Transcripts
1. Course Introduction: Hey, it's day from CG shortcuts. Welcome to our course. I'm a freelance 3D and motion graphics artist based in London, where I've been working in teaching in the industry for over 10 years. In this course, I'll show you how to create a daily render in cinema 4D and octane render, we'll be creating this science fiction scene, and best of all, you don't need to be a professional modal out or 3D artist. I'll show you some tips and tricks you can use to save time and create an artwork like this within just one day. Daily renders a super popular on Instagram and other social media at the moment. So it's going to be great for your online portfolio. By the end of this course, you will level up your Cinema 4D skills and be able to create your very own daily renders. All you need is Maxon Cinema 4D and octane render. Don't worry if you don't have them because you can download a free demo to start learning straight away. We'll also cover everything step-by-step. So you can easily follow along, including an introduction to daily renders, character creation in the free desert Studio app, as well as does integration with Cinema 4D and octane. We'll also look at some free resources you can use in your daily renders, and we'll go over the fundamentals of composition, we'll create and modeled props in cinema 4D and DAS, and we'll get into sculpting in cinema 4D. We'll also explore octane volumetric lighting and octane texturing and material creation. Before finishing up with a bit of post-production in after effects, there's also a bonus lesson on creating snow or dust particles to take our rent out one step further. Plus, you'll also get access to project files and time-saving presets you can use in your own artwork. That's it for now. Let's get started.[MUSIC]
2. Welcome to the Course: Welcome to Daily Renders Sci-Fi Scene with OctaneRender by CG shortcuts. Here is a few quick tips to help you get the most out of this course. When you get started, you'll probably see something like this. It may or may not be this course, but this applies for any courses on Skill Share. The first thing you might want to do if you haven't already is click the follow button here, so you'll be notified every time we release a new CG shortcuts course. You'll also get updates if we change anything or add to any of the courses. The Player window is pretty self-explanatory. These are all the lessons, if you want to play one, you just need to click on one, and it will play in this window. This is the play button. You can also scroll through nice and easy. You can even come down here and add a note, which looks like this. You can type in a note for everyone to read publicly or you can just make notes for yourself. Let's close that off and we'll take a look at the About section here. Here's all the information about the course. Again, it's not necessarily this course, but this is standard throughout Skill Share. Then we've got the Reviews tab, so you can write me a review in here. Hopefully a good one. Next is community. This one's a pretty important one. This is where you can have a conversation with myself or other students in the course. You can also ask any questions you might have here. When you've completed the course, you can share your project here. It would be great to see what you create, so please do remember to share. Let's come up to the next tab, the Your Project tab, here's where you'll find all the details of the course project. You can also access the course resources down here and these will change depending on the course you're looking at. We've got another option here to upload your project. In our final tab, you'll be able to see all of the projects that have been uploaded, although currently in this course, we don't have any yet. Unless you're looking at a brand new course, I'm sure there will be some projects in here. That's it for the Skill Share interface. Each of our courses also comes with an exclusive Facebook group to make asking questions and sharing work a little bit easier. Let's take a quick look at that now. To start with, you just need to find the Facebook group for your course. You'll be able to find the link in the resources PDF document that comes with this course. We will also put it on the screen down here. When you follow that link, you will come to a page that looks pretty similar to this. In order to join, you just have to hit this joint group button. You'll get a pop up asking you a couple of questions. If you just go through and answer these and hit submit, we should be able to confirm that you are a student and you will be accepted into the group very shortly. Our Facebook groups are pretty similar to the normal Facebook groups out there. You'll be able to ask questions, chat directly to the instructor and engage in conversations with other students. You can also upload your files and your artwork in one nice easy place. We check the Facebook groups extremely often. If you want a fast answer, this is definitely the place to go. Finally, for extra tutorials and resources, head to cgshortcuts.com and you'll find loads of stuff to help you out with your CG and motion graphics. That's it for now. Let's start the course.
3. Introduction to Daily Renders: A daily render an artwork you are able to design, setup, and complete within one day, every day for a set period. You could do an artwork every day for a week, or every day for a full year. It's really up to you. Oddest do daily renders for loads of reasons. Firstly, it'll help you improve your skills. You won't get better if you don't practice and forcing yourself to practice every day will improve those skills quicker than anything else. You'll also produce more work, which is obviously great for building a portfolio, attracting clients and getting feedback. You'll learn to work faster. Working within time constraints is definitely a skill you need to have if you're working for clients on tight budgets and timescales. You'll also improve your creativity. You'll come up with more creative ideas because the time limits will force you to think differently. Daily renders are getting more and more popular these days and there's loads of amazing artists doing them. Possibly the most famous of which is a guy called Mike Winkelmann, otherwise known as Beeple. He's been creating daily renders for over 12 years now. That's over 4,000 artworks. Definitely check them out online if you haven't already. it's amazing to see how he's improved over the years. Here's some more great artists who were doing daily renders. Each one has their own style, so check them out for inspiration. You can also find a list in the course resources PDF. Other places you can go for inspiration include Instagram, Behance, Tumblr, Pinterest, Facebook, ArtStation, and Art, Books and Magazines. Before you get started, you'll need to come up with a basic idea. Rather than just helping straight into Cinema 4D, it's probably a good idea to have a rough idea of what you want to achieve, even if that evolves as you go. I've decided to do a science fiction scene for this example, so he is my rough idea. It can literally be as simple as this. You can follow along with my example or create something completely different. You'll definitely pick up a few tips in the course along the way. Also see what you already have to save time and cut corners. We're all about taking short cuts where we can, so see if you can reuse assets from previous work. Or can you source some elements from online libraries or use something your friend or colleague has created. Anything you can do to save time. Always be building your own personal library of assets to reuse and re-purpose and you'll make your life a lot easier. Now that you have an idea, let's have a look at some of the tools and resources that'll help you get the job done quickly.
4. Whats Daz Studio?: Daz Studio is a free to use 3D program that gives you access to literally thousands of 3D pre-built assets that you can use to save loads of time in your daily renders. With Daz Studio, you can set up a scene and plug in any number of custom-built characters where you can then apply a different hair, clothing, accessories, and easily pose them, or apply time-saving preset poses. You can even apply pre-made animations or create your own. All the characters are fully rigged and articulated. Plus you can dial up hundreds of different motifs to make the characters look exactly how you want. There is hundreds of top 3D artists from all over the world creating downloadable content for Daz Studio and the content library is always growing and evolving. Best of all, you can use any Daz assets directly in Cinema 4D, which means you can integrate them seamlessly into your own work and even render them within Cinema 4D and Octane. We'll see exactly how to do that in the next few lessons.
5. Model Setup and Posing in Daz: I've been looking through the Daz marketplace and I've found a model I think will be perfect for our scene. Daz Studio actually comes with a few best characters, you get a male and a female. This product is just the spacesuit itself that we can add onto our character. When you're looking for characters and accessories, you're better off looking for Genesis 8 and above. The higher the number, the more recent the model has been released, and usually it's better quality and a lot more detailed. As I'm recording this video, Genesis 8 is the latest release. Most products in the Daz marketplace have a bunch of images. We can click on those here and just make sure this is the right model for us. She's got a few different poses there. A couple of different material sets included as well. Modeling something like this and Cinema 4D could take quite awhile, potentially days or weeks, if you wanted to go to this level of detail. For daily renders, you can see how does is a huge time-saver. They've taken care of all the modeling, all the texturing, and all of the rigging for us. All we need to do is pose our model and bring it into Cinema 4D, and the models are actually quite cheap considering the amount of time that's gone into this stuff. I'm going to go with this model, but feel free to have a look around the market place and get something that's suited to your idea. I'll put some other options that I found in the resources PDF, and I'll also put some links in there where you can find some free assets. There's also a link in there to download the free Daz Studio. Go ahead and install that, and whatever models you decide to purchase. I'll see you in Daz Studio. If you had any issues installing anything, just let me know. Otherwise, you can get onto the Daz 3D website and there's plenty of info in there. This is Daz Studio. I'm using version 4, but I'm sure whatever version you have will be pretty similar. You'll probably get this pop up where you can take a whole bunch of tutorials and see some of the other features in here. Go ahead and do that if it's your first time in Daz, otherwise just close that off and we'll go and find out characters. If we go and have a look over here, we'll make sure we've got our smart content tab open and we've got a few menus over here. The one we want is figures. If we click that, it should bring up some of the figures that we have installed here. These are the free ones that come with Daz Studio. If you don't see them though, you might want to come down here and uncheck this filter box. That usually fixes the problem. Now if you remember, the spacesuit we bought is for the Genesis 8 Female character. That's her right here. Let's double-click on that to bring her in the scene and now we have our base model but we want to keep this course family-friendly, so let's put some clothes on her. We'll come over here to the wardrobe and here's all the clothing we've got installed that's compatible with our model. Just down here you can see our space suit that we bought. You've got all the pieces individually here, the boots, the gloves, the helmets, etc, but we want the whole suit. Now before we apply that, we want to make sure our model is selected and you can see that up here, we've put out Genesis 8 Female. We'll come back down here and double-click on our "Full Space Suit" and that'll think for a bit and now she's all suited up. We can hide this panel for now. You can do that by just clicking this little bit right here. You probably noticed from the thumbnail our suit should really be orange and not this gray everywhere. It is actually orange, but we can't see it because we don't have our textures enabled. But if we come up to this little bowl thing here, we've currently got smooth shading selected, which is giving us that gray look. But if we want to see our textures, we need to come down here to textures shaded. There you go. She's looking pretty snazzy in her orange spacesuit there. Let's see how we can navigate around our scene. For anyone who's used 3D Max Maya before, this 3D cube up here might look familiar. It works the same way here. If we grab it, we can rotate the scene in 3D space just like that. If we click on one of these faces, it'll scoot straight to that position. There's our front view and if we move that just a bit, we'll click that there is our right view. We've also got our individual navigation tools here. This one is the orbit which does a similar effect to the cube. It just rotates our seen around like that. Then we've got our Pan Tool that'll move everything along our camera plane here. Then there's the Zoom Tool which zooms in and out, as you'd expect. This one here will center anything we have selected in the middle of the frame here and finally, we have the Reset button here, which will just return our view back to the default position. A lot of the models on the Daz 3D marketplace will come with extra texture sets. You can really customize the look of your clothing and accessories. I'm pretty sure this modal comes with a few different options. Let's go and see where we can find them. If we come back over here and open our tabs up again, you probably won't see anything about different textures. The only suit items available are in the orange. Where are the other textures hiding? Well, if we come up to the Content Library tab, and over here under Products, you'll get an A-Z list of everything you've got installed. We know ours is called the spacesuit outfit, so we'll pop S open and there it is. If we click on that, we should get everything that came with that file. You can see we've got loads of different texture variations here. Again, this will vary depending on the model you downloaded. But let's have a look through here. I think I'm liking the black suit the most, so making sure we've still got our model selected, we'll double-click on that. Our new texture maps have been applied. We'll close this panel again and I'll show you some of the other customization tools. We can actually completely reshape our model. If we come over here to the Shaping tab, you can see Daz Studio comes with a whole bunch of presets here and we have extra control over our characters body shape. Adjusting the slider will give her a bit more of a pie-shaped as you can see here, we'll undo that. You can also make her skinnier or even more muscly. You can also purchase a lot more of these presets from the Daz marketplace. These three come free with the Daz Studio software. We also have individual controls for different parts of the body. We can change the head, for example. At the moment we just have a control for the head scale, so you can get some pretty comical looks. But again, you can download a lot more presets. But I think we will just leave our character as she was. Now we need to think about posing our character. As you probably guessed, we can do that under the Posing tab here and we've got some pretty basic controls here, like the rotation of our entire model. If we play with this slider show just spin around like that. But just like you might find in other animation software, you can go in there and pose all of her joints individually, and if we come up here and have a look at our hierarchy, we'll pop that open. You'll get a list of all the bits and pieces that make up this character and animate as might be familiar with this one. This is the way we've got all of our joints and bones and down here you'll see all the accessories we've applied to our character. In this case, it's the bits and pieces that make up our spacesuit. Up here under our hipbone we can pop that open and we'll see all of our joints. You can see how they're all connected. Hip, elvis, left thigh. Let's grab that thigh and we'll get our controls down here. We can move that side to side like that, or we can bend it with this control, or even come down here and twist that bone. Another easier way to select these joints is to come up to this button here with the little bone icon, that's the active Pose tool. Now we can hover over any part of our model and click it to select the bone, and that'll bring up the options for each bone. We can twist that left-hand. We can even go into the finger level by coming down to our Pose Controls and clicking on Hands, and you can see we've got lots of individual controls for each finger here. You can really dial in the exact look you want. We've got some nice presets here to make a fist, we'll just spread the fingers out a bit, we'll bend individual fingers. Another way we can pose our joints is to select a bone and come up here. You'll see this little ball and a bunch of rings. If we click and drag this ball, we can rotate that joint in 3D space. These rings give us individual control. The blue one is the z-axis, the green one is the y-axis, and the red is the x-axis. The ball is more or less a combination of the three. Let's grab another bone and just run through those again. That's the z-axis, the y-axis, and everything together. Let's undo that. Daz models are also rigged up with inverse kinematics. Which means we can grab a bone and drag it out here and our modal will respond a bit like a puppet and this is pretty handy for making bigger changes to the pose. It affects the connected joints as well as the one you've got selected and it just feels a bit more natural to pose this way. Let's try that again on the legs this time, let's spin around so we can see this a bit better. We'll grab this shin here and we'll move that up here, and it goes a little bit crazy sometimes. It's sometimes has an effect on other joints that you don't want it to affect. But I'll show you a little trick to fix that. Just changed position here. Say we wanted to move this arm but we didn't want the chest moving anywhere. What we can do is come up to our Tool Settings here and that'll bring up this Window. Let's just expand that and move that out of the way. We've got some pinning options here. Which means if we come up here and select our chest and then we'll click on "Toggle pins. " That'll add a little red pin here. Now if we were to move our arms anywhere, whatever is pinned isn't going to move for anybody coming from after effects this is very similar to the puppet tool. Let's look ahead in place as well. We'll move that arm, and this is going to make posing a lot easier. When you're done with the pins, to get rid of them, just click on that pinned area and back over here will toggle the pins and that'll take it off. Let's do that to the head as well. Now say you had loads of pins in here. Stick a couple in the legs here and you wanted to get rid of them all at once. Just hit the "Unpin All" button. One more handy tip for those who are used to other 3D packages. If you'd like to see a standard little gizmo control with the bone selected, just hit Control and shift together. That will bring up this little guy and you can move it like you would in other 3D software. Another thing you might want to do if you've messed up your model is reset the bones. You can do that pretty easily. Say we want to reset everything in the arm, we'll find it over here in our hierarchy. Then we'll right-click and choose "Select" and "Select Children", and that'll select all of the other bone's connected. Then if we come up to this icon here and right-click, we've got a few options, we'd just go Restore Selected Items. It's back to normal. You can also apply it to the entire figure by right-clicking here and this time we'll select the Restore Figure Pose. Before we actually start posing this for real, I want to show you another huge time-saving feature in DAZ. Let's close this and open our tabs again. We'll go back to our Smart Content and this time we'll have a look at the poses. Here is a selection of pre-built poses. Now some of these come free with Daz Studio but there's literally thousands of them on the marketplace that you can buy. If you want to save yourself a ton of time, I'd recommend starting with one of these pre-made poses and then just adding to that. The way you apply this, let's go back up here and make sure our model selected. There she is. Now all we have to do is grab one we like and double-click it. There you go, instant pose. Probably not quite the right pose for our scene, but let's try a few of these. There's a nice sitting one. What else have we got? A walking pose might actually be a good start for us. Let's bring that in and we'll frame that up. Keep in mind your original idea. For my idea, this character was out doing a bit of space exploration and now she stumbled upon some strange ruins out in the Martian landscape. I want her to look surprised, but at the same time, curious as to what she's seeing. Go ahead and pose your character with the techniques we've just been through. If you'd like to use the pose I created, I've included it in the downloads. It's called pose.duf and to apply that to your model, you just need to grab it like this. It's just off screen here and drag it straight onto here and that's the pose we're going to go with. Feel free to tweak this or start from the beginning, whatever you like. In the next lesson, we'll have a look at getting out Daz models into Cinema 4D.
