Transcripts
1. Introduction: What's going on, guys? Patrick again, finally got in to the class here. This is what I'm very excited about for many reasons. One, we're going through this really cool looking Sci-Fi sculpture and how to create that. I really haven't touched base on this kind of class before. Also, another big thing we got, I'm not just catering to the physical render guys, and I'm not just catering to the octane guys, so we're doing both. Whatever you're using, it's octane or physical, you'll be able to light and texture this thing. I come and go through each step based on who you are and who's taken this class. I hope you guys enjoy. We'll be going over the modeling, lighting and texturing as always, going over everything, post coloring. That's pretty much it. I can't wait to see what you guys come up with and enjoy the class.
2. Getting Started (Camera Setup): Alright guys. I bet most of you are probably familiar with this page here. It's the Instagram I run and I wanted to show you what we're making first code down here to this post right here, I guess June 24, I posted it. It looks like a lot of you guys want to know how to make this sci-fi looking thing. I actually a while back, I did a series I think like a six post series where my theme is like these sci-fi renders and it got a good kick out of it. We've got a depth of field here, you can't really tell these things mass over small and almost looks like it's a big thing, if we're tiny. This will be fun to make and we really haven't touched this material or this feel on skill share yet, so this will be fun. Got this plexus thing going on, some cloner stuff, and then we've got some spline stuff going on, and then some nice simple simplistic lights going on. Should be fun and I guess we can jump into cinema now. If we go to cinema, this is the default layout. I made sure we had everything simplified here for you. I think we can go ahead and get started. If I'm not mistaking, this is actually the aspect ratio for this one where the dimensions were a little longer. It wasn't like a square like this. We can start that ASAP. Let's go to the Render Settings here and make sure everything's looking nice. Right now it's 1080 by 1080, that's fine. But we're just going to make the height 1350 and now we're actually the correct aspect ratio for those longer Instagram posts. Usually what I'll do is just lock this ratio and take this up to 1200 and 1200 by 1500, all the same aspect ratio, which should be a more high-res for some like Instagram this would be totally fine. That should be good. Before I start doing anything else, I may want to actually shift V and go to View and take the opacity to 100. We've got some nice clear borders and we can see what's going on and actually you probably don't have a camera set up, so we'll just delete that camera there. Now we should be good to start making stuff. What I usually do, even though I just deleted the camera, is pop one in there just so we can get our field of view in our framing centered. Whatever you make it looks like it's centered to the frame if that makes sense. We'll take the camera here and you go to coordinates and zero everything out except six or the z-axis. You can keep that minus 600 for now and we're going to take the rotations and zero those out as well. Right now if we were to hop out, we should be looking straight to the rate. If we click on this tab here, we can see that it is facing like 90 degrees this way toward Z and we're looking good. We want to make sure everything's clean and easy to keep track of. We can hop back in the camera and just so we don't lose our position, let's go to cinema 4D tags by right-clicking the camera, cinema 4D tags, and protection. This will make it so no matter where I move, I can't move when I'm inside the camera, but when I'm outside of the camera, I can move just fine. Let's hop back in there and we're looking good. I think we should be able to start making our shape here.
3. Modeling (Main Subject): If you'll see here, if I go back to the Instagram, we got this crazy, simple yet complex looking shape here and I think we're safe to build that first. Right now we'll just make it floating and then we'll make it attached to these wires and on that little stand there. Then we'll worry about making like the platform, it's on everything. Let's start by, I think what I did actually, is started with a platonic and you can see it already looks pretty similar, pretty simple object, not a big deal. But before we do anything, instead of bringing this guy up see it's morphing at us because the camera lens we're using is, looks to be pretty wide. A classic we're going to change this to a portrait 80 millimeter. This will just give us a more well-rounded looking shape is not going to bend, is not going to deform like a real wide angle lens. It'll actually help with our depth of field so we can keep this at any size that looks comfortable for us in the frame. Looks fine to me and what we want to do is this looks nice, but it's too symmetrical and it doesn't like this is just a platonic so we'll command or control Z that and then we'll take these guy here and we're going to put a deformer on it. We're going to take here is if you just click and hold down this guy and we're going to go to Displacer so you can either click and drag on top of, as a child of the platonic, or you can just click Platonic and while you're in this menu, hold down Shift and let go. Same thing. What we want to do is actually mess with this shape here and before I start, I want to go to this display and go to something like constant shading lines so we can see the segments a little bit easier. But if you go to the Displacer and we go to Shading, we're going to want to use a Shader a noise shader for this deformation. If you click Noise, we can see something happen, very slight. But if you were to go to the object tab now and change the height of the deformation. We're actually getting some cool deformations here. This actually, it's up to you guys how complex you want to make this shape, this is cool, it's very simplistic but if you want anything a little bit more simplistic, all you have to do is click up on the segments by one. Just that made this thing even more iris and I believe that's the amount of segments I used for this was two last time, you started more than on that it's losing that platonic look so you can get really crazy with this stuff and it's really cool but for what we're going for now, I don't think we need that. We can take the displacer, and if you're not happy with the specific shape, you can just go to the Noise and change the seed to whatever you think looks right. For me this is a hard part of, it always takes me a lot to figure out what I'm going for. All these look cool. I think that looks like what we're going for a little bit. Rotate around, there so many different, even though this is pretty low power, there's so