xpReel Tutorials, Water Helix, Cycles 4D - Part 2

[Music] hi my name's Bob Warmsley and I'm the technical trainer at in Cydia the makers of X particles and cycles 4d and in this tutorial we're going to be taking our water helix mesh that we created in part one and we'll be rendering it in cycles 4d here's how it looked in the X particles real [Music] so we're going to create a custom material in cycles 4d and we'll go to reference some of that particle color data that we burnt into our particle simulation will then set up some scene lighting and we'll get a camera with some shallow depth of field and then we'll look through some render settings to ensure we've got good quality and a fast render but without any unwanted noise so we've got lots to fit in let's get started so here's our water helix scene from scene one who have built this scene in X particles and you can see that we have our helix water mesh this was created by using this particle emitter to emit these particles they're colored blue - white blue being the slower particles white being the faster particles and we'll use that color data in the render these particles have been infected by this explosion effects simulation which is a smoke and fire simulation which is being forced around this helix object using our flow field object so we've got this nice cache of these particles which are moving in a very kind of fluid organic light way and that's what a split effects gave us but they're also following the path of this helix spline which is very nice giving this illusion of a water helix so that is our simulation we've cached it out which means that I can deactivate these two dynamic objects which means it's going to run quite quickly in the viewport and then we've got our open V DB mashup activated here so that gives us the mesh so what we're going to do is move on to rendering this with cycles 4d so what I'll do is I'll make the particles invisible just for the time being so we're just looking at our mesh and there we go so what we need to do first of all I'm just going to swap my layouts for a more kind of cycles 4d friendly layout so I'm just going to go to my cycles layout and this is slightly different you can see I've got a very small viewport down here but it is a normal viewport all the same and the attribute manager with all of the settings my object is here in a normal position my object manager obviously exactly the same it's just moved into a different position to this part of the screen and then here I've got my interactive render region and here I have got my material editing node work area so that's what we're gonna do so if I hit play on my real-time preview there isn't anything in the viewport and that is because there are no lights in the scene so let's just to get an idea of what this mesh is and what we've got so let's bring in a cycles 4d environment so we're going to use this to initially light the scene just bring that size down to 50% and there we go so here is our mesh being lit by this environment objects and you can see that when we kind of light it and render it even in this kind of clay material it's looking quite nice so let's have a look at this background object and when we bring in an environment it automatically has a background material applied to it and these are the nodes in that background material this is a normal output node with a surface input and then we've just got one background texture so what I can do is let's just put an HDRI image into here so we can like this using using that color and light information so what we'll do to do that is got a texture environment texture and I'm just going to put input the color of that into the color of the background and then with this what I'll need to do if I highlight the node here's my attributes here for this node and I need to put a texture into this texture window it's gone this magenta color because it can't find an image texture which is which is looking for so it goes this by default so what I'm going to do is go to my content browser and I've got the just search for HDR's in the cinema 4d free material and there's all these different HDR's and anything we'll do so let's just watch this one here let's drag in this one which is of the roof of a car parking garage so I'll drop that into there and go back to my no dancer now to get this to work you have to uncheck load from disk for anything from the content browser and then if we load that in again it's gonna load our HDR let's just reduce these samples a wee bit okay so now we're having this little R and it's looking really nice as a mesh obviously it doesn't look like water but as a mesh it looks pretty decent so we'll begin by making our water texture so let's go to create in our material editor browser down here and we'll go to cycles 4d surface and there's a glass node so we'll take the glass node and I'm gonna drag that onto my water helix and it'll take it to a couple of seconds to update and there we've got the start of our glass material than just dolly in a little bit and there we go and we've got this glass texture now you can see at the moment that we've got some areas which are kind of transparent but then we've got these very heavily dark areas as well and doesn't look very good and that's because we haven't got enough effectively kind of rebounce a--'s to lighten up this area so what we need to do to adjust that is go to our project render settings so I've got my render settings docked here but you can get to your render settings settings by hitting this button so what we'll do is in the renderer will select cycles 4d which brings up a new menu here these are the general render settings that's just make this space a bit bigger so I'm just going to put this on to CUDA and what I want to do is come down to the light paths and Ray depth section of this because we've got a fair few settings here some of which are going to be useful to it so we have a transparency depth of 8 and a transmission depth of 12 and these are the two areas that are going to be important to get realistic transparency and reflections but the problem we're not getting all eight steps in either the transparency or the 12 in the transmission and that is because the max ray bounces is kind of like a global control so if this is set to one you're