6. Daz to Cinema 4D Octane Workflow: Once you've got your character posed up and ready to go, it's time to export it to cinema 4D. Let's come up here to file, and we'll choose "Export". You'll get a little pop up and it's asking you to name your file. Let's just call our Spacegirl. Want to make sure the file type is FBX. There's plenty of other types, but I find FBX worked best in Cinema 4D. We'll hit "Save", and now we have our FBX export options. Now I've spent literally hours playing around with this and I found that these are the best settings. Just make sure you've got figure selected props, and over here you've got collect textures to folder and merge clothing into figure skeleton, allow degraded skinning, and allow degraded scaling, and down here you've got a list of everything that's going to be exported, so let's just hit "Accept". Then she'll do a little robot dance, and it may take a minute or so, but you should get an FBX file and a folder of textures. When that's done, I'll see you over in Cinema 40. So here's our exported files. There's a spacegirl.fbx, and the image folder. These are all the texture maps associated with our Spacegirl model. What we'll do is we'll start by renaming this. Let's just call it tex, for textures, this is pretty standard practice for Cinema 4D. As we go ahead in the course, make sure you save all of your texture files into this folder, and that way we can keep everything together in nice and tidy. Now we need to bring our FBX file into Cinema 4D. The easiest way to do that, is to just grab it and drag it straight in. When you do that, you'll get a little Import dialog box pop up. These are the default settings and I find they work just fine. Let's hit "Okay". So the input might take a couple of seconds depending on how complex your model is, and there she is. Just have a quick look around and make sure everything looks right. I'm pretty happy with that. Let's take a look at what we've got up here. If we pop this open, you can see we have the exact same hierarchy that we saw in DAS earlier. Here's our joints, and these are all the accessories such as the clothes and the model itself. If we pop these open, we can access all the individual bones. Because we export it as an FBX, we can actually carry on working on our pose directly in Cinema 4D. If we grab the rotate tool here, with their thigh selected, we can rotate that. Just as we did in DAS studio. If you're not a fan of digging through this hierarchy, I'll show you a little trick how to select joints a bit easier. If we come up to the Select menu here, we've got this nifty little feature called the Selection filter. Let's just turn our selection to none, and we'll go back in there again, and this time we'll turn on the joints. Now we can select these guys directly on the model and not have to worry about accidentally selecting the model itself. We can rotate these joints however we like. I personally would prefer to do the posing in DAS because it has some pretty cool posing tools, and doing it in cinema can be a little bit fiddly. But if you need to make little tweaks after you've exported, this is a great little option. When you're done tweaking the joints, don't forget to switch back your selection filter. Back up here under the Select menu selection filter, and we'll switch it back to all. Let's go back to our moved to all while we're here, and now we want to tidy this model up and get it ready for our scene. If we have a look over here, we've really got a lot of objects in our scene. You can see the bag, the belt, the boots, the pants, the torso, the gloves, and the helmet, or their own separate elements. But we're pretty happy with our model now. Why don't we combine these all into one object? Doing that we'll use less memory. It will render faster and it'll make our life a lot easier when we're navigating through our scene. Let's grab our bag and holding shift will come down to helmet and we'll select all of these accessories and close. Then we'll right-click and come all the way down here to connect objects plus delete, and that's merged all of those objects into just this one. Then we'll double-click on the name to rename it. Let's call it Suit. Then we just want to check it and make sure we got everything for you. Try to move this. You can see everything comes along together. Cool. Now, we also want to convert our character model into a single piece of geometry that isn't tied to any of these joints. To do that, we right-click, and this time we'll come down here to "Current State to Object". That's actually made a duplicate force under this null here. It's Pop that open, and here's our new geometry. We might as well keep this group. Let's rename it to Spacegirl, and then we'll rename our new spacegirl geometry to something like Girl. Now, we can get rid of that old one and we'll drag our Suit into the Spacegirl group here, and we'll grab that and drag it out here. Now we can get rid of all of this stuff. Now we're just left with a nice tidy group here with our Spacegirl and her suit. Now we don't need these textures on our null, they are already on our geometry underneath. Let's delete those, and now's probably a good time to tidy up this mess of materials. Let's come down here and bring this up so we can see all of these. You can probably already see there's a lot of duplicates in here. The next thing we want to do is merge all the similar ones, like this one and this one, and these guys, we want them all merge. So we've got one shader for each texture. If these thumbnails are bit small, you can always make them bigger and easier to see by clicking "Edit" and go into medium or large icons. Like, hey, let's start merging these materials. There's a few ways to do this. One way is to just grab one and holding Alt, drag it onto another marging one, and that should merge them. Again, pick this one, hold Alt merged here, and one more time, merge that go to there. So that's that material done. Another way, is to grab all of the marging materials except for one. Then right-click and select "Texture tags". Now you can see over here we've got multiple materials selected. These are the ones we want to merge until our unselected one, this guy. So grab that guy and drag him into here to replace all of those other three, leaving us with just one. Now we can go "Function" and remove unused materials. We're left with just that guy. Let's run through that one more time. Find a bunch that look the same like this guy. But we don't want to select one of them. We'll leave that guy will grab all the other ones, there's some down here as well, and one more over here. We'll leave this one for now because it's different, and we'll right-click. Select "Texture tags", and I'll grab that first one, drag him over into the material to replace all the other ones. Then function, remove unused materials, and now the one we left behind replaces all the other ones. I'll just go through and apply this to all the other materials until we are left with just one material for each texture. One last one, and we're done. Everything is looking a lot more tidy. The next thing we wanna do is check these materials in Octane. Let's come up to our "Octane" menu and we'll fire up the live viewer window. Let's grab this little thing here so we can move this out of the way. We'll take it over here and maybe just stretch this out a bit. We're going to need a light in here first. We'll come up to "Object" and we'll grab a texture environment, and you can see our texture is just set to white at the moment, which is fine for testing. Let's start our live here. Looking good. We can zoom in a bit and just double-check everything's come through fine. Now, all of these materials are just standard Cinema 4D materials at the moment, where we want to convert them to Octane materials. Let's grab them all, and we'll come up to "Materials" and down to "Convert Materials". That's basically switched their old materials with new octane materials. Everything looks like it's switched over fine, so let's get rid of our old materials. We can go "Function", "Remove unused materials", and now we're just left with our nice new octane materials. We'll spend a bit more time in octane later on, but it does help setting things up right, to begin with. There's one more step we can do to optimize this a bit further before we move on, we're done with octane for now, so let's come up here and close the live view window. We always want to have the least amount of geometry and polygons as we can. We can keep our system running nice and fast and speed up renders, so we want to get rid of anything we don't need, and you can probably remember, we have a pretty dense 3D model of our Spacegirl underneath this suit, which we really don't need because we can only see a face through the helmet here. It's probably not a bad idea to delete all the unnecessary polygons. To see the police, we'll come up to display and turn our lines on, and we'll come over here and turn out polygons too alone, and we'll make sure we've got our girl selected. We basically want to get rid of all the pulleys except the ones that make up her head. If we come up to the "Select" menu, we can grab the ring selection tool, that's going to make our job a bit easier. You can see if we roll over the pulleys here, we get this white line to show us the different rings selections we can make. We just want to select a ring around our neck like that, and that's not perfectly going around your neck, but we can add to the selection. Let's spin around over here and holding Shift tool to another ring, and that's connected it up. Then we'll hit "Delete", and now we have all these pieces. If we come back to our Select menu, this time, we'll grab the Fill selection tool. Then we can just grab all these floating pieces and delete those as well, and now we're just left with the head. We'll have a lot less unnecessary polygons slowing down our scene. But one thing you want to watch out for when you're deleting polygons, is if we come over here and turn on the point mode, you can see all the vertexes have been left behind here. This could potentially give you issues down the line, so we might as well paint them up as well. Let's just press "Control A" to select them all, and we'll come to "Mesh", and down to "Commands", and all the way down here we'll click on "Optimize". That should tidy up all of those straight points. We can go back to our normal shading and switch back over to object mode, and we're just about done. Let's unhide our suit, and we'll be back in our next lesson where we'll be talking about sourcing more models for our daily renders.
7. Free Model Resources: As we mentioned way back in the first lesson, it's always a good idea to build up your own library of assets that you can reuse and repurpose and save yourself a lot of time when you're doing daily renders. But if you don't have much of a library yet, don't worry too much. There's a lot of online libraries you can use, and a lot of them feature free assets that you can download and use in your work. One of the most famous online libraries, and certainly the one that's been around the longest is turbo squid. There's literally thousands of models to choose from on here, and a lot of them are free. We're looking for some 3D scanned statue models to use in our artwork. So let's type that in and see what they've got. They go up in price to about $600 for the Statue of Liberty over here. We've got some cool scan ones, some sculpted ones, some plastic ones, and even some Donald Trump ones, if that's your thing. Let's see if we can find some free models. If we go over to Sort, we can change this to lower prices and the free ones should come to the top. We've got this snazzy prejudice sculpt here and a whole bunch of what looked to be real 3D scans of actual odd, maybe not the demon head. Have a look around and see if there's anything you can repurpose in your own artwork. Let's go and have a look at this statue of Penelope. As with most online libraries, you'll get a few shots of different angles. If you're lucky, you'll get a wire-frame. Sometimes you'll get a full 360 degree interactive viewer. Just download anything you like. You will usually have a selection of file formats you can choose. FBX and OBJ are pretty popular and tend to work across most 3D software. C4d is obviously the most compatible with cinema 4D, but it also accepts VAE, 3DS and LWs and LWO. If you grab one of those, you should be fine. Another online library you might want to try is CGtrade-off. It functions exactly the same as turbo squid. Just type in what you're up to here. Again, we've got a huge range to choose from. If you want to see the free ones, all you have to do is come up here and tick this box. Sometimes they're a bit sneaky and they'll have the paid for ones popping up with the free ones. But if we come up here and change the filter to lower price, it should put most of the free ones at the top. So feel free to have a look on here. The next side you might want to check out is 3D Sky. In my opinion, these guys have the highest quality for the lowest price. Some really good stuff down here if you want to pay for some models. A lot of these have quite a lot of detail. If we come up here and hit the free tab, there's also some pretty good quality free models available. But the only catch on 3D sky is that you're only allowed to download three free 3D models per day. That's very hard to say. So have a look through here and see what you can find. Another place you can visit for some free resources is over here on our website with this goofy looking guy, CG shortcuts.com. If we go up here to learn and down to resources, we get a huge page of loads of resources to help out 3D artists. The good thing about this, is that we update it all the time. So keep checking back and you're bound to find something helpful. Let's come down here to the 3D models section, that should jump you straight to that part. Here's some of the guys we've already talked about and a couple we'll take a look at now. Let's click on Sketch-fab. This is where I found one of the models we're going to actually use in our artwork. Again, it's a similar sort of set-up to the previous sites we've looked at. We'll just type in our search phrase. If we want freebies and their results, all we have to do is come up here and check the downloadable box. This is one of the models I ended up going with. We've got a nice statue of Anibal from the loop museum in Paris. It's a 3D scan of the actual statute. If we look behind it, it's a little bit rough back here, but we're not going to see that in our composition. It's not a big deal. This one was actually done by Benjamin Bardou, who's been nice enough to give this model away for free. We can download it right here. Before you do download anything for free, most sites will have this. If you scroll down, you'll see the licensing attribution here. If we click on that, they'll give us a few more details of what we can and cannot do with the 3D model. As you can see, we're free to share and adapt. We must give appropriate credit to the original artist. Another great resource for 3D scanned models, is that my mini factory, which is now the home of the scan the world project. You can read all about that over here. But basically it's a huge collection of 3D scanned out work, much of which is downloadable for free. There's some really good stuff on here too, if you're into 3D printing. Now this is the second model that we'll be using in this course, the statue of Athena by Michael Jeffrey. As we mentioned a bit earlier, this model actually has a full 360 degree view. So if we switch this 3D button on, you can spin around that and see what you're downloading. So go ahead and find some models to download for your artwork or feel free to create them from scratch. I'll put all the links we went to in the resources PDF, and I'll see you in the next lesson.