many different variations you can go. If you're not happy with that, and if you're happy with this, but you can't tell what's not working, you can just mess up the height a little bit or even go inverted and see if that helps. Of course, you can also take the scale of the noise and boost that up. Again, it just changes everything. Just by changing the seed and really any value change, it'll change the whole shape of the thing so there's really endless limits and it's easy get cutaway here but sometimes you just got to pick something, especially for a tutorial like this or a class like this, might have to pick something that I'm not completely happy with just to keep going. Actually you might be happy with this, so I like this shape. I have to just take a couple seeds and keep going until I'm really happy with something, that's cool. Let's see, going to wiggle that around a little bit, I'm still not completely happy. Again, if this part is boring to you guys, feel free to just skip a little bit ahead but I want to make sure, especially for the thumbnail, I want to make sure that this thing looks somewhat decent. That looks cool. I guess we'll stick with that for now, it looks cool to me. You can see there's a decent amount of segments, not too many and not too little, at least for my liking we go three, starts getting real crazy but you're more than welcome to do that as you please. Cool, that's looking good to me. The next thing you'll notice is if I were to change the display back to regular, looks cool, but very low power and that's partially because one, we have a font tag on it, so we can delete that and two, this is starting to look good, but as you can see on the other one we have this it's almost like the segments are popping out to be like welded joints or something and then we got some spheres acting as welding joints or something to make this thing look a little bit more than just like a boring shape so if we go back, we're going to start to add that. What we want to do is those long pole looking joint things are comprised of spheres and cylinders, so very simple. First we can get the cylinders in of course, these are way too big so what you're going to end up having to do is roughly eyeball how thin you think you'll want the cylinders. Maybe something like that. Again, you just have to visualize this real quick. There's many different ways you can do this in different orders but once you've got that, we're going to hop into our best friend, the Cloner right here and then we're just going to make this guy a child of the cloner. It's hard to tell now, but there's pretty much three of these guys. Three of the cylinders stacked on top of each other because we're at a count of three, and that's just the default deformation. What we'll do is we can keep this on instance for now and then what we'll do is go to Mode Object and the object we want to be cloned on is the platonic. We're going to drag a platonic on there and already I think they actually changed. I think in R19 or R20, they made that change for the default distribution to be surface, it used to be vertex, which is very scary because if you're trying to clone something on an object with thousands of thousands of polygons that's just very dangerous to be cloning any metal objects on so they changed that very good decision by marks on and now it's stuck to surface. It's more of a randomized deformation or mapping of these things on this guy with a set of 20. However, we don't want surface either or vertex, we want edge. Right now these guys are mapped on to the edges of the platonic like we want. However, couple things we need do we need to click Scale on edge and now we can see much more clearly that these things are mapped on each edge of this thing. But we want these things to be 100 percent fitted to the edges of the platonic. What we're going to do there is we're going to go to Cloner again and just take the Edge Scale, bring it up to 100 and that looks really good. We're getting this product that we want, however this might be a little bit too thick so what we can do is just really easily take the radius down, so you can take it down by just clicking the down arrow , because by incrementing one, when we're already at 1.6, we only get to really click that once before it goes negative. What we can do is hold down the ALT key and just click Down, and that'll do it by the 10th and so we're pretty happy with it. To me, I think 0.8, how did we have before? Maybe a little bit smaller, let's go 0.7. That looks good to me. That'll be good for a start and as we can see, we've got this little shape here, but it looks a little bit more futuristic than just nothing so we got the cylinders mapped on the platonic. Right now I guess we can change this cloner name to I guess edge cylinders or joins or whatever you guys want to do to remember. Cool, looking fine here we've got the platonic, the displacer, and the edge cylinder, not bad. Now what we need is those joints or the balls that you can see right here. Same thing, literally just repeating the step we just did on the different distribution. We got the sphere, which will be the joints so we can just map that down and you can see it right here that's about how small is going to be you'll just to keep that in the center there. Then we're going to do the same thing, Cloner, drag this on top, this time object, drag the platonic in and change it to vertex. That's exactly what we want. Now we can just change the radius of the sphere until we're happy with it. Maybe like 1.9, let's go two, radius of two, looks good. Based on your scale of the project, you might need to be bigger or smaller. But this is looking good to me and I'm happy with it and we're looking good. We're actually done with the model of the object that we had.
4. Creating Supporting Elements (Lights/Base/Backdrop): I believe next, I guess we can get the lights out of the way. Very simple, just a loner with a cylinder. If you want, we can go, and hop in a cylinder which will be representative of each light. Then just make sure we solo it out. So let's go Viewport Solo Single. Now we can just see the sky. What we're going to do is to really just make these small, little cylinders here. If you want to hop out a camera to make it easier, that might help. If you notice on these frames, we're getting some nice shines in gleam. So we want to make sure these edges are just a little bit doubled. We'll go there, click the fill it, and make it something like a radius of one. That should be good. I want to make sure the rotation segments, let's take it to like 80. It's pretty round. Then we're going to want to collapse it. So we're going to go click C, and that will be able to edit the segments. What I did was clicking C. I made it editable. You can also click right here, and it'll do the same thing. Now this icon has changed, and let you know that you can really modify each of these guys as you