only gonna get one transparency depth one glossy depth one volume depth and one transmission depth and diffuse as well and so it doesn't work for us to see the effects of these eight transmission depths we have to bring up this global amount so let's just bring it up to two so keep an eye on the on the real-time preview here and I'm going to increase this by one and let's hit play we weren't playing and you see it's lightened up because the reflections are able to have had one more bounce now so we're filling in some of these darker areas let's give it another and another and so the more we increase these the closer we're getting to this transparency and transmission depth so that's much better and already this looks obviously far more transparent and it's kind of working now what I'd say was using an HDR to light this and to use that for the reflections is quite effective and very quickly this looks like a water splash doesn't it and it's it's incorporating this HDR fantastically we've seen the refraction the reflections and whatnot the problem with this technique is if you're not gonna be actually using this HDR image in your final background of your render it's not gonna look as good it's gonna look a little bit odd you kind of knee it's all relative and you need to be able to see this in the background for your brain to make sense of the reflections being this color so let's demonstrate that if I go to my environment object here in the object manager and make it invisible to the camera so the HDR is gonna be invisible to everything apart from the camera all of a sudden now we have a black background these reflections don't seem right and actually it doesn't even look transparent anymore it looks like a reflective metal surface and these are all tricks of the eye so you need the context of the background for it to feel like it's transparent otherwise it starts to look too reflective and look like metal so I don't want this is a quite low res HDR and it's not a particularly nice one just have a car park so I don't want this in the final render so lighting it using this and using this for the reflections isn't going to be a good idea so let's just get what I'll leave it in there for now just because it's providing some light so instead what we're going to do is we're going to use an object to light this and which will appear in the the reflections and the refraction so the object is going to have a texture and a really good object to use which gives you a very good look very quickly if you're wanting to use very dark or even completely matte black backgrounds is using a torus so if we bring in a torus into our scene there it is and you can see it in the real-time preview and what I'm gonna do is make it a bit bigger I'm gonna lift it up a bit and I'm just gonna angle it slightly kind of like this no I think I'll make it slightly bigger so I don't want this torus to be visible in the real-time preview in the render obviously but I want it to light the scene so what we need to do is use the equivalent of a compositing tag to say look use this torus to light everything but don't be seen by the camera so the way we do that in cycles is we have it highlighted and we go to the tags and we go to sorry cycles 40 tags and just off your screen I have got an object tag there we go so in the object tag I've got these kind of compositing settings so if I say don't be seen by camera it's still there you'll see it in the reflections but it's not being seen by the camera which is great so before I switch off the environment and use this tourist right the scene obviously we need the tourists to have a light texture on it otherwise it's not going to be emitting any light it's not going to be doing anything it's going to be useless so let's go to create in the material manager here and go to cycles surface emission and the emission texture we'll put that on the torus let's just go to our node editor and in the emission texture let's put it a full write and I'll just leave it at that strength for now so now what I'm going to do is just delete get rid of my environment so delete that so now the only thing that is lighting this is the torus and what is being seen in the water the reflections of that torus and that now on the black background is still looking pretty nice even though we don't have that mental kind of contextualization of seeing what's in the background and that's affecting these these splashes so that's looking pretty nice I think that's okay so we could make some adjustments to that torus for example let's just make the pipe radius of it so it's a bit thinner and so so we're having a much narrower reflective band if we make it super super thin it's having much less impact and then we could perhaps increase the strength of the material to then bring some of that brightness back so there's there's various different ways in which we can adjust this but I'm gonna just put that back up a bit that radius because I think it was actually by default not looking too bad all right so I'll just keep it like that for now we may make some adjustments later on when we look at this in a slightly larger context right so I'm just gonna move across my material editor and increase my render area just so we can see this a little bit more clearly so increase that size all right that's better maybe even slightly more matey okay so here is our water so what else do we want to do well we've got our basic water material which is just a glass node and one thing that's incorrect here is that the index of refraction by default on the glass node is one point four five and this isn't a correct index of refraction for water water is 1.33 so let's change that to one point three three and it'll just change slightly the way in which light is refracted in that material so that's one element but we can do something else here now obviously we've got a color slider within this node so if I bring up my color options if I wanted to I could bring some color into this so there's some red water or some blue water the problem with that let's just say we wanted to have a very subtle touch of blue in but the uniform blueness throughout the whole material here which may be fine but it's not particularly it doesn't particularly feel that realistic so let's say we want to color