8. Scene Setup and Composition: We're back in our cinema 4D project with our space girl here. We need to import our two new models. We will come up to File and we'll choose Merge. Here's the two files we've downloaded, we've got OBJ and an STL file. Let's start with the OBJ first, that's the Annabel model. We can just leave the input options at default. But if we do, it comes in pretty tiny. Not a big deal, we can fix that later. Let's bring in our other model. Now this one is a.STL and good news for us, Cinema 4D also supports STL files, so we will bring that one in too, and we'll just leave this as it is. It's been imported but we can't say it, let's zoom out a bit, there she is. The axis point of this model is in this center of the world over here, we want her right in the middle of the modal. With her selected, we can come over to Mesh down to Axis Center and Center Axis to. That'll automatically figure out the center point and place her right there. She's good for now, let's take a look at our other mesh. You can see it's coming with a material already, we don't want that, let's get rid of that. Now we can start scaling him up. We'll grab the Scale tool and drag that out here, something like that. Let's go back to our thinner model. We want her right in the center of the world, so let's put a zero in the x, y, and z coordinates, and if we pull out here, scaling her up might be a little tricky with her axis in the center there, ideally, we'd want that right at the base. So she'll scale up from that point. Let's click our middle mouse button to bring up all the views and we want the front view, so let's middle mouse button click again to enter that and let's just reposition this a bit. We basically want this center axis point to the right down here on the base of our statue. Let's come and click on now Enable Axis Modification tool, this guy right here, and we'll also grab our Move tool the we'll grab this in the y-axis here and drag it straight down here to the very bottom. Now hit that middle mouse button again and switch back to our perspective view, we can turn off our Axis tool and now with her selected, you can see our value in the y direction is changed here. Let's put that to zero, and that'll put her perfectly on the ground plane. Before we start scaling these up and positioning them in our scene, we should probably set up our project settings. Let's go up here to the Render Settings button and click that. We're going to be working at the standard HD size 1,920 by 1,080. All these are fine. The frame rate doesn't really matter for us because we were just going to be rendering a still. Let's close that up. Now we want to bring in a camera, so let's grab this guy here and when we bring in a camera it'll adopt the settings of our perspective view here. You'll see if we come and turn this on, nothing happens because the camera and the perspective view are the same. Let's make our scene a little bit more manageable. We'll start by renaming our female statue here. Let's call it something simple, I think "Female statute" will be fine. The male statue, let's just call that "Male statue" nice and easy. We'll hide both of those for now, you can do that by holding the ALT key and just double-click this until the lights go red and we'll do that for both statues. Let's start positioning our main hero character here, the space girl. We might even start by resetting our camera, let's grab it, and zero these all out, and we can just pull straight back in the z axis I think we're going to work from this angle, we'll bring it up a little bit, and I want her over to the right of frame, so maybe somewhere like that. We want to make sure we can see our frame nice and clearly here when we're working on our composition, you can see this faint line down here, that's actually the edge of our frame. I'd like to make that a little bit more pronounced. The way to do that is to come over here and click on the Mode and down here to the View settings. Then we want to go up to the View tab, we've got some interesting settings down here. We can turn on the title safe or the action safe if you're used to working in TV you'll recognize this. Let's just leave them off for a second but you'll notice over here where it says opacity, it's currently set at 10 percent, which is why we're getting those faint lines. Let's bring that ride up to 85 percent and that should make those edges a little bit more obvious. Now we can start thinking about our composition. I want our character over here looking up to these huge monolithic statues over here. We'll start by angling her towards that direction, we'll grab our space girl and the Rotate tool, and would have spin her around as if she's just stumbled upon these huge things out in the alien landscape. Now we can bring in our first statue, will start with the female statue, will unhide that just hold Alt and click here. Now with her selected, we'll go and grab the Move tool, and let's just position her out over there. Now we want this to be quite an intimidating statue so we wanted a lot bigger than this, so let's come up here and grab our scale tool, and we'll bring that way up. We might even rotate it a bit more towards our character, and we'll bring it down. We probably don't want to see the bottom of the legs here, we just want the torso popping out of the ground. It looks like the rest has been buried. Before we go any further, it's probably not a bad idea to bring in a ground plane, let's go up here and we'll grab a plane, we can grab this little bit here and scale it way back there, maybe bring it over here, and scale that right out here. We'll grab our statue again maybe bring it a bit further into the ground and scale it up and just position it how you like. If you find your axis is getting off screen here, we can always bring that back up without Access Manipulation tool, let's just move that up a little bit more and now we can rotate from there as well. I think I want that pointing towards our character and leading the eye up to the statue. An easy way to flip our model horizontally is to come down to our scale settings here and in the x-axis, we put a negative one in here and that flips it along the x axis. Now she's pointing towards airspace girl. So just position that how you like and we might do a bit more work on our camera. I want the scale between these two to be a bit more extreme. Right now everything's looking a bit flat. Let's see if changing camera lenses might exaggerate this look. If we grab our camera and come over to the object tab, we're going to load a settings for the camera here, but up here is the lens settings. Right now, our focal length is 36 millimeter, which is a pretty classic cinema lens and it's giving us this look, but let's try a wide angle. We'll go for the super wide 15 mil. Straightaway, it's definitely wider, we're fitting a lot more of our scene into this lens. Let's zoom in a bit. You can see how this is a bit different, our space girl actually looks a bit larger compared to our statute. We're starting to get a bit of distortion around the edges here, which is pretty common in wide angle lenses. It's a pretty cool effect for the right situation but I think in this artwork, it's not going to be quite right for us. Let's go back to our camera and see what other lenses that we've got to play with. Let's switch our 15 mil for a Super Tele 300 millimeter. It looks like everything disappeared but because this is a zoom lens, we've zoomed well beyond our scene. Let's just pull back in the z axis and there we are. This lens is definitely exaggerating the size difference between our two models here but at the same time, I think it looks a bit flat, or the distortion around the edge of the frame is gone now, but I think I want a little bit in this shot. I think it will work without pretty surreal concept here. I think we're getting close, let's try a different lens. Let's give the 50 milli guy. Again, we're zoomed way out because it's a bit of a wider lens. Let's zoom back in on the z axis. I don't mind that, but it is lacking just a little bit of distortion. How about we go just a little bit wider and we'll try the 25 mill and zoom in there. I think I'm liking that a lot. The statute looks a bit small, but we can easily fix that. Let's just adjust here. What if we grab her and scale her up? I'm really liking this. I definitely think this lens is making things look a bit more dramatic. Let's be a bit more accurate with the scaling here, I'll try to make our statue of more realistic size. A nice easy technique to measure things and make sure our space girl and our statue are a nice relative size, is to just come up here and grab a cube, and if we look at the object properties over here, you can see this is a 200 centimeters square cube. So we can actually use this to see how big things are in our scene by comparison. With our cube selected, we'll hit C on the keyboard to convert it to a polygon, and now we'll switch over our view, remember middle mouse button. In our front view, we want to change the axis of this cube so it's at the bottom, like we did before. Just like this. We'll turn off our access to waive that backup so it's touching the ground, and you can see two meters squared a little bit higher than our space girl seems about right to me, so if we switch back to our camera view, we can move this around and even holding Control, we can drag this up to create a duplicate and you can see our statue is about 4.5-5 meters tall. Well, the pot sticking out of the ground at least. I think that's a pretty reasonable size for now, let's delete that one, and we'll come over here and rename this to something like "Two meter cube." we can hang on to that in case we need to measure anything else later. We'll just hide that and now we can bring in our male statue. Let's also rename our plane to ground and we'll grab that statue and we'll move him back over here and switch over to our Rotate tool, spin him over here, and scale him up. Something like that. We might just tweak our composition a little bit. I like the low angle actually. Let's bring him up a little bit more, maybe moving back. We could even scale our original statue up, and maybe she's fallen over a little bit over the years. Let's put her over there. Still want here pointing towards the airspace girl. If you don't want to have to keep going back up here and grabbing these tools, if you hover on them, they'll show you the shortcut key. Move is E, Scale is T, and Rotate is R. So you can work a lot faster if you switch the tools just straight on the keyboard. I think I'll just make one final adjustment before we move on to the next lesson, I want this statute to look quite ominous. Maybe if we just lean it forward towards their character, like it's looking over her, it might make this composition look just a little bit more interesting. Something like that. We're very much still in our early stages of composition here, it's likely to change as we get more prompts in here and that brings us to the next lesson where we'll be doing just that. We'll be creating our first prop in cinema 4D, the columns.
9. Creating Props - Columns: We're back in cinema 4D, and I've made a few tweaks since the last lesson. I've moved these bits and pieces around, I've made our female statue a lot bigger in relation to our Spacegirl, I also zoomed back to make our Spacegirl a bit smaller and fit everything in the scene a bit better, and I like the way the objects is growing in the scene and drawing the eye to our Spacegirl and back up to our main statue here. There's a few other tools in cinema 4D that can help you with your composition. If we come up to the camera and down to the composition tab, we've got some composition helpers here. Let's just enable those, and we've got our Grid active here. You might have seen something like this on your DSLR or the camera on your smartphone. If we pop the Grid settings open here, you'll see the cells are set to three, and if you familiar with the rule of thirds, this is a nice little tool to divide your image up and get an interesting composition, and you can see how our composition fits into that nicely. You can also divide your image up diagonally with a Triangles setting here, and again, that's working quite nicely for our composition. The next one is probably one of my favorite tools, the Golden Spiral. Now this is based on mathematics occurring in the real world. I won't to go too deep into the science behind this, but if you use the Spiral to position objects in your scene, it's mathematically proven to be more pleasing to the eye, and again, you can see how everything fits nicely into this. If we come down here and take a look at the options for the Golden Spiral, you can also Flip it or Mirror it, and even that seems to flow quite nicely without composition here. Let's turn those off for now. So at the moment we've got quite a bit of dead space up here. It'd be nice to fill that in with some secondary props. So keeping in line with our original idea, our Spacegirl has been out exploring, she stumbled upon these ruins, maybe aside from the statutes there used to be some sort of alien temple here. So without going into too much detail, we want something that suggests that there was a temple here long ago. So I think we'll create some columns or pillars if you want, but we want them to look ancient and destroyed. So now I'm going to show you a nice, easy way to model exactly that. It might be easiest to start a new project so we don't get our other objects in the scene in the way while we're modeling. So let's come up to File New. What tool can we use that's pillar-shaped? Let's come up here and see what Splines we could use. What about the flower over here? Maybe we can Extrude that and make a pillar. Let's bring it in. Firstly, we want our pillar pointing up. So we'll come down here and change the plane to XZ. We'll scooch up here, and holding Alt we'll bring in an Extrude. By holding Alt, it'll automatically apply itself to that Spline, as you can see up here. Now let's go and have a look at the Extrude attributes here. We'll switch over to the Object tab. It's currently extruding 20 centimeters along the z-axis, which is this one here. We actually want it in the y-axis, so it's going up. So let's crank that up and zoom out a bit so we can see this. It's a bit of a weird looking pillar shape at the moment. Maybe we can adjust that. Let's click on our Flower, and under the object settings here, let's turn the amount of petals up, and we'll play with the inner radius and outer radius. I don't know about you, but I still don't think this looks very column-like. Maybe we can use a different shape instead of the Flower. Let's delete that guy. What else do we have up here? Let's try this Cogwheel. Again, it's pointing in our Z direction, we want it in the Y, so we'll change the plane to XZ, and this time we need to manually drag our Cogwheel into our Extrude, and that's affecting it now. I think our Cogwheel has potential. Let's just go back to our Extrude, and make this a bit taller. So we'll crank up the y-value. Starting to look a bit pillar-ish. One thing to keep in mind though what we're modeling, is that we don't want this pillar to look nice and new. It'd be great if we can make the top of it angled like it's been broken. We want it to look really old and destroyed. Now that I think of it, I don't think the Extrude is going to work for us, because the Extrude only extrudes flat. But I think I know another option. So let's take our Cogwheel out, and delete our Extrude, and we'll come back over here. This time, we're going to try a Loft. Don't forget to hold Alt when you click this, so it's automatically applied. A Loft extrudes between two shapes. So if we grab our Cogwheel and hold control and drag it up here to make a duplicate, we now have our two shapes. If we drag our second Cogwheel up, it'll extrude between both of them. What's nice about this, if we zoom in a bit, we can angle our second Cogwheel, and because it's Lofting between the two, we can get our damaged pillar. Although, you might notice, when we angle this our whole pillar is tapering inward as it goes up, which we don't really want. So there's a smarter way to set this up. Let's delete that second Cogwheel and we'll go grab that first one again. Basically what we want do is duplicate this, but have all the attributes tied to our original Cogwheel. So we'll come up here, and this time we'll grab an Instance. You can see with our new Instance, because we had our Cogwheel selected, it's automatically referencing our Cogwheel. So essentially, we have two Cogwheels based on the one Cogwheel, if that makes any sense. It might be a bit clearer if I show you this in action. Let's move our Cogwheel Instance into the hierarchy here. So it acts as our second shape, then again, we'll grab it and move it up, and you'll see we're getting the exact same effect that we were getting before. The only difference being the resolution of this shape. If we come up here and show the lines, and we get back to our original Cogwheel, if we change the settings on this guy it'll also affect our instance. If we turn up the amount of teeth, for example, we now have 23 in our original Cogwheel, and that same 23 will be carried into our instance. So our two shapes will be exactly the same. We're effectively driving our top shape with our bottom one. But the issue we have now, is that it doesn't look like there's 23 teeth in here. This is because we don't have enough resolution in our Loft. So let's go and grab that guy. Down here you'll see the Subdivision settings. The Subdivisions going around our object is in the U direction here. So let's crank that up from 30, to something like 200, and now we're starting to get something that looks like a column. We might want to tweak this just a little bit. Let's grab our Cogwheel again, and we'll zoom in a bit so we can see what's happening. Now remember when we adjust this, it'll also adjust our instance up here. So we'll start by adjusting those teeth. Let's just make it a nice even 20. I think those notches might be a bit deep, let's see what else we can do here. If we adjust the orientation, it just spins the Cogwheel around. Let's just put that back to zero. What about the root radius? That could be what we want. Let's make this 180 centimeters. What about the addendum radius? That seems to affect everything below it as well. What happens if we make this 180 as well? So it's shrunk our root radius, and actually that's looking pretty good. So just play around with some of these settings until you get a look that you like. These are the settings that I went with in the end, and I think that's looking like a pretty decent column. Although, it's still looking a bit too new for my liking. We need to damage this a bit. Let's try to angle this like we did before. We'll grab our instance and the rotate tool, and move it down here. You can see that effect that we had before is a bit more pronounced now. It's tapering our column up to a point which we don't want. So what do we do? We'll undo that and with our instance selected, we're going to use a deformer. So this is our deformers menu here. We're going to use a shear deformer, this guy right here. Now we want this to automatically apply to our instance. So this time, we need to hold shift when we bring it in. The form is meant to be the child of the object you want it to deform. Holding shift when you bring it in, will do exactly that, just like that, and you can see our deformer up here attached to our instance. So to make our shear deform, we need to up the strength and that's giving us an interesting effect. It's actually bending the whole column. So it's not quite working the way we want it to. That's because the deformer is pointing the wrong way. If we rotate that, you'll get some weird results at first. But if you go a full 90 degrees and then down to fit to parent, so it snaps to the right size, we should now be able to control this shear. Although, our deformer looks a bit flat there, and you can see this is set to zero. Let's make that a bit bigger, say 90 centimeters, and that's looking at bit more promising. So our curve is pointed up, because we've got a negative value in the strength here. If we take that off, it'll point down just like that. You'll see there's a bit of curvature on here obviously that's