please. Let's go click U on the keyboard, and L for loops selection. As you can see, these guys go extrude a little bit. It's almost like the lights are extruded. So we're going to do exactly that, which you click there, right-click anywhere, extrude enter, and click, and drag. Something like that. We're going to right-click again. Let's go Bevel, and let's do a subdivision of three. You're going to change the offset by clicking and dragging, just like that, and just like that you've got a light, except I don't actually think I need to many segments to be honest. So I think one subdivision will be fine, and we have our light. If you want a future proof this thing which you're going to do UL. Then what we really want is to differentiate the light part from the base. So right here this will be illuminated at one point. We can just get that ready, and go select, and set selection. Pretty much what this means is if I were to click somewhere else, I can always remember that selection. Just remembering that for later when we actually texture, and make that a little material. We should be good. Let's hop back into the camera. We got this thing somewhat decent. We're going to have to make it small, but that's good for a start. We can take the Solo off of course. What we want to do is actually, where the solo is on, let's go back to my graph Cloner, and let's drag this guy on top. Because these are all going to be the same, you can make these render instance. We're going to take it from linear to grid array. We just need one of the heights, so, I think that'll be good. Drag this guy all the way up. These guys are obviously way too big. So let's scale the whole corner down a little bit. Then scale each light down individually. That looks fine. Let's add another row of them. It should be good. Actually I think we had five of them on the x. So let's go one more. Then just make these a little bit smaller, and maybe increase the cloner, something like that. We're looking good if we want to un-solo this thing. Looking pretty decent so far. We have the lights, and we got the platonic kind of abstract thing going on. Really looking good. Next thing we can actually work on is getting a psych wall here or this endless or the seamless background. Very easy way to do that, we're going to create a plane, and bring this back down. Let's go back to the constant shading lines mode so we can see the segments. For this, you might be surprised to know that we don't want any segments. One by one should be fine. We just want to make that editable. Now we can select this guy. Of course, we can do a bunch of things once we're in this kind of mode, but let's also have the camera again, and see what we're looking at. Not bad. What we want to do is click the edge selection mode, and go to click one of the edges. Let's bring it back a little bit. What I want to do is while holding Control or Command, click, and drag. We're just going to create another wall. That's really the main part of it. Of course, you guys can probably guess, the next thing you do is you're going to click this back line here. We need this to be obviously not 100 percent 90 degree angle, but we want that smooth transition here. So what I will do is go Bevel, and then change the subdivisions to something pretty high. Let's go let's see maybe 13. Make sure you haven't done it yet of course. You're going to make your subdivision, let's go 20. Now watch what happens when you just click, and drag, just like that. As much leeway as you want. I think I want this thing pretty gradual. So I'm going to do something like that. I think we can change it even more if we want. As gradually as you want. My computer can handle a decent amount of segments. So whatever you guys are comfortable with. I think I'm comfortable with that. This should be good. As you can see, we're not covering the whole background. So easy fix where we just take this whole plane, and because it's editable, we can take while clicking "T" or this guy right here, the scale tool, you just click the x-axis, and widen that out. That fixes the problem we're going through. Then maybe increase the whole shape by a little bit. Now we're looking good. We have a decent bit here. We've got a cycle now, nice and big. We got our subjects, we just need to add a couple of wires, and that base. Now the first thing we're going to add is the base because I guess we need something for those wires to go into. Very simple, I'm just going to wing it here. Let's start with the cylinder. Bring that down to size. I'm just going to eyeball this guy. So you can do whatever you're feeling here. We're going to go over here, and make that a little bit smaller. Of course you want this thing to seem massive. So we don't want this guy to be too massive. How about side of a camera? Then what we can do is change the rotation segments to 60, maybe 80, make it editable. Then what this guy is selected. Now let's go UL again, and click here. Let's give this thing an opening. Sometimes it's fun to make them a little bit more intricate than maybe it should be or has to be. Maybe something like that, extrude enter again, and inside. So the wires will go in there. This is looking good. It's not really beveled though, so everything is really hard edged. An easy fix for that can just be going to one of these former, and going to Bevel, and dragging that on top of the cylinder. Trying to think here, there it is. Instead of limit, we're going to want to click use angle. This will give it a little bit of a threshold to which angles are mess because we don't want to worry about these angles. That's too much. So something like this will be fun. Then we can just dial down the bevel on the subdivisions. Something like that, looks perfectly fine. Let's go back to our camera. We actually want to change this floor. Let's take it down a little bit, which means we'll have to take this cylinder down. When we take that down, we're going to want to change this camera angle. For a second, let's just delete this tag that we made for the camera, and take the coordinates, and go down on the Y. Then we're going to take the rotation up like this. What we're essentially doing here is making this composition look a little bit more dominant. It's almost like we're looking up at this thing, which is really good for effect, and stuff like that. That should be good. I'm pretty happy with that. I think that'll end up looking really nice at 6.5 maybe up a little bit. I'm pretty happy with this composition. We're looking good, so we should be all squared away. That should be the last time we have to mess with the camera as far as the position, and the angle. Before we get too far in this, we should probably save. Well, so, it's command save here. I'm just going to save this on my skill share folders. Let's title this skill share underscores or something like that. This should be good. Now we just got to create these spline things here.
