise the worst so if we know that these sections are okay then we know that the final render and everywhere else is going to be alright as well now we've got this set to 50 samples and it's it's chugging through it's got an awful long way to go and already it's not even halfway there yet and I can see that this is it's pretty clean and a little bit of noise in these blurred out areas is actually quite good it makes it look like a realistic kind of film look so 50 samples is far too much for what we need I think we can get away with having fewer so let's just put this down to say 25 which is half that amount so this will take more than it'll be more than twice as quick because the samples are kind of exponential there they are the sample amount times by I think it's times by 4 even so 25 samples is hugely quicker than 50 more than twice as quick so there we go and we can see there's a little bit of noise in this blurred out area I'm not sure if you can see it on this screencast but there's not so much that it looks awful so 25 samples is a good amount I think and there's a chance you know we could we could even go with less than that and have a quicker render but this is gonna be the final render so let's not skimp on it we'll go with 25 good so the only other thing that we want to sort out with this in the render is let's go into our render settings here and set up cycles has been our renderer so in your renderer you want to pick cycles to be the render render you gonna use and let's change in our output let's make this full 1080p and we're gonna render frames 10 to 300 good and then save we have got openexr is our format that is a 32-bit file format so we're going to have all of this 32-bit light and color information that our real-time preview is displaying is going to be matched in our render settings so that's gonna be good no surprises there then in our cycles options let's just make this a little bit bigger we need to set this up so the device I want to use my CUDA cards I've got to 1080 Ti so that's gonna be relatively quick for me so set that to cooler I can leave my tiles as default I can leave that default threads as default in my integer sampling this is where I need to match my samples so I decided that 25 was okay my real-time preview so if I stick 25 here I'm gonna get the same look and we're not going to be using the denoising feature in this render and so if you're not using denoising always remember to have a seed value here of 0 and this means that your noise from frame to frame any noise that is created in the render will be animated noise which is what you get when you record properly with film the noise is never static it's always fuzzy and animating and having a seed of 0 means that there isn't a fixed noise for each frame it'll change on a per frame basis meaning it'll look more realistic any noise that's there so if you're not using denoising make sure you've got that seed to 0 so that's it for that let's get down to our light paths and ray depth I'll just switch all these down so they're outside ok so light paths and ray depth so at the moment we've got a glassy depth of 2 so glossy as our reflections and we've got lots of reflections in this scene so we're going to need that we've got diffuse as well so I'm gonna say that we need at least we need at least two so let's go with we won't get a glossy depth of 2 or a diffuse depth of 2 unless our max ray bounces is at least 2 otherwise it can't get to this amount so let's just we're going to put this up for do to be safe and I think that's gonna do us for that so the only other thing we want to activate is we want to render some motion blur and the reason we want motion blur is some of our floaties are actually moving relatively quickly and we want to give that they will it'll look a bit odd if they are particularly crisp and moving quickly because obviously if they were shot with a real camera and it was kind of dust particles or whatever they would have motion blur to them so we need to add that but the thing to note with cycles 4d motion blur is that it doesn't work on objects that have differing numbers of vertices and that's because it's a way in which it works out the motion blur on the frame previous and the frame after is to do with the points of an object now our open V DB measure is a dynamic mesh it's growing on and it's creating new polygons as and when it needs it that means that it has changing number of vertices which means it won't work properly when we render with motion blur so what we need to do is tell cycles that we want to render with motion blur but we want to ignore the open V DB measure so the way in which we do that is pretty simple so we'll activate motion blur but we're going to deselect effect all objects so let's untick that so now it is only going to apply motion blur to objects in which we tell it to so what we need to do is apply motion blur to just the particles so the particles are inste see instancing this cube object this is what the particles are and the cube object is this one in our scene file in our object manager so we need to tell this object to apply motion blur and it's really easy to do just go to tags cycles 4d tags object tag and in the object tag we've got all these options these are kind of like the external compositing options leave that default but there's a motion blur tab and we just need to activate it so now we have said apply motion blur to this cube which is being instanced by all of the particles so now if I go to my real-time preview and hit render and activate the view so it's rendering and is there any motion blur well we need to check one more setting the real-time preview needs to be set to render motion blur so let's go to the render settings and we haven't got it ticked so it's not rendering motion blur this which is why we can't see it so let's check that and now it's gonna recalculate and this is gonna take a lot longer to render because motion blur is expensive because it's effectively having to analyze three frames instead of just one it needs to frame your rendering and the one before the one after to work out where the motion blur movement is coming from okay so we've got a little bit of motion blur there but perhaps not quite enough so let's go to our camera settings which is where we can set up the motion blur so here's my camera tag here's the depth of field that we've already set and here's the motion blur options and the amount of blur will be dictated by the shutter time this is the shutter speed in a camera so the longer the takes to close the more light is coming in which means you're gonna get more blur the smaller the shutter time duration the the less blur there will be so if we upped this to let's just put it this two point zero seven so it's more than doubled it and it'll just work that out it'll take a while as it chugs through and now you can see we're starting to get this blurred view here so I'm just gonna minimize this somewhat let's put it down to 50% the size of this so we can get an idea of the whole frame so now we're getting these particles blurring in the direction of their travel and that's looking an awful lot better and I think actually that amount of point zero seven is looking good we don't want it to mush but when they're moving quickly we want more blur and when they're moving not as quickly we want less blur like these ones excellent so that's looking good so I'm happy with that we've got our samples right we've got our motion blur arm which is just affecting our particle so we're ready to do this render so let's go to my render settings and double check everything so we're doing 1080p we're rendering a manual range from 10 to 300 frames we've got our file path selected were rendering open ax ours and in cycles I've got my cuda selected 25 samples motion blur selected so we're ready to go so I'll start this rendering and I'll pause the tutorial and once it's finished I'll come back to show you the render and tell you how long it took and here's the final render so this took about two and a half hours to complete in total for around 300 frames which isn't too bad and it's looking pretty nice these floaties giving a great bit of movement to the scene they're working well I think the amount of blur and the motion blur is working pretty well for those I think the camera move works nicely we've got this initial development with some blurred out portions in the foreground we've got this nice camera rotation as well as moving upwards and I think it's nice the glow looks good and it leaves behind the growth of the goldleaf which itself gets some really nice kind of glinting highlights and it works well with the roughness of that texture as well so all in all I'm pretty pleased with that and this is a pretty decent representation of the technique that Muriel used in his X particles reel so that is it that is rendering our XP cell auto procedural growth animation using cycles 40 don't forget if you'd like some more content on X particles foreign cycles 4d then please go to the in Cydia here hit subscribe and this will mean that you'll get all of the latest material as soon as it's released so until next time I'll see you later [Music]

Channel: INSYDIUM LTD

Views: 20,007

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: WGUggSQaBFs

Length: 75min 43sec (4543 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 05 2018