controlled by the curvature setting here. If we put that to zero, our cut will be nice and flat. Our rig is almost complete. We can easily adjust this by changing the strength. You can have the cut however you like. Let's go back to the display and turn those lines off, so you can get a better look at this. If you want to hide the deformer, you can come up to Filter and just turn that off. So now if we zoom out, we can have a bunch of these columns and have them more broken at different angles. But there's one more little issue we need to fix. If we zoom in, you can see there's a little hole in the middle here, that's just because of a little setting back in our Cogwheel. Under the Inlay tab, you'll see there's a Center Hole option here, we just need to turn that off and that's it for this part. Let's tidy our scene up a bit, we'll rename this to bottom and our Instance to top. Now I know you're going to have a bit of a giggle here, but this part of the column is actually called the Shaft. So let's rename that so you can impress your friends with your knowledge of columns, the top bit up here is actually called the Capital, and the bottom bit is called the Base, that's what we're going to create next. So let's come up and grab the Pen tool, and we'll do the old middle mouse button click trick to switch views, we'll go to the front view and let's just position our view at the Base here. If we try to draw a spline here, we'll click once here and over here, you'll see we struggle to get straight lines. So we'll undo those, and we'll come over here to the Snapping settings. First we'll enable snapping. It will open this menu again, and this time we'll come down to Guide Snap, and one more thing we want to turn on, if we go back in, is Dynamic Guides. Now if we try to draw a spline, we'll get this cool guideline popping up and it'll align to the grid or to other objects and make drawing straight lines much easier. So now if we zoom in a bit, we're just trying to draw a profile of our Base. So I'll stick one here, one up here, maybe one here. You can do your own design or follow along with me. This is all very rough and now we'll refine this a bit later. So we'll just come up to where our shaft starts, and then we want to finish it over here in line with our first point. If you're having trouble lining this one up with the bottom one, just put a point down and we'll end our spline on the first point, so we've got a full loop and we'll make sure we're in Point mode, we'll grab the Move tool, and sometimes it'll snap straight to the bottom if we try to move this. But it's still being a bit difficult. Let's just hide the shaft for now in case that's interfering with our Snapping and make sure you're still Selecting the spline and we'll try that again and it still doesn't want to work for us. We could just zoom in and try to get it as close as we can. But a better option might be to just come down to this value here as the x plane. If we put that to zero, it will be right at the center of the world and we might as well do that to our first point just in case that's off. So those two points are dead in line with each other now, which is what we want. So we basically want to extrude the shape in a circular kind of motion to give us our base. So back in our perspective view with our spline selected will come up here and this time we're going to use a lathe. Let's hold down the Alt key so it's automatically applied. Now we have the rough shape of our base. Let's just get Back to our front view again. We want to Tweak this a little bit. Let's Turn Off the light for a second by unchecking this. I think our base is a bit too tall. Let's Come up and Grab the scale tool and Scale the whole thing down a bit then we'll Switch Back to point mode and Select our spline. These pointy edges here I'd like a bit more rounded. So Grab both of those and we can Right-click and there's an option down here called Chamfer. Now we can just Click anywhere and Drag and it will smooth those hard corners out for us. Okay, we can Turn our light Back On again now and we'll Switch Back over to the perspective view, and our base is looking pretty snazzy now. Let's bring the shaft Back On, will Switch Back to object mode and will Grab the scale tool. It looks a little bit too big at the moment, so let's just Bring it down. Something like that looks pretty good. Now there's one final piece to this. We want all of this stuff to rest on a square block. So the easiest way to create a block is to Come up here and Grab a cube. We can Come down and Grab these points and Scale that up just so it's bigger than our base. We can keep it nice and square if we put some values in over here, let's try 560 centimeters in the z and over in the x. We can probably Make the y value a little bit thinner, 45 centimeters might be fine. We will Turn On the fillet and if we zoom in, that's way to fillited nice and round, but a bit too extreme for my liking. Let's Bring the subdivisions down to two and the radius 12.5 should be fine. Let's Switch over to the front view. Let's Grab this and we'll Move it underneath the base. Beautiful. All right, so we're almost done with our column. One little thing to do before we Move on, we just want to tidy everything up. So we'll Come up here and Grab a new null. Let's rename that to column and will collapse our lathe and we'll Grab it and the cube and we'll press Alt G on the keyboard to group it, will Rename that to base then we'll grab our base and our shaft and plunk them into the column. Then with those two Selected, let's Switch over to the front view and we want this stuff to be right on the ground plane. Let's bring it up to about there and we can Switch back to our perspective view and there you go. L column is ready to go and our main scene. With that Selected will hit Control C on the keyboard and we'll Go up to window and Over to our main project and then we'll hit Control V to Paste it in. To position this in the scene, I'm Going to middle mouse Click and we've got another perspective window over here. Let's go in there and we'll Zoom out a bit or Grab the Move tool and will Position this behind our big statues and it's a bit chunky at the moment. So let's Scale it Down and we can middle mouse Click Back into our camera view and actually I don't mind it over there. Let's Click on our camera and Back over under composition tab. We'll Put those helpers back on. So we've got our rule of thirds go in here and we'll Grab our column and the move tool and we'll just position this somewhere that looks good. Maybe there potentially Scale it Down a little bit and I wouldn't mind seeing more of this destruction. Lets try that. Actually I prefer it if it pointed towards our character and again, help draw the eye towards our space girl. So we've got this nice triangle here, pointing the viewers eye to where we want them to look. We can also Adjust our column rig anytime we like. Let's just Grab that the former and maybe we'll have it on less of an angle. Something like that. Now I think we wanna have a few of these columns in there. So let's Grab that and the Move tool and Holding Control, we can drag out a copy and we'll Switch views again and if we wanna drag it in this direction, we can Align our access to the well coordinates by Clicking this Button and you can see the columns z axis is now in line with the scenes at x axis. Let's Move In a bit closer and we can switch views. With all four views Open here, it might be a bit easier to see what's going on in a camera view. If we Drag that, you can see it's being Updated Up there. We'll just get that somewhere in the middle. We might even Scale it Up a bit. Something like that and I also want this one to be leading the eye towards our space girl. So we'll Spin that around and we'll Grab the shear and Up that strength. So that's pointing straight down there and it's a subtle thing. But I think it really helps with our composition and leads the viewers eye to where we want it to go. Let's Grab our Move tool and we're going to duplicate this out one more time. We'll Hold Control and Drag it over here. I want this one to be more in the foreground so that Switch views and Drag it. Something like that. Let's have a look at our camera view. I'm liking that Putting some objects in the foreground will give our image a bit more depth. Another thing we could do to make this look like old ruins is to have one of these pillars fallen down on the ground, like how alien temple has collapsed over the years. So we'll Switch views and Hold Control will duplicate this one more time and we'll put it somewhere like that. Will Turn Off the world coordinates. Then we'll Come Down here zero out our rotation. You can quickly do that by just Right-clicking these arrows and we'll Grab the rotate tool and Move it over here. So it looks like it's fallen down. Let's just position that and have a look in our camera view and Back to all the views. Let's just Move it here and maybe just Rotate it just a tad. Cool, will Scale it Down a little bit and have it so it's slightly embedded in the ground and I think I'm pretty happy with that for now. Ideally, we'd like a few more broken ruins in here. Maybe we could have part of this statue in the foreground here. Maybe her other arm has sort of broken off over the years and part of it's landed in the foreground and we can probably create something just like that like a dance studio.
10. Creating Props - The Hand: Here we are back in DAZ studio. It's time to create a hand. Let's go back up here and grab our figures, this hand belongs to our female statue, so we'll use the Genesis 8 Basic Female again, and she's coming naked here, just like before we want to keep this family-friendly, so let's give her some clothes, let's go over to wardrobe. I think she's feeling fairly casual today, so we'll give her this street casual T-Shirt. Sometimes you'll get this message pop up if you try to apply clothes that weren't specifically designed for your model. I know for a fact that these casual clothes were designed for Genesis 3 Females, and not our Genesis 8 model. But if we come up here and just change this to Genesis 3, the order fit will kick in and convert that to Genesis 8 for us, and that's fitting her nicely. Let's give us some jeans as well, these ones look fine. We're getting the same issue again. This time I know these were originally designed for Genesis 1 models. We'll come down here and choose Genesis at the bottom, and it'll do its thing and they're fitting nice and snug. Now that's out of the way. We can concentrate on her hand. Let's zoom in here and get it into position. We're going to be posing this hand, but first, let's click on this little sphere up here and change our shading to texture shaded. Now we can see the details on here a little bit easier, we'll close this tab up and we'll click on her right hand and you remember our controls up here. The X, Y and Z Controls. Let's bring her hand up a little bit here, we want to put this into an interesting pose, like maybe our statute was reaching out originally before it broke off and landed on the ground, and we've got a bit more control over this under the posing tab over here, we can drill down to the hand section. Let's play with some of these controllers, move that there, just bringing this over a bit more into the center, and let me zoom in a bit and also use our navigation cube here. Let's get it roughly into the angle we want facing our cameras back in our scene. I want it to be reaching towards our space girl character and look quite menacing. We can just play with these hand controls. Maybe close it into more of a fist, spread the fingers a bit and we can come down here and control individual fingers or we can come back up here and click the individual fingers, and you can see we've got our been controls over here. It's Bengali's. Just play around with this until you get something you like. It can be a bit of a slow process. Something like that is looking a bit more interesting and maybe we use these tools again just to bring that wrist up a bit. That looks like she's reaching out to grab something, maybe we'll just staggered these fingers a little bit of that one a little bit lower that's cool. We might even grab that thumb and move it out a little bit, or we could bend it and see what twists does that's cool. I think we're pretty close. Then forget you can use the hierarchy up here to select the bones in the hand when you click on an average, you get your pricing options pop up down here. Just tweak a couple of days. I think we're almost ready to export this. If you want to use the pose that I created. I've also included it in the downloads. It's called handpose.euf. We'll just apply that now. I'll just grab it off screen and drag it straight onto our model are usually leave the limits on, so we don't get any strange results when we apply our post, and here's the final pose we want to export to our scene. Once again, we'll go up to File and Export. We'll call it hand, although we'll be exploring the entire model, and save that, all of these settings should be as you left them before and we already know they work. Let's just accept and once that's done, I will see you back in cinema 4D. Let's just drag our exported hand-on FBX file into Cinema 4D. Here, we get our import options. Again, we'll leave them as they are and hit Okay and here is our lovely hand model, although we don't need the rest of her, we're going to cut her hand off and export it to our main scene. Let's go and take a look at our hierarchy. Again, we need to tidy this up a bit, but nothing too extreme this time. The only part we actually need is this part right here, our Genesis 8 Female character. Again, we need to make it independent of these joints up here. Just like before, we'll right-click and come down to current state to object. Now we can delete that one and this is the new group that's been generated so we'll grab that and move it out of this hierarchy and we'll pop that guy open and grab the geometry here. Now we need to see the polygons. We'll come up to display and turn the lines on, and we want to select the polygon faces. We'll switch over the polygon mode, and if we go up to Select, we can use the ring selection to select a ring around our arm just like that, and then we'll just hit Delete where we want to cut and if we zoom in, what you can see there is the joint bone, these guys up here. We'll be getting rid of them shortly. But first we want to get rid of the rest of this geometry. So we'll zoom out again and we want to select everything except for the arm piece that we've cut. We'll go back to select, and this time we'll grab the fill selection and then if we click anywhere over here, it'll select all the polygons and our models looking a bit hairy at the moment. If that happens to you as well, it's just because your vertex normals are visible. We can turn that off nice and easy though. If we come up to Options, you can see we've got polygon normals active will turn that off, and we've also got vertex normals active, will switch that off as well. She's not hairy anymore, so we can delete these polygons, and you might remember from last time when we did this, there were a lot of leftover vertex points. If we switch over to points mode, you can see those there, and the way we fix that was back-up at mesh and data commands, and right down here optimize, and that's cleared them up nicely. Let's switch back to object mode, and we can go over here and grab this stuff. We don't need it anymore, let's just hit Delete. Now we've got something pretty creepy going on up here. It looks like we've missed her eyes and her teeth. These parts weren't actually connected to the polygons we deleted, but we can get rid of them easy. Let's go and grab our geometry and move that out of this group. We don't need that either. Now with that selected will come over to Mesh, Inversion, and down here we've got polygon groups to objects, and that'll separate all the pieces that aren't connected and now we can grab our rectangle selection too, l and drag it across these pots, and you can see over here all of that stuff selected. Then we'll hit Delete and we're left with just one tooth will do the same with that. Delete that as well. We've finally left with just our hand. We've got something extra up here. Let's just grab this and pull it out of here and delete that, and we'll rename this to hand and now we need to just fill this hole here, and there's a few different ways to do that. But first, we might want to have the access point actually inside our hand rather than if we pull out, you can see it's at the center of the world here, miles away from our hand. That was actually the axis point of our full model before. We'll come up here to Mesh, and Axis center, and we'll go Center Axis to, and then we can hit S on the keyboard to frame this up and there's our access point right in the middle there. That's going to make positioning and navigating around our hand a bit easier. Let's fill this hole. One way to do it is to switch over to edge mode, and then we'll right-click on an edge and choose closed polygon hole and will hover over an edge until that whole highlights and if we click, it should fill in, and that's the quickest option. But I find the geometry at generates usually is a little bit dodge you can see we've even got a triangle here. Let's undo that and I'll show you a slightly slower, but much better way to do this if we right-click on one of these edges again, and this time we'll use the bridge tool. Then all you have to do is click one edge and drag it over to its corresponding edge on the other side. Just like that, and we'll just do it again, and just make sure you get the right edge. You can see we've messed up here. Let's undo that and we'll try that again. That's right, and basically just do this until you fill in the hole and the top bit as well and now that's looking nice and tidy. We want to make quads here, so we need some edges going this way as well, though we'll use a different tool. We'll right-click and we want the polygon pen and now if we go up here and click on this point and then its corresponding point down here, we can draw a new edge and we'll just do that for the rest of the surface here, and now we've got some nice tidy geometry. All quads, nothing weigh it happening, lovely. This part doesn't have any texture on it as you can see. But that's not a big deal we actually don't want any textures on our hand. It's going to be made of the same material as our statue, so will be re-texturing it later on in our main scene, which means we also don't need any of these materials down here. I will grab them all up here and just hit Delete, and now we're ready to copy our hand and paste it into our main project file. Just grab that, press Control C and I'll see you over there. We're back in our main scene and you might have noticed, I've tweaked the positioning of some of the pillars here, and if we switch views and go to the perspective view here, will go way out and you can see what I've done here. I've got this pillar way out here. We've got a bigger one closer here, and I've made the one in the foreground much smaller and just tweak the one on the ground just to make a bit more room for our new hand. Let's paste that in and that's come in super tiny. We'll zoom in and we'll grab our scale tool, and we want to make that roughly the same size as our statues of a hand. Basically it's fallen off over here somewhere. Let's rotate that a bit and point it back towards here and we'll grab our move tool and sketch that over here, somewhere in front of the camera and we'll switch back to our well control so we can take it straight back on the z-axis. Then we'll switch views and just bring it down so it's touching the ground, and we'll just rotate it a bit. It's aiming at our space girl then we can probably exaggerate the size of it just to make this look a bit more menacing, and we're just about there. Just a few more little tweaks to get this right where you want it resting right on the ground there. Something like that and maybe just a tad bigger. Now will go and grab our camera and will turn off those helpers so we don't need that grid anymore and now we're ready to go on to the next lesson. Where we'll be sculpting the ground. So these objects, so start looking a bit more embedded into our environment.