5. Creating Wires: I just wing the stuff when I'm creating these splines, there's different ways you can map certain splines to the points using Espresso and other plug-ins like that. However, I'm old school as you just like wing and I like that. What we're going to do, is start grabbing splines. The best way I know is just honing in on one of the points here and making sure they're out and corresponding to some of the other stuff, but let's grab a spline. Let's click on one of these guys. I'm really just free forming where we want these things to end up, so something like that. Of course sometimes there might go around behind, you name it, and this is where you might have to jump outside of the camera to really mess with where these things are headed. At least for this, a lot of times I'd like to just take this tool right here, the last selection, and moving that forward or back, based on where everything is. Let's go around over here, make sure this guy is going to happen in to this sphere. Looking good, and then from the camera view that would look pretty sweet. This guy might be able to go in a little bit, so it's a little bit less going on. That's fine. We got one down, and to make this a piece of mesh which right now it's nicer to spline, what we need to do is, take another spline, a circle spline, and one of these guys, a sweep inside this menu, and so in this order we're going to create the circle must be in the middle and drag it on top of the sweep. Circle in the middle, spline below that, and they're both children of the sweep. To decrease how fat this thing is right now because we don't want it just click T on the keyboard and drag down until it says, smooth as tiny as we need it. I don't really like how these segments are mapped out, so I believe in the circle, we can take this and go to uniform and the spline, we can take this and go uniform. There we can just up those for how our smooth we want. Again, we can take this circle, make it even smoother. Remember, we don't want these things to be too big. They're just like tiny little ropes going inside this thing. If you need to change the display to see what's going on, those wires like fine with me will be a little bit bigger. You can always go back to the reference. Yeah, something like that. Maybe a tiny bit bigger, which will make us have to make the spheres a little bit bigger, to facilitate what's going on there, and really we can just start cloning these things around. We can take this sweep here, and we can take command copy. This will be another one, and since the circle is still there and everything, so we really just have to move the spline. Right now we can take this guy and change where that guys actually pointed, and this is where we can eyeball it here. Let's have this guy be connected too, and this comes down to being really familiar with navigating through cinema and just knowing what's going on here. Let's take another point and see as we move each one, I think before I left all of them going into the same basket area, and if you need this thing to climb around and go back to the pen tool and just change this guy a bit. Now, we're getting that nice little move in there, like a nice, pretty organic, and let's do the same thing. Copy paste. Let's take the spline again. Let's go over here, grab where he was, and this time, let's map them to this guy. Let's go over here, I Just got to pay attention to where everything is. Easier said than done map and these things, maybe a little bit confusing at first, but I think n product is definitely clutch. That looks good to me. We can grab this guy, move him around a little bit or that way, somewhere like that. Make sure we're getting some high differences and looking good, except we actually are running into the guy here, so let's just take this guy. I believe actually if you take the rotation tool, you can do it that way as well, but I think it'll be easier if we just take the pen tool and just move them out of the way there. In doing that, we just got to keep messing with this thing. Sometimes it gets a little tricky, little bit hard to see what's going on, but let's rotate this guy. What are we rotating here? It doesn't want to rotate. We'll just have to improvise, which we do all the time, and to do that. Let's go, I guess. Let's just bring this guy all the way out here. Cool. This should be fine now, let's take one of our initial ones and just drag him up, and let's go spline. Let's bring him down a little bit maybe. I'll select, and let's map them to this guy here. Cool. As you can see, it's cutting right inside of this thing. What we want to do is select another one of the angles here, drag it out. This one might be able to actually twist it. There we go. That is the reason I actually didn't work because when you try to twist something it has to be in between different points in the spline and can't be the end because I guess there's nothing to rotate, which makes sense. Let's go back in here, just make sure that's going fine. Cool. Back in the cameras, see what this is looking like, that looks good. You could do this thing where it's asymmetrical, where one side is being filled with it, it looks nice. I think we'll do one more and that'll be good. Let's copy paste. We got four sweeps now, technically five. We'll move this one over here and get that connected to this guy in the front. I almost got that one on the first try, and it looks good, and then we can move this, of course. Cool. That looks fine with me. Of course, you can always open all of these guys up, and if you don't want to change the size of these guys, individually, you can just hold command or control down and just hold T and make them bigger or smaller as you like, and that looks fine to me. Seems to be a lot of fire trucks outside my place today. I'm in the city, and let's go back in here now. It looks like we can minimize the size of this as we speak. Let's take that and we don't need to mess with the height. Let's just worry about x and z, and so with that selected, I think will be fun to just shrink this down and now work with the height. Looking much smaller, and that should be fine, and maybe make it a little bigger. She'll be fine. I'm fine with that and we should be good to move on. Let's save our work.
6. Lighting (Physical Renderer): This is where we're going to split these things up between octane and the regular physical render. Starting now I'm going to at least try to incorporate the lighting and texturing of both the physical render and octane. It should be fun. Let's see what we can come up with here and make. We can collapse all these sweeps just like this and collapse everything we have just so we can get a sense of what's going on. Instead of the plane, let's have the plane or the floor, actually Cyc Wall. What we're going to do is collapse everything that we have into a group. So Alt+G and just call this, I guess subjects. It's pretty boring, but it'll get it to work. We'll be fine and what we can start doing is, let's first texture this thing in the physical render. The first thing we'll do is go to this guy. I'm very distracted, there's like 50 fire trucks outside my place and that's all I'm hearing. I'm trying to figure out what's going on, but let's go back to this. Let's go to the physical render. That's what we going on first. Let's close that and we want a new view panel. Let's go to panel, new view panel and drag this to the right. That'll be good for now and we'll want to hop into the camera as well, just so we can see what's going on. Let's go to Use As Render View and Camera. You want to make sure this display something that you can easily see what's going on whether that's this or I guess this would work best for us so we can see we're texturing and everything. Concentrating with the lines might work. I think we're ready to start going here. If we click Command or ALT R, this will start the render process for us. Actually before we do that, see how we have black borders here. We want that for this panel as well. Let's go to Shift V. We've got this guy selected, let's go to opacity 100, and then we can