this with more of a variation in that color well what we're able to do is use our open V DB measure so at the time of recording at this open V DB masher feature is only available in the X particles early access build so if you look into your open V DB measure and move this up we have this option but called transfer point color so if this isn't available in your open V DB measure if this this function here doesn't exist then this isn't available to you you haven't got the early access build if that's the case I would just either color your glass your glass shader using this color input here or just or leave it leave it a white color but if you do have the early access build or this is available in your version of X particles then this is what we're going to use so this does is if I just let's just go up I'm gonna go back to my normal view here's our normal view and let's go to our open V DB motion so we have this function called transfer point color if I check that what happens is that this color vertex map appears on our open V DB measure and if I click on that you can see that the particle color that blue to white gradient has been applied to our mesh which is very good because what we can do is access that in cycles 4d so what I'm gonna do is at the moment and the transitions between these Kaluza a little harsh you can see there's blockiness well we can smooth that out if we go to the open V DB measure and we go to the point color map smoothing iterations let's just try it on seven maybe that's going to update and now as you see we've smoothed out those areas so that's gonna look much better in the render and so that value of seven is going to be fine okay great so we've done that we can leave it now I'm going to go back to my cycles 4d layout and now we have this color vertex tag so this is the key which is it's just fantastic if I take this color vertex tag and drag it into my material editor it creates an attribute point color node and if I type this into the color of my glass we are now getting that blue and white gradient value put into the glass object which is excellent now obviously at the moment it's way too it's way too blue it looks frankly ridiculous it looks awful but it's great that we can access that particle information apply it to the vertices of the open V DB measure and then get access to it in cycles 4d so let's make this look more desirable so all we need to do really is reduce the saturation of of this color and that's really easy to do we'll just right-click and we'll get a color node and we'll get a hue saturation value node okay let's just plug it in and let's just reduce the saturation of that blue so it's just a touch alright and I think that's just dolly in a bit I think it's a little bit too blue and I think this isn't quite right I want too much lighter blue so more of a cyan so all I can do is just do a huge shift let's see let's just bring it back there okay so I'm much more like in that one so this is really cool so we've got this glass material colored now dependent on the it's the speed value of those particles as they're moving through the mesh so the faster particles the faster areas of the mesh are going to be white and the slower areas of the mesh are going to be going to be this blue color so I think that is very very cool and I like it a lot it's going to make this look fantastic right so that's great that's the attribute point color node so you can drag maps in from your objects it directly into the material editor and then use those in your shaders to get the effects that you that you desire so pretty cool right so what else do we need to do here so we've got our lighting using our torus we've got our very easy quick water material made what we need to do really is set up a camera and start setting up maybe some shallow depth-of-field and getting all that right so I think what I might do is I'm just going to jump into my standard layout so what we're going to do is bring a camera in the scene so we'll go to the cycles 4d menu and go to the camera and this brings in a cinema 4d camera with a cycles 4d tag on it so let's look through that camera and let's think about positioning so I like the have a look I really like this underneath section here I like the way this was coming away from the camera at this point underneath and then whizzing round so that looks really nice so I want that in the shot and I want where it ends I want this to be out of frame because it'll look hard otherwise if it's just stopping at a point so I want that to be out of frame so it was just dolly in but what would be nice is if we could get some of this circular shape here so if we could have the angle from maybe here looking upwards so that it's just dolly and from there so that's looking pretty interesting not quite right yet but interesting so what I'm gonna do to make some fine adjustments from here is go to the camera and I'm gonna select a null make the camera child of the null and I'm going to make some adjustments using the nulls rotation settings so we've got a heading pitch and Bank the pitch is going to allow us to maneuver it this way the headings can allow us to kind of twist it and then the bank is going to give us this more horizontal movement so I quite like it maybe coming across the frame like this that's interesting so let's activate the open V DB measure and just so we're looking at the particles because this almost plays in real-time so this looks quite nice we've got it coming across the frame whooshing around in a circle and then coming back out of frame so that looks that looks pretty nice what would be good is if we can just get a little bit circular motion in so let's just see what can I do with this together there we want this to look like it's going away and coming back around again so something like that is looking quite nice I could try we've got a 35 mil camera at the moment we could try it maybe a slightly wider angle lens on that camera and that is gonna accentuate that somewhat I think it'll bring it into the into the frame more that we want this circular shape coming around that's nice and then we want this coming out of shot so I think we're kind of getting there let's go back into my null out of shot and then let's just get the camera and just position it here somewhat