11. Sculpting The Environment: Okay, we're back in Cinema 4D and I've tweaked the hand just a little bit since the last lesson. I think this position is a little bit more interesting. Now we're going to sculpt the ground and make these objects look a bit more embedded in the scene. So first things first, let's switch views. We've got this big giant plane here as the ground at the moment, but we don't want any extra space that's not within camera view because we'll be subdividing this and we don't want loads of extra geometry, which would potentially slow everything down and make our life difficult. So let's click on that plane and under the object tab here, you can see it's already got 20 segments. Let's just bring that down to one and the width and height. So now it's just one big polygon. We want to scale the edges of this, so let's come up here and right click and we'll come down here and make it editable. Now, we want to adjust this to our camera view, so we'll switch the views and drag this over so we can see our camera and our perspective view. We'll switch to edge mode and we'll start with this edge and just keep an eye over here. We'll grab the move tool and as we bring this in, you can see it adjusting in the top window there. We want it just big enough to fill our camera view. So let's do the same for this edge, we'll just bring it in until it's visible and then we'll back it out a little bit. That looks good to me. Then the same deal for the other two edges, somewhere about there and this guy, we can have him about there. Okay, if we zoom in a bit, we might actually need to have this one a little bit further out because I actually want this statue resting on a big pile of dust or debris here and we might need a little bit more space. That should probably do it. Okay, let's switch back to object mode. We're now ready to start sculpting and I find the best way to do that is to come up to the layout and switch cinema 4D into sculpting mode which is great because we get a nice layout with all our tools and all of our layers over here. So don't be too overwhelmed by the amount of tools we have here, we won't cover all of these in this course, we'll just go over the ones we need to sculpt this particular scene. So let's start at the top. The first thing we need to do is subdivide this plane and you can see as soon as we do, we get this little level indicator here, where on subdivision level zero, if we subdivide again, we're on level one, but our planes starting to get circular shaped. Let's subdivide again and it's getting even more circular. What's going on? Let's undo that a couple of times, so we're back to our square shape and if we come up to the subdivide, there's a little Settings icon here, if we click that, you'll see what's causing it. Right now we've got this smoothness set to a 100 percent, so when it subdivides, it's also going to smooth out the edges and we don't want that. Let's bring that all the way back to zero and now if we hit subdivide, it would appear that nothing's happened. if we subdivide to level three, still no visible change. So how do we see these subdivisions? Well, you can come up to display and turn the lines on. But again, I'm not seeing any subdivisions on our plane. But if we zoom in, we can see the lines on the statues and other objects in our scene. So what's going on with the floor plane? If you have this same issue, all you need to do is go back to display and down here you'll see some of the settings to reveal these lines. Right now we have the isoparms enabled, but we need to enable the wireframe. Now we can see the subdivisions, so we'll zoom out a bit. I think we're going to need a lot more subdivisions than this, so back up to our levels. If we bring this all the way back to zero, you can see there's no subdivisions, obviously and we can drag it back to three. This is quite cool because it means you can switch between subdivision levels anytime you like. Working at lowest subdivisions will be handy if you want to move large parts of the mesh and higher subdivisions will be great if you want to add little details. Let's subdivide this a few more times. We'll get it to level five and let's start sculpting. Now that I look at it, maybe one more level, we'll bring it to level six. That should give us enough geometry to work with here. So we can get it back to display and turn the lines off now while we sculpt and we'll zoom right in here. I'll start with this mound that this statute is going to be leaning against. The first brush we want to look at is the pull brush and that basically just pulls everything in the direction of the normal. So if we paint that, everything's going to go straight up. You can use your mouse for this, but I'd highly recommend using a Wacom tablet and Pen. I'm actually using a Wacom Cintiq right now, which is great because I think you've got about 10,000 levels of pen sensitivity here as well. So you can really smoothly paint on these strokes. Now, if we want to change the brush size, we've got this size slider here and you can see we've got a smallest circle around our cursor now. You can also do this straight on the keyboard by pressing the open and close brackets, which I think is the same for the shortcut keys in photoshop when you're changing brush size. We've also got pressure controls over here. If we crank that right up and paint, you can see our brush stroke is a lot more harsh. Let's undo that and if we bring that down, it's much softer. Let's undo that as well. Let's switch views again so we can see both camera angles. We'll just carry on sculpting here, keeping an eye on the top camera view to see how high we're going if we watch this bit here. We might want to try a different tool to make this a bit faster. We can come up here and grab the grab tool and we'll bring the size of that down a little bit. This one's nice because you can just click and drag the mesh, so you can very quickly get some height on this. We'll just go around and do this a few times to build up a bit of a mound and you can see up in this window, it's a lot higher now. So it looks like our statue's actually resting on something. We'll just go around the base of our statue here and have everything embedded a bit better. We want some nice curves in our landscape here and if you want a smooth any of this out while you go, just hold the shift key and brush over it and that'll blend the surface. So we'll just keep working without grab brush and smoothing where we need to, until this big mound up here is starting to look a bit more natural. Another brush I like to use is this one up here, the wax brush. That one's great for just piling on the clay here. You can use it to quickly build up some nice forms, something like that. Let's undo that. We want to work on this area around our second statue here. Just bringing that size down and we'll just paint around here, might be easier to see if we have the camera view as well. We'll just carry on using the wax brush to build up some of these shapes and you can always switch back to the pull brush if you want to build these shapes up a bit faster. So we'll just keep working on that for a while until we're happy with how things look in our main camera view. We want a bit of a mound behind our second statue here, so it's got something to rest against. We might even switch over to the grab brush, so we can quickly pull this stuff up. It's starting to look a bit more interesting up here. Maybe we can get a few bumps in the foreground, so we can just add a little bit of detail here, so everything's not so flat. Let's go back to our wax tool. Normal sculpting will pull everything up, but if you wanted to push things down, have a negative effect here, all you need to do is hit the Control key while you sculpt, and you can see it's creating a bit of a hole now. That works with all the brushes. It's basically the same effect you'd get if you were to check this invert box here. Okay. Let's undo that, and we'll just go through and put a few more finishing touches on to this. We want to make sure we can see a bit more of her hand here. We don't want this area around our space core to be so flat. When we're happy with that, we can start thinking about adding more detail. So we'll go up here and subdivide again, and we'll turn the lines back on just to make sure we've got enough subdivision here to work with. It still looks a little bit low here, so we could probably deal with one more subdivision level that looks about right to me. We'll switch over to the wax tool. We'll just put a bit more detail into here, and maybe have some of this dirty or snow flowing this way. I want it to look like it's been affected by the wind in this alien atmosphere, then we'll just hold shift and blend this in a little bit. Another tool I'll like to use to bring out some of this detail, is the amplify brush. Basically that takes whatever brushstrokes you've made and amplifies the details. If we run that over here, you can see it just makes everything a bit more extreme. You probably don't want to go too crazy on this. It's probably looking a bit too extreme up here, so we'll undo that. Now we might move over here and see if we can embed this pillar a little bit better. It's fallen to the ground and maybe it's pushed up some of the dirt. So we'll bring that size down and just sculpt around here, maybe change back to the wax brush, it's cool. Again, we want it to flow and will smooth it out a bit. Another tool that's quite handy if you've done quite a bit of sculpting that you want to undo is this erase tool. If we run that over any of our sculpt, that'll basically put it back to the way it was originally. It's a bit like the mop brush if you've ever used that brush. Okay. That's all looking a bit more interesting. Next, we want to embed our space core character a bit better. We'll add some footprints in behind here which should again lead the eye towards our main character. Let's just get into position, something like that. The first thing we need to do is check to make sure there's enough subdivisions. If we turn our lines on, I think those polys are looking a bit too big. I don't think we'll be able to get much detail out of that. So let's come up in subdivide and they still look a little bit too big in relation to her feet there. We'll subdivide again, but depending on your system, you might want to keep an eye on your polygon count. We've got 262,000 polys at the moment. If we subdivide again, we now have over one million. Just be careful you don't want to crash your computer. Mine seems to be running fine. Let's start sculpting. We'll turn those lines off again, and we'll zoom in, and bring out brush size way down, and we'll just start sculpting. We'll alternate between the negative and positive effects. It got some little holes and little indents, and some more chunky areas where the snow or dirt has piled up. Something like that around the feet. Then holding control with some nice deep footprint. Left and right feet pointing in slightly different directions with a little bit of build up around them, something like that. Just a nice little trail of footprints. I forget to check in our main camera view. We want to continue these a bit further. One more right foot over here, and another left one back here. Now we'll add just a few little details. Some more little chunky bits between the footprints, that's looking pretty good to me. Just go ahead and sculpt around these objects and embed them a bit better. The next thing we want to do is break this area over here up a little bit. In a new scene, we're going to sculpt a big rock or it could be a piece of broken statue and we'll quickly run through some more of these tools. We'll come up here, "File", "New". Let's come over here and grab an object to start with. We'll go with the cube, and you can see we don't have any subdivisions on that yet. Let's go up to display and turn the lines on so we can see that, then we'll go over here to our "Object" tab, and we'll right-click on our cube, and we'll make it editable. Now we can subdivide that, we'll do that a couple of times, and you can start seeing the polygons in there now. But you can see it's keeping that cube shape, which we don't really want. I want this to be a smooth lump of clay really, so undo that, and we'll click on our subdivision options here, and we'll bring that smoothness all the way up to a 100 percent. If we subdivide again, it starts to become more of a sphere. But the polygons on there nice are even, and that's going to make sculpting a lot easier. With our subdivisions quite low like this, we can get out, grab brush, and start pushing and pulling this to get the rough overall shape of our rock. This rock is going to be quite pointy and jagged. So just flatten out the base there, something a bit like that, push that bit in maybe, then when we're happy with that shape, we can subdivide again and start adding more detail. We can probably turn those lines off, and we'll take a look at another brush I like to use when I'm doing hard surface sculpting and that's the flatten brush. Basically, it does exactly what you'd expect, it flattens out the model. Let's just bring that brush size up, and there you go. We can use this to give our rock some nice flat edges. We'll just carry on all around our rock, and do a few of these on different angles. When we're happy with that, we might want to sharpen these edges a bit. We can do that over here with the pinch brush. You can get a good look at this, we'll turn those lines back on. If we run this down one of the edges here, you can see how the polygons are pinched in towards our brush stroke. With the lines off, that affect looks just like that. We'll go ahead and sharpen up some more of these edges. Just try not to make them look too sharp. You can hold Shift as you go and smooth things out a little bit as well. So the exact shape is totally up to you. But when you go into a place you're pretty happy with, something like this, we'll come up here and rename our cube to rock, we'll hit Control C, we'll switch back over to our main project, and we'll paste it in Control V. Now we just need to position this, we'll grab our move tool. We want it over here next to our full and pillar, we'll switch views, we might even scale this a bit. But if we grab our scale tool and we try to scale this, you'll see that that's not going to work first. That's because we can't scale objects that have a sculpting tag on them. So let's right-click on our rock and we'll come down to current state object. That'll keep our original one. If you want to hang on to that, you can do. But I don't think I'll need it anymore, so I'll just delete that. You'll see we've still got a rock in our scene here. If we turn our lines on, you can see all that subdivision is baked in now. Okay. Let's just scale this in the x-axis here. We'll make it a bit more of a thinner, jagged rock. We'll scale it down uniformly by clicking out here and dragging. Make it a bit smaller then back in this view, let's rotate it a bit, and we'll spin it around towards the camera, and maybe just embed that in the ground a little bit deeper. We'll just try and position this somewhere interesting. I think that spot will do it for now. When you feel like you finished with the sculpting, you won't need this layout anymore, don't forget to switch back to your startup layout. Although, I think our scene could use a bit more sculpting, I think the foreground elements need a bit more work to be embedded into the ground here. I'll get into that now and I'll see you in the next lesson where we'll be talking about volumetric lighting in octane.