just go Alt R again and start running this thing. Now this looks awful partially because this guy is set to medium quality. Let's drag that all the way up. Now it looks much nicer, but a 100 percent fake. All I want to do now is change some other Render settings. What I mean by that is we are in the physical render, but we need to add some effects. Let's go to Ambient Occlusion. Adding some natural shading to the thing or some shadowing, click "Add Value Transparency" even though I don't think we'll be using glass or anything like that. The next thing we will do is go to "Effect", "Global Elimination". This will make everything black because we don't have any lights that was just giving us a default basic light going on. We should be good now; so everything should be fine. We can keep it as it is. We can change this thing. I think we're good. Let's keep these settings how they are. To achieve any sort of lighting, let's start with the sky. As you can see, pretty bleak but actually we're starting to see some realism, some nice shadowing, even though we got no real lighting going on. Let's start with the actual lights. I guess that'll be the first thing we texture because it's pretty important to see what's going on with that. As you can see in this corner, we have this guy, if you'll remember. If we double-click that, pretty much all of these things are just emulating one light. All we have to do is create a material or a light material. Let's call this thing light and drag this on there. Now these guys are textured only in that area. So let's make this guy actually illuminates. Let's take the color and the reflections off and change this to luminance. Now these guys should all be giving off some light. It's very apparent just by how much light is being given off, just from that. Let's go Brightness 200, something like that. Before I forget, let's take illumination and click "Polygon Light". This will get rid of some splotchness that may appear on something like that. Looking nice. What we're going to do now actually is take another material called HDIR for now. This will be placed on top of the sky and this will brighten up the room. Instead of just being mapped by 100 percent bleak light, I think it's being wrapped by just like this white nice light. Let's say the color off, reflectance off and give it a little bit illuminance. Now we can see it's really brightening up. We're looking good. I like how we're looking now. I think I'm happy with that. I actually know something. I've two wires going into one thing, but that's fine by me. You guys get the idea what's going on just by this whole process obviously blazing through it. It looks to be fine. I think that should be good. Let's start texturing the stuff we might have to adjust the lights a little bit later, but I think I'm happy with that. Let's create the texture of the psych. We're doing everything in reverse now recreating all the background elements as far as texturing. We'll save this guy for last so call this Psych or Floor, let's call it. Let's do backdrop. Backdrop and drag it on the backdrop. Now we're getting that white in the middle of nowhere look, which is really cool. This is what we're going for. I think in the original, maybe it's a little bit darker, but it might have been in post. You could take this tiny barrier that's the luminance is take the color down via tiny bit. But it's looking good. Happy with this so far. I'm actually very happy with it. Let's touch the lights. Why not? Since we already had this thing selected, let's click U&I. That's inverting the selection, creating another material, let's call it Light Frame. Let's drag this on there. As you can see, so we don't have to render this whole thing every single time which you can focus on the parts we need at the moment. Let's take the light frame, kill the color, take the reflectance at a reflection. Right now there should be Chrome, and maybe add a little bit of roughness, which apparently is default. Now I haven't used physical render in a while. Let's take the specular off, this down just a little bit. It's like a dark Chrome, maybe a little bit more. Cool. Looks fine to me. Again, if you want guys to add a little bit of a different HDRI around this thing that might help with some reflections. On Illuminance, let's take a texture. I'm just going to use a basic and HDRI around this thing; nothing crazy. I'm talking like one of these guys. So if you want, just use something basic. I'll use just like a studio. You guys can find these pretty much anywhere but you'll see now we've got some actual reflections going on and that should be good. We can play around with the specific type of reflection, but let's see what works. A little bit too uniform for me. [inaudible] have to work. If you're not crazy about it, you can always rotate it. You can see the reflections move in the actual render too, which is cool. I'm fine with that. Let's see how this looks as a whole image. Cool. Really just what we did here is going to help in the reflective process and how the stuffs going to show reflections as well. It might help to have some HDIR wrapped around this thing. The next thing we'll do, and if you want, it might actually help us. Let's go create a big Key Light on the left side of it. Let's go create a plane which will be the light that's being cast on this thing facing this way. This will be a big bright beaming on this guy, which you cannot see because it's out of frame now. If you'll see something like this, so we'll duplicate the light here by Command and just dragging, just call this Key Light and drag it on the plane. It might be very bright now, we might have to pin that down, which is looking like we might have to. One it's burning up the scene and I think it's giving us a little bit more dynamic lighting to it. I'm actually happy with that. We've got some shadowing here, but if you want that realism, you can keep it or you can just go to this view and drag it out a little bit. I'm happy with that. Looking good to me. As far as the physical render grows and very happy you can see a little bit of splotching us. I'm not sure how you guys model is looking right now, but if you can see any splashing that's going away with any of the sampling subdivisions we used or any of the global elimination settings we change in the future. I'm going to take a simple water equip.
7. Texturing/Rendering (Physical Renderer): We're back, so let's go and start texturing everything. Let's focus on the main object lasts. Lets go to the wires, make them the material we need. We can just make a new material called wire, and then again, I double-click around this area to create a new material, and on all the sweeps, we can drag this material. Let's go on here. These guys are going to be pretty much pure black so we can just take the color out, make it pretty reflective and pretty rough. Take the default specular off and take this guy down until it's about here, and let's see how that looks. Again, we don't need to see everything, just the wires were focused on right now, and let's move this guy around, and that might be a little bit too rough, make it a little bit less. Starting to be good, let's take the roughness down a little bit more, just to give it that Chris Black that we're going for. Cool, I'm pretty happy with that and we're getting somewhere. We're good with that. Let's take the balls now. If we want to start with this light chrome texture and duplicate that. I think the texture of the ball bearing things and the arms or the edges will be the same texture. Let's just call that metal for now and drag those on the cylinders, not the cylinders, the lights. Drag those on the spheres and the edge cylinders, and it's your choice, you can choose to leave it like this if you want. Let's see how that looks. Pretty cool, getting some nice reflections from everything, I think we can make it darker though. Let's take the metal and just get rid of a lot of this to make it like around 15 percent with about 20 percent roughness. Matter-of-fact, maybe less, let's make it like 10 percent roughness. We want these to be somewhat