there we go and I could obviously spend more time finessing this and you know we can you can do it however you like but I quite like this coming in washing around making this circle and then going out of frame I think that's looking pretty decent so when you're doing this on your own scene obviously spend ages and you may even have you know a director you might have a client that wants a specific shot in mind but we have the luxury in this tutorial to actually just get what looks nice to us so let's just activate our open V DB measure to get our idea of what this is gonna look like when it's actually meshed and I'm just going to deactivate the visibility of those particles so where they're not going to get in the way of this and I'll just move back a frame so that's looking pretty good I think and we're going to get getting some real dynamism in the shot here as its whooshing past the camera okay so that's looking all right so let's go back to my cycles 4d layout now that I've got this camera angle that I'm happy with and let's hit render all right so this is looking really nice I've got some really good movement here so the last thing we're going to do with this camera is we want to set up some depth of field effects and we want some shallower depth of field so I'm just going to make this interactive render region bigger and let's put that up to say 80% we'll probably fill it right so let's look at depth of field so what we need to do with depth of field is select our camera and go to the object tab of our camera and if we just scroll down the object tab there is a focus distance setting which by default is put it 2,000 centimeters so if I click this with this picker I can pick anywhere on my mesh in the viewport and it'll put it into focus so let's try putting I don't know this section in focus you're not going to see anything you can see that the focus distance has changed but not going to see anything in the viewport because there isn't any depth of field actually attached we haven't changed the aperture in any way so what we need to do is go to the camera to the cycles 4d camera tag and we have the this is the motion blur setting so if we just scroll up slightly to the top of those settings we have depth of field radius and size so if I just increase the size this bit has immediately been blurred out can you see and this section is in focus a bit more okay so now we have got this bit of blurred out water to begin with comes around gets into focus as it washes up here and then goes out of focus as it makes its way around and washes round this section obviously you can pick whichever area you want to go back to the camera and back to the focus distance picker and we could pick this bit in the distance so now this section is in focus round here and this four section is going out of focus so obviously it's in front that looks quite nice it's entirely up to you and you can even animate this value should you wish to get whichever part in focus you desire so that looks pretty nice as well I mean all of these effects are going to work well it just depends on which what's the look that you want so I think let's go a bit further back I think I quite like this effect of it coming out to focus right in the foreground and then coming back into focus as it makes its way around here so I'm just making it slightly closer to us yeah that's looking pretty nice alright so the last thing we need to do is make some adjustments to our render settings because I don't know if you can notice but now we've put these depth of field the shallow depth of field and we've got some noise coming in to this part of the render and this is going to be a problem at render time so what I'm going to do is first of all I'm going to just try I'm going to use my regen render region here to try and get a guesstimate of what samples I need so I'm guessing I'm gonna need at least 30 samples so let's put 30 samples in the samples area here and it's gonna render through and it's gonna take way longer than it did before because it's it's these samples are exponential so I think that to the power of 4 so the difference between 10 and and 30 is absolutely huge it's not just 20 more samples but you can see that it's still rendering but it's starting to clean this area or up these bits that are out of focus are getting much cleaner and that's working well it's still so it's finished it only took 20 seconds for that frame we've got a little bit of noise in there still so 20 30 samples isn't quite enough but it's getting pretty close right so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to change layout one more time I'm going to go to my cycles render layout so I've got my render settings docked here and what we need to do is just make sure we've got everything right for this final render so first of all let's deselect save and in the output will just output the current frame because we'll do a bit of a test and I've got this set at the full resolution of its 1080p so that's going to render the current frame good and we're not saving anything at this point that's alright so let's go to the cycles 4d options and in the device I've got my device set to cuda because i've got and these two titans in which render quite quickly on Kudus that's going to work well so I can forget about that everything else we can leave default so then we've got get to the the integrator settings and what we want to do here is we need to set the samples now in the real time preview we had it set to 32 sample at 30 samples sorry which was okay but there was a still maybe a fractional bit of noise in there so let's we'll keep it at 30 knowing that there's going to be noise but what we're going to do is activate the denoising feature here so this this is the denoising options which kind of the denoising works by blurring out the areas where there are noise and you can kind of have this effect only certain channels in the render which is pretty cool but will could just leave all this is default at the moment and all we're going to be bothered about is is this strength now by default the strength is point five with a radius of eight so I'm gonna keep that radius as is but what I'm doing I just want to reduce this strength way down because I don't want loads of denoising I'm gonna start with maybe