12. Octane Volumetric lighting: We're back in Cinema 4D, and you can see I've spent a bit more time on this sculpting on the ground here, if we take a look in the perspective view, I've just built up the areas around our objects to make them look a bit more embedded. I've tried to make some of the big amounts flow into each other. Now that we've got that sorted, it's time to render our scene. Because I was saying is set on an Alien Planet, I want that to be an eerie atmosphere, so I want some pretty dramatic lighting and I want some Fog or Haze in there. Our space got stumbled on these statues that are appearing out of the folk, so we want to set this up in Octane Render. The first step will be to make our camera an Octane Camera, and the way we do that is we just grab our camera and we count the tags, C4D Octane Tags. We'll put an octane camera tag on the camera. That'll give us a few extra options down here that will check out a bit later, but for now, we'll go up here and fire up our Octane Live Viewer, so this is basically a preview window of our octane window. Will fit these little dots here and drag it over here to reposition our live viewer. Then we'll just bring this up, so we've got the two windows next to each other here, we can probably use a little bit more of the Screen Real Estate over here, and if we come and click on this button, that will fire up our preview and show us what our current render will look like. At the moment, octane sky is letting us in, if we click on that, you can see we've just got this white color that's evenly lighting our entire environment. Let's come up here to our octane settings button and we'll see what we can do to make this look a bit more realistic, we've got a few different rendering modes in octane render. At the moment, we've got it set to direct lighting, and it's currently using the Ambient Occlusion Model, which is quite faster render, but not the most accurate mode. Let's try a different mode, we'll set this to GI diffuse, and still I don't think it looks very realistic, I prefer the path tracing option up here. It's a lot more photo-realistic and the result is usually better looking, although it can render a little bit slower than the direct lighting options, but will just be rendering one frame, so that's not really an issue. We'll just leave these other settings as they are for now, we'll come back to that shortly, we'll close that up. The next thing we want to do is replace our Octane sky and this flat white color with the HDRI Environment, so we'll come up here to the objects menu, and here is the HDRI Environment we'll bring that in, we'll grab our old octane sky and just hide that for now. Then we'll make sure we've got this tag selected here on our new Octane sky. This contains the HDRI Map, which if we click on, is currently set to nothing, so now we need to find a HDR Image and plug it in here to light our scene. Now there's a HDR image resources online, and I'll show you a great collection that you can download for free. This is HDRI Haven, which was created by another CG Artist, Greg Zaal, and it features almost 300 free to download HDRI maps, so you're bound to find something you can use for your scene. Let's come up here and click on the HDRI Tab. Now we've got a whole bunch of categories here, we want something outdoors. Let's click on that and we'll scroll down a bit, and you can see they've got a huge range here. For our project, we are looking for something that's a bit overcast, so let's go and click on that option. We've got some great results here, let's just scroll down a bit, you could use any one of these, but this is the one that I ended up going with, the Lenong 3, so we'll click on that one, and you got a few previews here and a whole bunch of different resolutions as well. I think the 2K map should be plenty for our work, so download that and I'll see you back in Cinema 4D, let's apply this HDR to our environment. We need to go back down here to our image texture, and I'll just go off frame now to grab our HDRI that we downloaded, and I'll drag it straight into here, if you don't see anything updating, you may need to send your scene the live viewer again. We'll just click this button, and there we go, we can see a tree in the background there it is working, and you can see now that image is dictating the lighting in the scene, so let's make sure we've got our Environment Tag selected here. We've got a few options down here. Firstly, you've got the pale up and that lets you change the intensity of the image, so you can see dragging it up makes it brighter, dragging it down makes it darker. Let's just reset that back to one, then we put the rotation in the x-axis, and if we change that, it's just going to spin our environment around, so you might like it somewhere about there with some clouds in the background. That's quite cool actually, and you can see that nice overcast light spilling into our senior. Now we want to add a bit of fog, so if we come down here next to the main tab, we have a medium tab. Down here you've got a little button to "Add fog", if you click that, you'll get a big black screen. That's because we need to come up here and adjust the scattering medium. If we click into there, you'll see that this fog is so dense, you can't see anything at 100 here, so I'll bring that way down and you should start seeing objects in the scene. If we look up here, you can start to see that haziness coming through. We can control this effect even further by coming down and getting back a level will adjust the medium radius, which is thick in this fog up a bit. That's quite a cool effect, but I do find controlling this with just the two sliders to be a little bit tricky, but I've got a way to set this up that's going to give us a bit more control. Let's go back down here to our scattering medium. You can see at the moment are scattering is being controlled by this RGB Spectrum, which is set to white at the moment, but we want to change that. Let's click on this little arrow and we'll go all the way up here and clear that, so we want a particular octane shader to replace the absorption and the scattering, so we'll click that arrow next to the absorption and will come to our C4D octane menu here. Then up here, we want the float texture, which is basically just a control from 0-1. We want one in the scattering as well, so we'll do those steps again, back up to C4D Octane and float texture. Now we want to uncheck the invert absorption, and we'll go into our first float texture, we'll put that at zero, and go back and a second float texture, we'll have at point one. Now if we go back, we'll set out density to something quite thick, let's make this point two, and you can see now the further away from the camera, the foggy it is. If we get back one more level, we can control this nice and easy with the medium radius, if we bring the slider up, we can make that fog much thicker. Something like that. I think this is looking much more interesting. The fog is really highlighting those Silhouettes of those statues, and I think they're looking a lot more ominous, which is what we want. Now I want a bit more contrast in here, maybe we can brighten up the background and add a light behind the statues to really bring them out, let's go up to objects and lights, and we'll grab an octane area light. Let's come in over here, let's move that behind the statues, we'll grab it and drag it way back here in the z-axis. We'll grab our Scale tool and scale that are right up, so it's almost like the sun on the horizon or some alien glow back here. We don't want to say the square shape of the back of our light here, so we'll go over to our light tag here, and under the visibility tab, we'll turn off that camera visibility. That's looking good, although it looks a little bit blown out down here, let's switch over to our light settings. We'll have that power to 50, maybe even 40. At this point, we might want to just have a look at our Octane Render Settings, so we'll come up here and hit this button. Now I've got a crazy amount of samples here, we don't need that many. Let's bring that down to 1000, we can have the diffuse depth and the specular depth, we don't need so many GI calculations, so we'll clamp that to one. We're getting a nice quick render over here, without all of those high values, it's still looking pretty good, so we'll close that up. The one last thing I want to do is have our main character stand out a little bit from the background, we want to put a bit of a back light on her, again, we'll go up to objects and we'll bring in another octane area light. It's back in that same spot, but ideally we'd like it to be pointed at our space girl, without light selected, we can go tags, Cinema 4D tags, and we'll come down here to target. Now we need to set a target for our target tag, we need an object to put in here. Let's grab our space girl and put her in there, our light will go a bit crazy as it's directly on our space girl, but if we grab our move tool and position that up here, you can see that stays pointed directly at our space girl. Let's switch views and reposition this a bit better, I don't want it in front of her, I actually want this light behind her, we'll switch it over here and put it back here. You can see in our render view that's already giving us a pretty cool look, maybe she's packed her space vehicle behind her. These are the headlights shining over here to reveal these statues. It might be a little bit intense, let's scale the slide down a bit, we might even move it closer. Wrong axis here, we'll switch it over to the local axis, I think something like that should be fine, although might be too bright, let's go back to our light. We'll bring the power down to something like that. That's it for our lighting, I'll see you in the next lesson when we'll start texturing.
13. Octane Texturing - Marble Material: So here's another great online resource. CC0 textures by StruffelProductions, is a huge library of high-definition texture maps that you can download and use in your projects for free and we're going to do exactly that. Now we need a few materials and we're going to start with a marble material. We'll just type that in here if I can spell it right and we'll hit, Enter. We've got some really great ones to choose from here, look at the marble #03. So let's click on that and you get a nice preview and a couple more previews down here, and again, we just going to go with the 2K maps, so download that one. That'll be a nice texture for our pillars, and now we need one for the ground. We'll just type that in here, and again, this is totally dependent on your scene, but I like the Ground #04 here, so also download that. I also want something that looks kind of dirty, so let's just type in dirt and you'll get some more ground textures here. But this one here looks interesting, the Surface Imperfections. This one's more of a black and white map. I definitely think we can use that, we'll grab the 2K map for that as well. So just unzip those to your Texture folder, and I'll see you back in Cinema 4D. Before we go building any shaders we might want to change the lighting setup, to something simple that's going to render fast and make it a bit easier to see our actual shaders. Our Fog looks cool, but it is quite slow to render, and we really want instant feedback while we adjust our shaders. Let's grab our OctaneSky and hold Control and drag that up here to duplicate it, we'll reuse this. So let's grab all the other lights and we'll hit ALT + G to group those. We'll rename that to Lights. Now we can just hide them. So now we're just left with our new sky, let's work on that. First, we'll rename it to Temp Light, so we remember to switch this out later. Then we'll grab our tag here and we'll come down to our Medium tab, and we'll remove the fog by clicking here and going up to Clear. Now we've just got our HDRI MAP lighting scene. You can see that down here there is our image from before, again, we can rotate that if we need to. This is a nice even light to work with so we can see how shaders as we're building them. Now we want to create a marble material for these columns. It might be a good idea to zoom in a bit so we can see this easier. Let's just turn off our camera for now and we can reposition our perspective view up a bit closer to this column, that looks good. Now we'll create our first Octane material. We'll go to Materials and will create an Octane Glossy Material. You can see that guy down here. Now, Octane has a fancy Node Editor that will help us build those shaders a bit easier. You can find that up here under Materials as well, and it's this one right here. This is where the magic happens. We still want to see our Render Window here. So let's just move this out of the way and scale this a bit. The navigation controls here are the same as they are in the viewport. Holding ALT, you can drag this around. These are all the ports that make up our shader, and here's a list of many, many nodes that we can plug into those ports. You've got a few filters up here as well.Our shaders are going to be constructed of mainly textures. So let's bring those in first. Here's our Textures folder. So the ones we want to begin with, are all these marble textures. Grab those and drag them straight into here. Now we can start linking these up. Let's move our shader over just a tad so we can see this. Before we do, let's just come down here and rename it. We know it's going to be the Marble shader. So that'll do nicely. We need to apply it to one of these columns. So let's grab it and drag it over here. You can see it updating our live viewer. Now we can start linking these textures up. Let's grab the first one. You can see this is the roughness channel, so it's just a black and white map. To save memory in Octane, every time we use a black and white map, we want to change the type to float, meaning values from black to white without red, green, and blue values. So we'll plug that into the Roughness channel here. The way to do that is to click on this little dot and drag this line out. When it goes green, you can connect it. You won't see too much over here as that was just the roughness channel, it'll just be effecting the reflections on our material. But at this stage, it's a bit hard to see. That's it for our roughness channel. What's next? Now we've got the normal map. Let's just move that out of the way. He's pretty easy. You just got to connect it to the Normal over here. So same deal. Drag that over here, and this will be a bit easier to see. A normal map is a lot like a bump map. It basically just adds some bumps and dense and gives our shader a bit more detail. You can see that effect in here. So what's our next map?We've got a mask. We don't actually need that one, so we'll just delete that. Then we've got a displacement map. Because these objects are quite far off in the distance, we're probably not going to need that either. Displacement maps can add a lot of extra detail, but they can also take a lot longer to render. I think our normal map is giving us enough detail. So let's just delete that guy. Our next map is probably the most important one. It's our color map or our diffuse map. We need to plug that guy into here. That guy gives us our RGB color information. In this case, it's a blue color. Maybe we can zoom out a bit to get a better look at this. The pillars looking pretty cool. But I actually want it to be a bit lighter than this. So let's do some color correction. The good news is we can do that directly in Octane. If we grab this guy, you've got a couple of options over here to change the brightness. But we've got a much more powerful node over here. If we scroll down, we'll grab the color correction node, and to apply that, we just need to click it and drag it onto this line. When it highlights yellow, we can drop that in. You won't notice any changes in the live viewer here, until we start changing some of these settings. So we can bring the brightness down. Let's undo that, and we can change the hue, so give it another color. Then we've got saturation controls, and we can adjust the Gamma, which should give us what we want if we pull that back. We've got a bit more of a lighter blue. Now let's switch our camera back on so we can see how this looks in our scene. I'm liking that. Let's move this down here and we'll try that shader on the other pillars. Let's just drag it on to that one. Then we'll hold oontrol and copy it to the other ones. We might just bring that saturation down just a tad, and possibly the Gamma as well. I think that looks fine for now. We can always come back and adjust these later. Let's move on. In the next lesson, we'll be texturing the ground.
14. Octane Texturing - The Ground: In this lesson we'll be texturing the ground here. This should be a quick and easy one. We'll start by coming up here to materials, and we'll grab an octane glossy material. Let's go straight down here and rename it, we'll call this ground and back up to materials and we'll grab our octane node editor again. Let's move this over here and we'll open our texture folder again. This time we want to grab our ground images, so this guy to this one. We'll just drag those in, and we'll grab our first texture here. That's the color texture. I'll drag that into the diffuse channel and before we go any further, we should probably apply this to the ground. Grab that material and drag it over here. We'll just move this out of the way while the live view updates. You can see that over here now, but it looks a bit pixelated. The scale might be a bit off. It might be a bit easier to say if we change the camera angle. Let's turn that off and will frame this up a bit. You can see compared to our character, these details in our texture are massive, they look like little leaves or something. Now one way to scale out textures down, is a technique you're probably used to using with the standard Cinema 4D render and as to click on the tag here, and without projection mode set to UVW, we could come down and adjust the tiling here and that can still work in some situations in octane. But there's actually a better way to do this in the octane node editor. Undo that, and bring back our node editor. If you're live view isn't updating, you can just press this button, and if that doesn't work, you can resend it to the viewer. Now we're back to how we had it, and now we can apply a UV transform node, to our color texture here. We've got a little shortcut button here for that, or you can bring it in from our node list over here. We'll drag that in, and we just need to connect it to the transform here. We'll zoom in a bit so you can see that. Now let's have a look at the options in our transform. The S section over here, is for scale. If we bring that down to 0.5, that will half the scale. This S section is scale, the R section is rotate and the T is transform. Let's scale this down a bit more. These leaves are looking the right size compared to our space go, and I think 0.2 is about right, that looks pretty good to me. Let's switch our camera back on. You can see it's looking quite shiny down there, and that's because we need to add our roughness map. Let's see what our next texture is, we've got the AO map, which we don't need, let's delete that. Here's our roughness map. Let's plug that into the roughness channel, and instantly that's looking less glossy and a bit more realistic unlike shiny mud. Although if you look a bit closer, our two maps aren't matching up. Our scalings only happening to our color texture. If we take a good look at our roughness texture, we can do that by plugging it into the diffuse. We'll then see that in the color channel, it's still at that original scale. We need to apply our transform node to our roughness texture as well and now that's matching up. We'll put our color texture back where it belongs. We'll zoom out a bit so we can see this, and we'll just plug that back into here, and our shade is looking correct now. Before we move on, our roughness shader is a black and white map. We just need to make sure we set that to float. We'll move on to our next map, this one is the normal map like we did before. We'll just plug that into the normal channel, and now we've got some extra detail in there, It's looking a bit bumpier. Don't forget before we go into the final map, we need to apply that transform to our normal as well. Transform to transform, and again, that's matching up better and looking pretty good. We'll grab our final map here, that's the displacement map, and again, that's a black and white map. The first thing we do, switch it to float. We'll bring this down here and zoom in a bit so we can see this. You'd think you'd be able to connect the displacement map straight into the displacement channel here. But you'll see if we try that, computer says no, we actually need to run it through one more node. But first, before we forget, let's apply our transform node to our displacement map just like that. Now on our node list, if we scroll down a bit, here's the displacement, and that's got a few extra options. We'll drag that over here and connect our displacement texture to our displacement and have a look what we can play with here. You'll see that the amount to displace is set to 10 centimeters by default. I usually bring this down to one centimeter at first, because I don't want the effect to be too extreme. The next thing you might want to have a look at, is the level of details here, which is currently 256 by 256. This has to do with the resolution of the texture you'll be using to do the displacing. An easy way to find out what our resolution is, if we just drag this out a bit, is click on your texture and it'll tell you right here, we get a 2k map, as you'll probably remember from when we downloaded it. If we switch back to our displacement node, we'll change that to a 2k map. That'll just make sure all the detail in our high res maps are used in the displacement. Okay, before we connect that to our actual shader, we want to do a bit of a before and after comparison, so we can get a better idea of how our displacement is affecting our ground. In our live viewer, we'll right click and come down to store render buffer, and that'll capture our current render. We can slide this and see a before and after of when we apply our displacement. Let's do it, so we'll grab our displacement node and connect it into the displacement channel. We'll just let that render for a sec. Now if we grab this bar, we can slide it back and forth to see a before and after. Although we can't see too much at the moment, the effect is pretty settle. Let's crank that amount up, we'll go back to 10 and just wait for it to update. Now if we slide this back and forth, you can see the geometry of the ground has actually risen. We might see this a bit better if we change the camera, will turn that off and zoom in a bit, and just frame this up, maybe near the rock here, and back over in our live viewer, we'll right click, store the buffer again. If we put this back to one and let it update, you can see those changes now. The ground actually raises quite a bit at 10 centimeters. I think for now we'll keep it nice and settle and leave it on one. Let's turn that camera icon. The way to get rid of this buffer, is to just come up to the compare menu and untick enable AB comparison, and there we go. We might just make one final tweak before we move on. I think I want now seem to be a bit more dusty or snowy. I want to take some of this brown out and make everything a bit lighter, but still keep some of that texture in there. We'll grab out diffuse texture here, and we'll use another color correction node. We'll grab that and put it right on this line here to connect it up. We'll bring that saturation down somewhere about there, and that's taken out some of that brown. We'll also bring the gamma down to brighten it up a little. I think that should be fine for now. Just tweak this to mature sane, and I'll see you in the next lesson.