shiny. It's looking pretty cool to me. Yeah, I'm pretty happy with that. Again, you can change these as you'd like, but if you wanted them to be a little bit darker, we can take that down to like 10, maybe eight, and let's see what happens. That's looking pretty good to me. Let's get this thing the same texture, why not? You guys get the idea? This little platform thing, looks fine to me. You guys can tweak that as you need, but let's work on this guy. This will be the most complex sculpture. Let's just start fresh here with a new texture, let's call this platonic or sculpture or whatever you want to call it and drag it on top. Looking good so far. That's pretty wide, that's actually a different look. I mean, if you guys are into that, that's totally cool. It looks very cool. Wow, I actually like that. The first thing we can do regardless of the color is take this and go to reflectants. At reflection, we definitely don't need this thing to be chrome. It's just going to reflect everything that's around us. Might be cool if that's where you guys are going for, but yeah, I don't think it needs to be too chromey, but we're going to do is take the default specular all the way to zero. We'll just turn it off and take this layer to like 18 percent and now it's going to make this a white shiny object, which is pretty cool. Might show some reflections of the lights, which actually it is and I actually might keep it that, I feel like that actually looks somewhat decent, especially for a Thumbnail, but if you didn't, of course, you just remove the color and add some bump and some different reflection stuff, but let's see how this looks just right off the bat. Of course, this actually always looks cool. I'm very torn on what to keep it as. Maybe just to show you guys the workflow. This is nice, but it's really just roughness. Let's work on this a little bit. Let's take this down to as small as we actually need it or as big I should say and let's take the reflectance and here's what we do. We'll make a lot of this rough. Let's make it a 100 percent chrome and then we're going to add another reflection layer on top, and let's make this maybe 21 percent, but add a mask. This will be a little bit rough. Lets go like 16 percent and the mass can be a noise, it can be whatever. Let's add a noise and pretty much this is going to do is going to mask out one reflection from the other. It's usually nice to use a decent type of a noise that looks really scattered and randomized. You can see what it's doing around these parts. Pretty nice, we can add a little bit of, oops. Let's make sure this thing's pretty hard hitting. Bring down the high clip a little bit. That almost looks like marble. The actually looks pretty cool. We can take this, maybe make the roughness a bit higher. Maybe take the layer opacity down to maybe 14 percent. Just messing with these values to see what pops through or not. That looks pretty cool. Let's try a different noise. I think it's in here. Let's go to something like p-axon, it's always a nice one. Oh bad. Let's take actually this layer up even larger so you can see how this is being affected. It's making it much classier, however I think we want. Let's see here. Let's drag this layer below. Then a little bit of roughness on this layer here, not as much, let's see what that gives us. Now it's looking a little bit more Matte nice. We can take this down a little bit more like 27, so it's not as glossy. It's cool to check it out, and if you really want to get funky, add a layer masked to this guy. Maybe another noise, choose a custom noise around here. I think that's what it's called. Not sure. Now we're just layering reflections and mass on top of each other to bring this guy out. This looks to me a little bit too crazy. I don't even think we needed a noise magic on this guy maybe. Let's see what happens there. To me, this isn't looking bad, that's not bad for a start. Let's go to bump, maybe add something very subtle. Let's go to noise and change that to something like electric. Definitely take this down to something like five. Maybe even smaller, and maybe even use a different noise. But just to see what this looks like. Yet definitely too big, let's change the noise to something like Paxo, down to like three. Just refining these steps. But I think you can tell what's going on. I actually like it. Let's go down to maybe 60 percent on a global scale and then take this down to two. Again, the noisy or the bumpy you got to really be subtle with to make it pull off is any type of real estate because that's just how it works in real life. Obviously there's exceptions, but this looks pretty good. Something's giving us a very big shine, and I don't think we need at least that much of it. Some fantasy which is more reflective, let's take this down a bit. Let's take them both down by a little bit. See if that helps us with that shine we're getting cool. I'm pretty happy with that. We might be able to change this guy Layer Mask. Take the layer mask amount down to like four, maybe. I don't want to see too much of that and again, this is the part where you can go as long as you want, spend as much time as you need on it. But that looks pretty decent. Looks like this refer abstracting metal thing going on. We can turn the color on as well and see how that looks again. Because I think especially with these renders, the cleaner, it looks the better. I might actually keep it like that because I think I do like that we have the textures that we already built because it's white now it's a little bit more hidden and sleeker in my humble opinion. Let's drag this out and see what we're looking at here. Again, any kind of splotch, and this should be theoretically wiped away. With the changes in the caught the Render Settings core. This is looking good and I actually like it, it's can decent. One thing we have to make sure we have is depth of field because everything is currently a 100 percent focus. First thing I want to do actually is take the ball bearing things we have and make them a little bit smaller. Like that might be easier if we use a different. Here we go. Now we're going to go to the camera and we're going to go to actually render settings. Make sure we even had the depth of field checked on, which now we do. In the physical tab, you're gong to want to take the F-stops something like 0.5. Let's start with that. I actually haven't used physical in awhile, so I'll make sure I'm correct. This thing should be looking pretty blurry now from correct? Yes. It's really looking very blurry, and that's because we have to set a focus distance. If you go to object, easiest way to do this is going focus distance and clicking where you want it to be focused. Let's go maybe right there. This will give us a sense on how shallow depth of field really is, because it should be focusing right here. But this stuff in the background should be out of focus. If it's not, we just make that F-stop lower, the F-stop number lower. It looks like it's actually doing that pretty well. This just comes down to dialing down how shallow you want, the depth of field. Right now that might be a little bit too shallow, so we can take this up to like one, see how that works. That's looking pretty nice. We just want it to be subtle, so nothing too crazy. I think maybe 1.2 and I'll be fine with that. I'm going to make sure we keep saving and we can be ready to bump this out for export. I think I'm fine with everything there. Let's just make a Render Settings are right, let's go to physical tab, let's go to fixed, let's take this make it high, I'd say, and then take all of these up to four. We don't need any subsurface scattering subdivisions because there's no subset of scattering of course. Then global elimination will take this to high, let's say, since it's a single frame, we can spend a decent amount of time looking at how this will turn out. I think we're set the correct resolution already, so we should be good theoretically to bump this out. That takes it for, I guess the physical tablets render this out and then we'll go to the octane settings and a little bit.