just point what let's start with point two so we're going to use denoising we're gonna leave the light paths and raid depth settings as they works I think they were looking quite good for getting light to bounce around as much as possible as much as we need anyway so they're all fine as they are so the only other thing to do before we do this test render is to look at this seed value in the integrator menu now this seed value is really important because it dictates whether the noise any noise that is created is animated frame-to-frame or a static frame to frame and this is the rule if you're not applying the denoising effect you want your noise to animate because real noise in real life when it's created by recording on to film is animated it's not static noise so if you're not using the D noise you want your noise - slightly animate cuz it'll look real it'll look really weird if you've got this static noise it'll look like you've got just kind of like a dirty lens but if you are using the denoiser you want the noise to be exactly the same on every frame otherwise the blur is gonna change from frame to frame when you can get this odd blurry flickering so the way in which you give it a fixed value so it doesn't animate is by giving this seed a value of anything above zero so zero is gonna be animated any number above zero will give you a random noise pattern that doesn't animate on every frame and that's what you want if you're using denoising okay good so let's try a render to picture viewer then and with those settings so I'll hit render to picture viewer here and let's see so I mean this is a much higher resolution that we had in in the real-time preview window and we've got the denoising effect happening as well so my guess is this is going to be I don't know it could be maybe a 50 second render it could be over a minute let's have a look so it's gradually cleaning up these frames I think the area where we're going to be able to see whether our denoising and samples has worked are going to be obviously the blurred out areas and i think specifically in this corner here we're gonna have some very blurred out sections of fluid which if we're going to see noise this is where it's going to be a parent okay so we'll just zoom out to hundred percent so here we go so it's not done a bad job even though it's blurred it's also looking this looks like this blur on top of blur and that is the denoising effect but it's done a pretty decent job I think so I think I don't think we want any more strength in that denoising I think that's going to be fine there is a I'm not sure if you can see it on this capture but there is a slight little bit of noise in here still probably we could get away with it but I tell you what what we're going to do to try and sort that out is we'll go back to the render settings and we will just increase the samples let's just boost them up to 32 to give us a few more samples so this will have a big impact on render times let's just go back to the picture viewer so this one was one minute and six seconds I would imagine by having these extra samples we're going to put at least another 15 20 seconds on that but I think it's gonna give us a better quality render so I'm happy to start rendering on those settings so let's go back to our render settings and in the output tab we want to in the frame range we want to render all frames and everything else can be left as is now we want to save this so I have a file path already saved you put it where you need to I'm going to save it as an open EXR file which is 32-bit and if you want to render an alpha channel with this this is a two-stage process in cycle so you need to make sure that you do it this way you need to have this alpha channel section ticked so that's the first step but you also must go to the cycles 4d render settings and come down to the film tab and you must have transparent film ticked and this is going to give you your alpha Channel arguably this isn't the best name for this checkbox but this is this is how it comes from the cycles core but transparent film this must be ticked and this will then give you that alpha information okay so everything else is ready to go so then we can start that rendering to the picture viewer and we'll leave it so what I'll do is I'll pause the tutorial here and then I'll come back to when it's finished and we'll have a look at the final render and I'll tell you how long it took so here's our final render this took just over well it's about five and a half hours to render this which for kind of liquids have lots of reflect reflections and refractions going on isn't particularly bad for err 300 frames and it's looking pretty good we've got these in really nice areas of defocused water in the real foreground than in the distance we've got these nice areas coming into focus and I really like the way we've managed to get this curvature of the helix angled correctly so it comes round whips and then goes underneath and back up again and the the gradient color that we managed to get from the particle information which we then passed on into the cycles 4d material giving it the slower areas this blue tint and the faster areas are white and I really like the look of that not necessarily photo real but I think it's an interesting effects quite subtle but I think it brings a lot to it so I think this render this is just straight out of cinema 4d so in post it could probably benefit from a little bit of post-production motion blur perhaps to get these in focus areas just blurring a little with this very fast movement but I'm pretty pleased with that result so that is the end of this tutorial that is rendering our water helix using cycles 4d if you've got any questions about this or any of our other training tutorials then please join the insidious cord channel this is an online chat room where you can interact with fellow X particles and cycles 4d users and within Cydia and staff also you can subscribe to the in Cydia to be no and then you'll get these brand new tutorials as soon as they're released so until next time I'll see you later [Music]

Channel: INSYDIUM LTD

Views: 16,950

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: brUKYFSP_zI

Length: 37min 30sec (2250 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 20 2018