15. Octane Texturing - Octane Mix and Dirt: Now, we're going to work on a shader for our statue elements. That includes our female statue over here, her hand, the rock, and the male statue. Again, I want this to be a dirty marble material, but this time, it's going to be a little bit more complex. Firstly, we want a layer of dirt to collect in the crevices of the statues to bring out some of these details. Secondly, we want to make these statues look quite old. Like they've been out here for a long time. I want to have some dust or snow collecting on them, but I only want that together on the top of each model. Let's see what we can do. We'll start by grabbing our old marble material and we'll duplicate that. We can probably save a bit of time by just repurposing this. Let's rename it to statue. If we double-click that, another way to get to the note editor, is this button right here. Let's close that. We'll quickly tidy this up. Here's the color correction node that we use to brighten up the column in the background here. Before we start tweaking this, let's apply our statute material to our main statue over here, and then I can now color correction node. We'll tweak some of these settings. We want to bring some green into this marble texture. We'll start by adjusting the hue. I don't really see it just yet, but if we bring that saturation up, there's some green, and it's pretty bright, so we might need to bring up the gamma. That's looking pretty good. We'll go ahead and apply that to all the other statue parts. We'll put it on the male statue. That's working nicely. Then we can grab it, and holding control, drag it onto the other parts. Just the rock and the hand. That's looking good. But I think some of these details are getting lost in this texture. Let's add some dirt into these cracks to bring out some of these features. Lucky for us, Octane actually has a dirt node that's going to do most of the work for us. You can find that guy right here. Let's drag him in. We've got some pretty simple controls over here, but before we get into that, I'd like to connect this to the diffuse channel while we're working on it so we can see it a bit better. Instead of of our marble texture, we can see the dirt map. It might be a bit faint at the moment, but if we come back down here and adjust this strength, let's bring it up to four, you can see we've got some dirt and all of the cracks now, and it's bringing out those details a bit more. We might even do a before and after so you can see this a bit clearer. Right-click and store render buffer. Then we'll bring the strength back down to one and let that render through. Then we'll grab our slider. If we slide this over to our render with four as the strength, you can see a lot more detail in there. Let's disable our comparison. We'll put a fallback in here so we get that stronger dirt look. Now we want to combine our layer of dirt over the top of our marble texture. The way we're going to do that, is with a multiply node, this guy. Let's drag him over here. If you've ever used PhotoShop, you'll probably know how this is going to work. If we connect our marble texture to the bottom texture slot here, and our multiply node into the diffuse, you'll get a very dark result up here, but if we come back down here and grab our dirt and connect that into the first texture slot, the black and white values of our dirts are multiplying over the texture map and merging them together. Let's store the render buffer again so we can see this clearer. We'll come down here and bypass the dirt so we can see how it was before. Just let that render a bit. Now, we can do our comparison. Here's before and here's after. I think that's looking much better. It's a lot like using an ambient occlusion shadow. Lets clear our comparison again. Now we want to work on our dust or snow layer. Whatever we go with, it should match the ground shader. Because if it's dust or snow, it would also fall on there. They should be pretty much the same. We can probably start by duplicating the ground shader as well. We'll hold Control and drag it over here, and we'll rename it to dust. Let's apply that to the statute so we can see how it looks on there. It actually looks a bit to gray brown for my liking. We'll make sure we've got out dust shader loaded into our node editor, and we'll grab the color correction node, and we'll tweak the gamma a bit just to brighten this up. That looks like it could be dust or snow. Now we need to figure out a way to just have this showing on the top parts of the objects. Up on the head and the shoulders and on the arm here. First, I want to get the dust and the statue marble shader and put them together into the one shader with the idea of masking the dust layer over the statue layer. Still without dust shader selected here, we can actually grab our statue shader and drag it into here. Now, to mix these two shaders into the one shader, we'll need a mix material node. That's not to be confused with this mix node here. The one we want is right at the top here, the mixed material. We'll bring that one in and zoom in a bit. You can see here, it's asking for two materials and we've also got a slot for the amount and a displacement map. We just so happen to have two materials here. Lets plug our dust into material one. It's the top layer, and our statue into Material 2, which will be the layer beneath. If we take a look at our layer viewer, we're still only seeing the dust material, and that's because we haven't applied our new mixed material here. While we're at it, let's rename this to mix, and we'll drag that onto our dust material to replace it. Now, we're getting a faded look here. That's because it's actually mixing those two materials together. If we come and check that out, you'll see the amount is set to 0.5 by default. So it'll be a 50-50 mix of those two materials. But if we bring this fully this way, we'll have Material 2, our statue material. If we put it fully this way, we're fully back to our dust material. But we want to create a mask to drive the amount so we can have our dust only appearing on the top surfaces of our object. Let's just leave this setup for now. We need to build a mosque and bring it back in here to link it up. We're actually going to create our mosque in a separate material. This time we're going to use an octane diffuse material because we only want to create a black and white map for our mosque. Let's rename this material too. Because we are just going to use it to test a few nodes. Once we figured it out, we can copy the nodes and paste them into our main mixed material. I think this is a much easier way to work, especially seeing our mixed material has become pretty complicated. Let's apply this test material to our statue and hopefully you'll see what I mean very shortly. As you'd expect, our shade is just white at the moment, which is good because we want our final result to just be black and white. Let's grab our shader, and now we need something that's going to give us a nice black and white fall off, vertically on our object. The best node for fall off, is the fall off node. This guy right here. Let's plug that straight into the diffuse channel. You can do that, just dragging it here and now we've got a similar effect, to the dirt node that we used before. It's giving us a nice black and white mask that we could use, so we're definitely on the right track. But let's come down here and see what's going on. These are the options for our fall off map and you can see our current mode is set to normal versus eye ray, which is a fancy way of saying, any surface pointing towards the camera will be black, and any surface pointing away from the camera, will be white. Other angles will be somewhere in between, we've got a black to white gradient fall off, which is a pretty handy effect. But it's not quite what we're off to for this shader. Lets try one of the other modes here. The next one down, normal versus vector 90 degrees. That one is looking a lot more promising. You can see all of the top surfaces are dark and the lowest surfaces or white. It even looks dusty now. Let's see if we can bring up the contrast of this effect. If we change the minimum value, the blacks become lighter and if we change the maximum value, the whites become darker. But it all looks a bit murky to me, there's a better way to control this. We'll come down here and we'll bring in a gradient. We want to drag that right in between here and if we have a look at the options here, and scooch this over here, we can now control the contrast of the effect with this lovely gradient here. If we bring the white one down, we've got less of the black but if we bring the black one in closer, we get a more contrasty effect. Let's just try something like this and I think that's fine. Or we want the effect to be inverted. These areas are white and these areas are black. The easiest way to do that, is to just grab an invert node. We'll plug that in right between these two and let's just tidy this up and now it's starting to look like snow on our statue. Let's just double check our setup and try it on the other modals. We'll drag it onto the male statue, and that's looking like it's pretty snow covered as well. But before we move on, let's just zoom in and check it out up close. We'll switch that camera off and we'll go and have a closer look at our arm. I'm not so sure about the harsh edges here. It'd be nice if we could break this up just a little bit. Let's take a look at our Textures folder and see what we can use. Maybe we could try the Surface Imperfections Map we downloaded earlier. You can use either one of these. I'll go with this one. Let's drag it into our test shader and we need to figure out a way to work this into our setup. Let's give ourselves a bit more room first and before we go plugging things in, let's see what this looks like in the diffuse channel. If we have a closer look, you can see some stretching going on here. Let's zoom out it's definitely looking a bit distorted. Let's grab all of these materials and we'll change the way they projected onto the mesh. Down here under projection, let's switch that to cubic and that's looking a bit more even. Let's reconnect this, we're back to the look we had before, and now we want to add this extra detail to our fall off map, but we might want to change the contrast of it as well. Let's do what we did before, and bring in a gradient to control this. We'll link these up to the diffuse channel again so we can see it. It's just like it was before, but if we click on our gradient, and change the slider here, we can adjust the contrast. I want this mostly dark with a few little white bits to break it up. Something like this. Although we might need to make those whites a little bit brighter. We'll drag this guy closer to the black, and that should do it. Now we need to add this to our fall of map and you probably guessed it, the best way to add is with the add node. Let's bring him in and plunk him right there and that's plugged itself into texture one. Let's grab the output of our invert and plug it into texture two and now you can see they've been added together. We've got our imperfections, breaking up our original black and white mask. All we need to do, is get this setup back into our mixed material. Let's just click and drag to collect all of these nodes and we'll hit control C to copy and we'll switch over to our mixed material and line this up a bit and we'll hit control V to paste them in. Now we can take that output and plug it into the amount, and we don't want to forget we put our test shader on here. Let's delete that and now you can see that dust collecting on top of the statue material. If we go back down here, you can see that's also reflected in our thumbnail here. Now at this point, if you wanted to make the dust a bit more prominent, we can control that up here with our original gradient node. If we crush this in a bit, that should really update. It might actually be a problem with the refreshing of the live viewer. But we can check that. I'll show you a little trick. If it's a bit hard to tell the mask is working on two materials that are pretty similar looking. You can just bring in another material and if we set the color of that to something obvious like red and plug that into one of the material slots, that becomes a lot easier to see. If we go back to our gradient and try to change this, will now be able to tell if anything's happening and it's not. It's definitely a problem with the live viewer not refreshing let's hit this button and now you can see the change is taking effect here. Let's go back to our mixed material and put the dust shader back in its place. That pretty much completes this shader. All we need to do now, is apply the mix material to the other objects. We'll put that on the male statue and that's working nicely. Then we'll throw it on the rock and the hand and complete this lesson. It was a bit of a tricky one, but we got there in the end. I'll see you in the next lesson where we'll be looking at octane rendering.
16. Octane Rendering: I ended up tweaking some of the shades a bit off to the last lesson. I've made our statue shade a much darker and more contrasts. We can really see that dust. I've also decided that our dust will be a bit more like snow. So I've lightened up our ground shader here and taken some of the bumps track and the leafy texture. It's always an evolving process, so just do what's right for your scene. So let's get ready to render this. Firstly, we don't need out temp light setup here that we use when we were designing our shaders. So let's delete that. We'll turn our volumetric lighting setup icon here. We'll just pop this open to make sure everything is on. Now that we are able to see this with the correct lighting. I'm liking the way those shaders are looking. Maybe we could use a little bit more color in here. Octane actually has some really great post-processing tools. You can potentially Render a final image directly out of Cinema 4D. Let's just make our scene look as good as we can, and we'll add the finishing touches in After Effects. If we click on our octane camera tag here, we can take a look at some of these post-processing tools. If we go to the camera image tab, and enable camera imaging, we've got loads of things we can tweak to enhance our overall scene. But one thing I like to play with, is the response. Which is effectively adding a lot to your image. A lot or a lookup table is basically like a filter you'd find on Instagram for example. If we click here, you can see all the filters available. If we click on one, you can see that's given us quite a different look. We can actually cycle through these by just hitting down on the keyboard. We'll just go through until we find one we like. The one that I use quite often is the FC1 CD filter. That's not looking too bad. Before we do our final render, I'd like a bit more light to scatter through the scene and brighten things up. It's looking a little flat right now. So let's grab our environment tag here. You remember we've got HDRI map in here, which is learning a fog, but if we switch over to our medium tab and go into our scattering medium. Let's see if we can bring a bit more light into this. We can do exactly that. With the emission down here. We need to add a shader, we'll go C4D octane shaders and bringing in a black body emission. Which is adding an extra light in here. That light is way too bright right now. So we'll click into our black body emission. Here is the power. Let's bring that right down something like that. You can see we've got a lot more light bouncing around in here. We can even change the color temperature from being this way. We can make it look a bit warmer, because we've decided this is a snow planet, let's make it look a bit colder. Maybe just a touch more to bring in some more of that blue or something like that. So now this is feeling a lot more like a hostile Alien environment. Now that we're happy with that, let's go and have a look at our Render Settings. We already set this up before and everything is looking good. HD, we don't need to worry about the frame rate will render the current frame. All the frames are the same, so it doesn't matter. But what we need to do now is switch the Render from standard to octane render. That should appear down here. Let's click on that tab. Look at octane Render Settings. Make sure you're on the Render passes tab, and we want to enable that. So then just name your file and location. We're going to save that to the D drive and call it Daily Render. So we'll put that in here. We want the format to be EXE, the depth to be 16-bit. These two settings are fine, show passes on. We also want save beauty checked. We don't want to multi-layer file this time. Down here we've got a whole bunch of passes, but we're creating Daily Renders here. So we want to do this as quickly as possible and only support what we need. So let's have a look and see what we actually need. Let's turn on the reflection pass. We can preview that up here, by clicking this little reflection tab here. This could potentially be quite helpful to bringing our models out a little bit. So we'll render that and our beauty pass, which is the main one here. Those two layers should really be all we need. Let's just have a look in our octane Render Settings here. Our max samples are set to 1,000, but what we are doing is still image. Let's crank that up just a bit. We'll say 1080. Everything else is looking pretty good. Let's close that up, and I think we're ready to render. Let's press shift R the keyboard. That should fire off a Render. Let us do other things. When it's rendered to disk, I'll see you in the next lesson where we'll be putting the finishing touches on in After Effects.