8. Lighting/Texturing/Rendering (Octane): I guess. It only took about 10 minutes or so, not bad. But I guess we can start over here. It'll start fresh and actually just so we don't get confused, let's save as a new scene. Let's go underscore Octane. From this point forth until we actually start editing it in Photoshop, which we'll do to the both images. This will be catered towards the Octane users, but obviously everyone's very welcome to check it out in case you want to purchase Octane in the future. A much faster workflow, I got to say. But starting off here, let's just delete really everything because it's not going to work once we start using the other render. Let's delete everything. Which makes it easy because at the same time we can see exactly where we have to put everything. Just delete that guy over there and, actually no, you got to keep that guy right where it is, because that represents the two layers of the light. But the question marks will give us an idea of where to put everything. What we're going to do is actually really change all this. I have a separate Octane view panel, but we'll just do a makeshift thing here. What we're going to do is unlock this guy and delete it. Let's go to Octane live viewer window and let's drag that exactly where the last one was. Oops, wrong square. This should give us an idea of what's going on here. I like to have this somewhat small in the frame just so everything fits. Now we'll be using our GPUs. Before that, we are going to the rendering, go to Octane render and you uncheck these, we don't need these anymore. Honestly that should be it for that. First thing we can do is start rendering this thing. As you can see so much faster, and of course I have two GPUs running this thing, but nevertheless, should be somewhat faster than using the physical render, because that's just how it would be. Without further ado, let's start doing the stuff. What we can do is actually we can delete this plane that we had on the right. Because we'll create that in another way. But I think we should be good too. Actually, we can delete this guy as well, and yeah, everything's looking good. We have the site, we got everything, we just have to start lighting and texturing the stuff. The same way we did it before, actually a little bit differently. What we are going to do is go to Materials, I'm sorry, Objects and go to HDRI environment, and similarly to when we switched over to globe illumination, now we're relying on adding our own lights. We'll start with a texture. We'll use literally the same HDRI that we used last time and just hop this in there. There we go. I guess I should mention as far as the sampling stuff goes, we should have that window out. Let's go to Octane settings. We should have this somewhere. Let's just drag that, I guess below here. You can see what's going on here. Samples, we can keep this like 200 for now, and instead of Direct lighting, let's go to path tracing. Much more accurate form of lighting. Let's go to 200 samples and GI clamp, let's keep that at one. That'll make it so there's no fireflies or any hot pixels going on for the most part. We got that HDRI being wrapped around everything there. The next thing we can do is turn these lights on. Just like before, the difference is we're going to take a material here and go to Octane diffuse material. We can call this, light, and start dragging these. I got to see which one's which now. We can just start a fresh with these lights. We go over here, that is the light so we're going to drag this on top of there. Not bad. With that being said, we're going to need to hop into the node editor here by going to, I believe, Materials, Octane node editor, and I have multiple displays, but it's going to be hard to do that so you're going to have a bunch of displays going on here so we can see. But I guess we don't need to see this stuff right now. Just this guy. Obviously this texture that is put onto the light is represented in the note editor. Any texture I click will pop up in the note editor. As you can see, it's called light, and what we're want to do is make this emit light. What do we have to do? If you go to Emission and just go to Blackbody emission. As you can see, that's doing exactly that only it's much brighter than we need right now. Let's turn on surface brightness. It makes it a bit more controlled and even just for the start of it, and that should be for the most part good. Obviously, if you want to add another color of light, you can go to this guy and go Texture, Color. Of course, for whatever reason to adding a texture or a color just really amplifies the light so you'll just have to bring this value down even more. I hate this window. You can see. This is a pretty good brightness that we're dealing with right there, and of course, you can change the color to whatever you need. That should give you a pretty decent result. But we're going to stick with white here. Want to be somewhat similar to the last render we did. I believe that's good for that. We can leave that there. Actually I probably didn't have to delete the node editor, but whatever, we got the light here, those are right there and let's use the other selection tag to texture the other part of the light with some metallic looking texture. Let's go to Material and of course metallic material, and drag that on the other side getting some nice reflections. Not bad. If we actually double-click the texture or the material editor and go to Note editor, we can just do it the same way, and what we can do is just take the brightness up a little bit to something like that. I'm pretty happy with that. It doesn't have to be too crazy. We can always add some roughness maps, but those are so small, I don't even think we need them. I'm going to keep them pretty simple. That's looking good. For the wires, what we want to do is go to, let's grab a glossy material for that. Let's just go each wire. Boom, boom, boom pretty simple. Each wire should be glossy now. What I'll do is I'm going to take, we need the material editor for this. Let's go to diffuse HSV, all the way down to black or maybe a little bit brighter depending on what you're going for. Actually, we can go black and then let's go roughness, bring this guy up a little bit, and you'll see the more we go up to it if we hop out of the camera, and you can see, oops, I went out of the wrong camera. Let's go. This guy hop out, so you can see we're getting a decent texture for that guy. Let's hop back into the camera. That should be good for the wires. Let's go to, let's take this octane metallic material and we can texture the bearings and the cylinders with this one. In this one again, we want a darker material. We'll go to, let's go specular and bring this down a little bit. Then probably less roughness. We don't need that much roughness. These are supposed to be pretty shiny. Cool, so I'm happy with that. Again, we can texture this guy with the same thing. Now we can start to get to the fun stuff. We can duplicate this material and just call it platonic and texture this guy, right off the bat, this is looking pretty nice. This is where we can actually use some roughness maps