17. Finishing Up In Post: Here we are in After Effects and the first thing we want to do is change our bit depth. We're currently working in 8-bit. As you can see down here, we've exported 16-bit EXI files. So we have to make sure our project is set up to make the most of those files. Let's click on this. I usually just set this to 32-bit, so we've got the maximum color depth to use while we're comping. The next thing we need to do is bring in our rendered images. I've got them over here. I'll just drag them into the project here. Then we'll come up here and grab our main Beauty pass, which looks just like that. We need to put this into a composition. So we'll drag that down here and this is what it looks like straight out of Cinema 4D. I think it's a little bit flat, so let's apply some color correction. You could apply that straight onto the image here, but I like to work with adjustment layers. So let's bring one of those in. We'll go up to Layer, New and down here to Adjustment Layer. Or you could use the CTRL + Alt way shortcut? Let's keep everything nice and tidy and rename our adjustment layer. To do that, just press Enter and we'll call it, color. Now, After Effects has loads of different color effects, but the one I like to use is called Lumetri Color. Up here in our Effects search box, let's just type in L-U-M and it should bring it up. There it is. So we'll double-click on that to apply it and nothing's changed yet. Let's come over and have a look at the settings. We want to make it a bit more blue. We could play with the temperature down here. If we make that a negative number, it will cool it down and if we take it the other way, it'll warm it up. If we undo that, there's another way to do this. If we come down to the Creative tab here, we've got these cool color wheels. So we can tint the shadows or the darker areas and make them more blue. We'll just do this nice and slowly and gradually add that color, nice and blue now, but I'll show you my favorite way to color correct images. Let's undo that as well. We'll come up here to where it says, "Input LUT". This is pretty much the same as the response feature we looked at in the octane rendering class. If we click on this, the LUT or filter that I really like is the M-31 LOG LUT. You can download this one for free. There's a link in the Resources PDF. Let's apply that. That's given us this very deep blue, which I quite like. Now, we can always turn this down a bit by adjusting the opacity of our color correction adjustment layer here. You can see the opacity by hitting T on the keyboard. Let's try bringing that down to something like 40 percent. That's looking good. We can leave our Beauty POS for now. Let's go and see what are other layer can do for us. So we'll go back to the Project tab. We'll grab our reflection part here and drag that onto the top of our layers here and you can see what that looks like. Basically, it's rendered just the reflections in a separate image. If we come down here and set that layers blending mode to Add, this one here, it'll add that effect over the reflections that we've already got in our Beauty pass. It just makes those reflections a little stronger. I like to use this technique to make our objects stand out a bit more. Let's bring this layout underneath our color, so that LUT will affect it as well and make it blend in a bit better. It might still be a bit strong, but we can turn this down again as we did before and bringing that opacity down. Let's try 20 percent. If we toggle the layer visibility here, you can see a before and after of that. I definitely think it makes our image look a bit more interesting. But now that we've got that on there, we might want to make a few more tweaks to our color adjustment layer. We'll go back here. It still looks a little bit washed out. I think it could use a bit of contrast. So let's crank that right up here. That's better. What would be really cool, is if we could bring that fog out a bit more and maybe add some texture to it, like a slight cloud or smokiness. I think it needs to feel a bit more science fictiony. So let's see what after effects has for us back over here in the effects pallet. I think we might use the Fractal Noise. Let's start typing that in here and under Noise & Grain, you can find that, but we don't want to apply that to our adjustment layer here. We actually want to come up to Layer, New and we'll apply it to a Solid. These settings are fine. We want it to be white. Let's hit "Okay" and now we can double-click our effect to apply it. Now, we've got some noise, but it doesn't look very cloudy. So let's have a look at these settings. We've got Fractal Type here and if we click that, we've got a bunch of different options. Let's try Dynamic. That's an interesting effect, but not very cloudy. What about Smeary? That's cool. But I think if we go with the cloudy, it might be our best option. These are pretty weird-looking clouds. Let's see what else we've got up here. What if we change the noise type? Let's try Spline. That's looking a bit more like clouds. It's probably not quite right yet. Let's see what else we can change up here. Let's take a look at the Transform options. If we scale this up, it might not look so busy. I think that's looking pretty cool. Let's come back down here and rename this. We'll call it Fog and we'll drag it under our color correction and let's try changing its blending mode to Add as well. It's looking pretty intense. But as we did before, let's dial that opacity down a bit. We'll try 15 percent. We've got some nice texture in there now and it's looking more like a misty alien planet. We could even tweak this a bit more. Let's try inverting it. That's cool. It's a subtle effect, but it breaks up some of these more empty spaces. You could even come over here and adjust the evolution to get a slightly different result and I'm liking that. So let's leave that affect there. Another thing I like to do in comping is sharpen the image up a bit. We zoom in here. Some of these details are a little bit soft. So let's come down to our color adjustment layer and we'll duplicate that. That's CTRL + D on the keyboard and we'll rename it to Sharpen. We'll bring the capacity up to a 100 percent and we'll delete the effect that's on there, our lumetri color. Then we'll come over to our effects and we want the Unsharp Mask. So we'll start typing that in and here it is. Let's apply that. This is my favorite sharpening effect and it's very subtle and you might not be able to see it so well on this recording. But when it comes to our final render, it definitely makes a difference. The next thing we want to do is add a little bit of imperfection. We could add some lens distortion to make this look a little less computer-generated. So let's come up here and we'll grab another adjustment layer. We'll come down here and rename it. Let's call this one Lens Effects. Then back up here, we want the Optics Compensation. So we'll type that in and apply that one. There's no effect yet. But if we come over to the field of view and crank that up, we get this cool lens effect and it bulges the image out like this. It's obviously a bit extreme, so let's reset that. We want it to bulge inward. So let's take the reverse lens distortion and if we bring that back up again, it'll start distorting the way we want it to. We don't want this to be two extreme. Let's just change this to 10. We can see a before and after here. Again, it's a subtle effect, but these little details can really help lift your artwork. Now, there's one more lens effect that we want to add. This one's a third party plug-in, but it's free. It's called the quick chromatic aberration, and it's by the company Plugin Everything. They actually have quite a few free plugins, so you might want to check them out. There's a link to that in the resources PDF. So let's apply that guy and we'll come over here and crank up this position so we can see what this effect does. Basically, it just separates the red, green, and blue channels, which sometimes happens in actual photography. Not to the scale, of course, but you'll usually find chromatic aberration around the edges of the frame. Let's see if we can limit this effect to just the edges. Let's try playing around with the rotation here. That might be a bit too much. Let's try a value of 0.1. Now, it looks a bit like it did before. But if we bring the position right down as well, let's just try one. It now looks like nothing's happened, but if we zoom in, you can start to see that fringing around the objects here. You might see that easier if we turn this on and off. Or maybe if we try and area up in the corner like this spot here. That should be more noticeable if we turn it on and off. Yet again, it's a very subtle effect, but it does add a bit of realism. You might see it even better down here on our space girl, especially around her hand here. If we toggle that on and off, that's a bit more obvious. It might even be a bit too extreme. We'll put that position down to 0.5. Let's zoom out and have one last little look at this. Quick toggle on and off and let's try toggling the whole Adjustment layer. That's it for our subtle lens effect. Let's just move this under the Sharpen, so it gets sharpened as well. That's pretty much it for our post-production. But I wanted to show you one last trick. How you can easily get a completely different look. Instead of a snowy planet, what if this scene took place on Mars? Let's bring in another adjustment layer and we'll rename this to Mars. We'll move it up above the sharpen for now, then over in the effects will type CC and we'll grab the CC toner. Straightaway, that gives it an old fashion look. But let's come up here and we'll change the highlights. It's set to white at the moment but we can remap our highlight color. We could try a red and we get this effect. But if we want to be on Mars, let's try an orange. Now we're getting a dusty Mars atmosphere. Then we'll change the mid tones. So these areas here, we want something like this. Now, it looks a bit like red dirt and we'll change the shadows to something like this. Now, it's starting to look a bit like Mars. Let's just brighten this up. We'll come up here and grab an exposure effect. We'll just crank that up a bit. It looks a little bit intense. Let's just bring the opacity down to something like 90 percent. Just like that, we've got our mass effect. It actually looks a little bit like Blade Runner Now. Hopefully you can apply these techniques to your daily renders. In the next lesson, we'll look at taking this one step further and we'll add some snow or dust particles.
18. BONUS: Dust or Snow Particles: let's make our planet look a little bit more hostile and have some snow or dust particles flying through the air. The first thing we'll do is delete our octane sky. We won't be needing that fog effect anymore, and we also don't need these lights for now so let's turn those off and collapse that up. We'll replace this with a more simple lighting setup and we'll bring in a texture environment. Then we'll come down here and make this color pure white. We only want to render the particles in the scene so we can overlay them back in our After Effects comp. We want to get rid of anything we don't need or that'll slow our render down and that includes the materials. Let's grab all of those and delete them. Then we'll need to refresh our live viewer here. We now have a much more simple scene. You can see down here how much quicker it's rendering. Now we can start adding our particles and have them raining down over L seen. We'll pause our live viewer while we set this up, then we'll go over to Simulate particles and we'll grab an Emitter. We'll need to reposition this but switch views and we want it way up above L seen, something like that and if we go over to the Emitter tab here, we can resize this. Let's just make it 2,500 by 2,500 and if we hit play, you'll see it's pointed the wrong way. We want these shooting down so we'll rotate that 90 degrees. We want it in front of the camera and probably a bit higher. let's check this in our camera view. That looks fine for now. Let's start emitting particles. We'll go over to our Emitter and under the particle tab, we can start with the birthrate. This dictates how many particles will be emitted. Will crank these up to 500, which will be able to see in the viewport editor and the final render. Then we'll leave the settings for now and hit play. You can see them coming down now. It looks a little bit like snow, but we want this to be a lot more turbulent. The weather conditions on this planet are pretty extreme. We'll come up to Simulate particles and we'll grab a turbulence. There he is. Before we play with these settings though, let's hit play and see if there's any effect yet. Not much different. Let's try cranking that strength up to something like 50. That's starting to have an effect. Still want it to be a bit more extreme. Let's try bringing the scale up to 1000 percent. Now that is looking pretty cool. We might need to extend our timeline a bit so we can see more of this animation. Nine hundred frames should do us. I'm pretty happy with that. Let's pause that and we'll see if we can get one of these frames to render. We'll fire up our live viewer. It looks like we can't see these particles yet. We need to tell octane to render them. But first we need to attach some geometry to the particles so octane has something to render. We'll come up here and use a sphere. Let's move that up. It's a bit big. We'll come over here to the radius. We want this to be a pretty small snow or dust particle so bring that down to two centimeters and it doesn't need to be too detailed so bring those segments down. We can probably get away with just eight. Then to apply it to our particles, we'll drag it into the emitter. At first, it doesn't seem like anything's happened. Our sphere is still there but if we grab our emitter and come down to show objects, each one of those particles will now be replaced with the sphere. If we rewind and play this, you can see all those spheres raining down now. It looks a bit strange, like it's raining golf balls or something. We want them to look like little streaks and imply a bit more motion so we'll need to turn on a bit of motion blur. Let's go grab our octane camera tag and under the motion blow tab all we need to do is click Enable. We'll also need a shutter speed so we can see this effect. Although if we turn this up, you still won't see any changes yet. We need to tell octane which objects need to be calculated for motion blur. We want L emitter to be in that calculation. We need to come up with the tags, cinema 4D octane tags and we'll grab an octane object tag. That's now made them blurry but they might be a bit hard to see at that scale. If we play it back. You can see they're still raining down but they might be a bit too small. Let's grab our sphere and will double the size and if we play that back to a more turbulent frame, you can see that nice motion blur happening. If you're still not seeing this motion blur, there's one more thing you might want to check. If we come up to our render settings and under our octane render tab, under main, you've got some motion blur settings here. You just want to make sure that this is set to full motion blur. You should be good to go. While we're here, let's go over to the render passes. This is still setup how it was before but this time we'll be using the render layer setting down here. Let's turn that on. That started to isolate our particles. Basically, we're now only rendering objects that are on layer ID 1, as you can see here. If we come up to our object tag on our emitter, and under the object layer tab, we've got our layer ID here, and it's currently set to one. Let's change this to two. You'll see our particles disappear because they no longer part of layer ID 1 but if we now change that to two, we get only the particles, which is going to make life nice and easy when it comes to compositing this over the shot we did in After Effects. Let's just buy this through till we get a frame we like. This one looks okay but those streaks are look in a bit too long for my liking. Let's go back to our camera tag, and we'll tweak the shutter speed. If we bring it up here, you can see that stretches at even more. Let's try 0.05. I think that's a bit better. Let's try another frame. That frame is looking pretty good but I think our particles might still be a little bit too big. Let's go back and grab our sphere. That we'll bring that radius down to two again. I think that's about right. But let's just check one more frame to be sure. This streak's still seem a little bit long so let's go and change our shutter speed one more time. This is by no means physically accurate. We're just art directing it at the moment. We just want something that looks good. Let's try 0.01. I think we're finally there. I just want to have a few more particles in here. Let's go up to the emitter and we'll crank these up to 800. We'll play that back. I think that's looking pretty good. You can see how the other objects in the same are masking out our particles. This is going to work great when we get it comped in. I think we're ready to render this now. Let's go up to the render settings and we'll check the output. It's set to current frame, which is good. This is the frame we want to render. Just make sure you're on the frame that you want. Then we'll have a quick look at our octane sender settings. Under the render passes, we need to change the file name. Let's call this snow. Then our render layer is all set up. But we need to remember to get back to our beauty passes and turn off that reflection pass. We don't need that anymore. Let's hit Shifter and fire up a render. It looks like we might have a slight issue here. Our motion blur has gone really long and crazy again, what's going on? I find sometimes the preview in the live viewer and the final render is a bit different when it comes to motion blur. To calculate it accurately, you actually need a few frames either side of the frame you want to render. The live viewer is sometimes a little unreliable, but it's an easy fix. All we have to do is come back to our camera tag and if we just make the shutter speed a little smaller, let's add an extra zero in here and fire off another render. That should fix the problem. That's looking much better. Just let their rent out and I'll see you back in After Effects. Here's our snowy planet scene as we left it before. Now let's grab our snow EXR that we just rendered and drag it into here. Then we'll plunk it down here at the top of our composition. That's what our final render looks like. Now we need to overlay this image into our scene so we'll change the blending Mode to add. Now we've got our snow layer. It's not being effected by all of our lens effects yet. Let's drag it down here underneath L fog layer. Again, it's looking a bit too intense so let's hit T on the keyboard for the opacity settings. We'll bring that down to 30 percent. Now that's filled in some of the empty space and it's made our planet look a bit more exciting. We can also go and see what this effect looks like on Mars. There you go. Our daily render is finally finished and ready to upload, and that's it for us. I'm looking forward to seeing what you created.
19. Thanks for Watching!: Thanks for watching. Don't forget to post your final render on our Facebook group. If you share your creations on social media, you can tag me at CGSHORTCUTS. It would be amazing if you could leave me a review. If you need help with anything or have an idea for a future course, please get in touch. You can find us at all of these places. I'll catch you next time.
Dave Bergin, CG Artist - CG Shortcuts