and stuff like that. What we'll do is open up this texture. Let's go to the node editor. You can delete this guy. What we want to do, is let's take an image texture on the sky. What we can do is make this guy attached to the roughness map or to the roughness and of a saga there. Then here you could choose to bring in a node or a noise, or any image texture you want. So for instance, I have a whole library of textures. You guys can find these wherever you can take them yourself. If I just want to take something like this metallic texture thing here. As you can see, totally makes this material much more realistic. By taking the Gamma it increasing the contrast between those blocks, making shinier versus not shiny, totally up to you. You can take the diffuse or not the diffuse, take the specular as high as you want. Now it's like that glossy, gloomy thing, or keep it black. Maybe I'll keep it black for the sake of, for the octane one. White for the physical, black for the octane ones. That's honestly for the most part it, like you can go crazy as crazy as you want. I want to keep this somewhat, I don't want to make each of these texturing is extremely long, but you can see with octane, we pretty much did everything we did in the last video in a fraction of the time. The last thing we have to rebut is like, let's make these lights glow and have the bright spots glow as well. I guess we forgot about texturing the psych, but I actually like how the color is now, you can do whatever you want with the background, but this looks fine to me. To do that, once were hopped in the camera and you got to make sure that options check cameras on. Otherwise, it won't show the effects, the camera effects that you choose. Before you do anything you going to right-click Camera, go to C4D octane tags, octane camera tag. Within the octane camera settings, let's create a little bit of depth of field here by bringing this down and that's doing just that. That's a little bit more detail. You can lock resolution. Doing a little bit. We can bring this down even more. A little bit more of a shallow depth of field, a little bit more. I'm happy with that. Let's create some blooms. It's got a post-processing enable. Then let's bring this guy up a little bit. You can see it's making the lights in anything that gives off light a ton of glow, which is exactly what we want. We can bring up the glare power. You can see the glare is just going crazy there. Usually I bring this down to like two or one and actually blur it out. But if this is a little bit too intense as is, you can bring the bloom power down and then the glare a little bit down. Usually I keep these pretty similarly. Then especial intentionally, you can burn this image as if it just like you're bringing it onto a sensor or something like that. Sometimes that gives some life to the whole scene. Especially we, really everything's black and white, so maybe just a little bit of that end might be nice. Keep that somewhat light and then touch it honestly be it for the octane stuff. I'll keep this at maybe let's pause this so it doesn't run at all the samples. But let's go to like 1500 samples for something like this, you can always go less. Then you should be able to theoretically bump that out by just clicking render. You can see how much faster this thing is really just taking shape like it really it so much less work we had to do to achieve a pretty decent result. It's almost done rendering, it's it like 300 samples, 400 samples. This could have been stopped theoretically now. But I like to play it safe. Yeah. That's pretty much it with that. The next part will be just doing the stuff in Photoshop, so we can stop it right there. That's plenty fine. It took less than 30 seconds, amazing, it's like 33 seconds compared to 10 minutes. Pretty crazy, and it's honestly a better quality image when you think about it. We got some bloom, we got some artifacts and stuff. We can save that 16-bit tiff octane. Now we're ready to hit Photoshop and texture all these elements.
9. Post Coloring (Photoshop): Photoshop's open, and let's see. Let's open these images. So first image we have is the Physical image and the second image we have is the Octane image. Both pretty similar, just different renders. One's white, one's black. We're looking good. One's got glow, which is nice. So I guess we can focus on editing this one first. So what we're going to do is, Command J. Makes sure we can duplicate that. Filter, Convert for Smart Filters, and then Camera Raw Filter. Now I have a bunch of presets I've made for tones of different renders that look pretty nice, even stylistic, but we're going to make this from scratch. I like that clean, classy, look. So let's increase the Vibrance maybe a little bit. Bring the Blacks up a tiny bit, crush with it with the Contrast. We're honestly almost there. We can take the Temperature a little bit left and the Tint a little bit left to create that almost scientific, clean but sinister almost look. It's hard to even explain what I'm talking about here. The last thing is adding some noise. So let' go to Effects, Grain. Just add a little bit of settle Grain to this image and it looks very nice. There you have it. That's pretty much it for this image. We dolled up a little bit, gave it a bit of life here. Just so I can use this for the next one as a starting point, let's say this is a Skillshare, underscore Octane, underscore Sci-fi, cool. Save that. Now we've got this image that's completely done. So let's go over here. Same thing, command J, Convert for Smart Filter so we can always go back and reedit, Camera Raw Filter and you go down to S first Skillshare Octane Sci-fi. So as you can see, I think it actually works. It adds some life to it, some dimension, and a little bit of a sinister look, maybe brighten up the Blacks a tiny bit. But I think this honestly works. So it looks fine. You can tweak whatever values you want but I'm happy with this. We can click Okay. Of course we can always go back with the Camera Raw Filter being that it's non-destructive. But here's how you make it guys. This is how I made the first one and this is how I probably will continue making them, with that technique. So using both Octane and Physical render, I think we were able to achieve something. So hope you enjoyed this. Please give it a thumbs up if you thought you got anything out of it. If not, tell me in the DMs on Instagram or just comment on one of these posts. But I appreciate you guys watching as always, and let me know the feature classes you'd want to see and we'll see it next time. Thank you.
10. Outro: That's it guys. I hope you enjoyed this class. Please leave a review if you liked it. If you didn't like it, give it a thumbs down, please. I need to know whether these classes are horrible. But if you did like it, feel free to drop a like and suggest some future classes that we can go over. I take a lot of your feedback into consideration like this one, we had a physical and octane. Because of you guys, we're now teaching both physical and octane for pretty much all future classes. I hope you guys enjoyed it and we'll see you in the next one.
Patrick Foley, 3D Artist
