Creating Spicy Chili Peppers Using the Volume Mesher

1. Intro: What's up guys. This is Patrick again. Thanks for coming up for another class here on skill share. Today we'll be making some spicy chili peppers using the volume measure and cinema 4D R20. Of course we'll actually be using a little bit of octane. For those of you who don't know what that is, that's a third party rendering software that's kind of a plug-in on attachments of two cinema 4D. If you don't have that, I apologize. I won't be using third-party plug-ins like this all the time. By any means this is actually the first time I'm doing it but I want to show you guys. For the majority of the class that we're actually making the pepper, you're not really going to need that. Follow along and I think either way you'll get something out of this. Hope you enjoy this class. We'll be using cinema 4D, octane and finishing off with some photoshop. We're going to make something really cool so enjoy the ride. 2. Getting Started (Reference Imagery): Hi, guys. I actually logged on a scale shift and I was very pleasantly surprised to see that we've surpassed over 3,000 students. Pretty insane that this has happened and I'm sorry. I've been actually very busy working in this industry, so it's been very hard to get the time to do stuff like this and even bump out the dailies that I've wanted to bump out on Instagram. But were here and I thought, what better thing to do than they make one on the whim. I asked a little bit a while ago on making chili peppers, and if you wanted to do something like that because I usually don't model a bunch of stuff. The way we'll be doing this is pretty interesting and unique, and I think we'll come out with some nice looking stuff. We'll also be using octane, which is very nice because it's the first time we'll be doing that. Then mind you for the people who are using like the physical render, don't worry, I'm not going to stop using physical and stop catering to you guys. It's really just because I haven't made one, we've had plenty of classes using the physical. It seemed like the last poll was split in the middle. I think more people wanted octane just because I've never done one before, but I started using it a little bit a while ago, and let's see how it goes. If you guys will bear with me here. Chili peppers, let's type in chili peppers and see what we get. I didn't realize how many different types of chili peppers and the different looks they had. You've got very simplistic, this one's not even real. Stuff like this. There's a million different ways we can go. I was looking at something like this, that'd be cool because it's got that curve. It allows us to make something a little bit unique. We could obviously make stuff like this, but I think either way you can't go wrong doing this. If we say we want to make something like this, let's go ahead and save this image by right-clicking and saving as. I'm going to save this in one of the folders because really obviously it doesn't matter where you guys save your stuff, but I'm just going to save this image there. I think we are ready to jump in here to cinema. I don't think I'm forgetting anything. 3. Building Chili Pepper (Base): But might as well get straight into it. So the first thing we're going to want to do is, this is the default layout. Obviously since raising octane, I'm going to have to really mess with this. I have another layout that's kind of geared towards my usual workflow, but especially since this is the first time we're going over anything octane related might as well will start fresh with the default standard layout. So the first thing we're going to want to do is right or not right-click, middle mouse, button click. It's giving you split views and let's go to the front view here and I'm actually going to delete this camera. I just made that default there, and then we're going to click, "Shift V." This is going to pop up the view port settings here and if we go to "View" or I'm sorry, "Back", we're going to select an image here. Very simple. Let's just go to wherever that folder was again and jump back into the photo we had. So here's the photo kind of baked in. It's only on the front view. That's really all we need for now. We're going to start making this thing here. So if you'll notice, this thing is curved, and I was debating on the best way to do this. I think what I want to do is actually start with a spline. So to get going here and to make it actually easier to see, lets "Shift V" again and take the transparency down a bit, so we can see a little bit more. I usually only like it if it's like this transparent or this visible, I should say. So I can actually see the splines I'm making very easily. So just deleting that, let's go and restart this thing. So we got the pen tool out and all we're going to do now is just click kind of vaguely creating the shape just like a skeletal type of feel. Right off the back that obviously doesn't look like a Chili pepper, but we're going to Command A, and select all the points in point mode here. We're going to click, right-click anywhere in soft interpolation. So right there, that's giving us a little bit more of an accurate result here. But you'll see there's still some areas we could probably improve on and certain areas where I think it could improve on, we can adjust these things it's necessary. So if we see there's not enough space in certain areas that are making this thing be more what do you call it, hard edged when we won't really soft edges. Now we're just going to take this thing, Command A, and click all the points again and soft once again. What this should be doing is making this a bit softer for us but it doesn't have to be perfect. You know, we don't have to make this thing ideally as closely related as possible, as long as it looks generally what we're going for, that should be fine. So the next thing we want to do, yes, if you want to title this entitle it, Chili Spline or something of that nature. We're going to go gets a couple of these guys. So we're going to go to a sweep, and we're going to have a circle. The first thing we want to do is drag the spline into the sweep. Then drag the circle in-between the spline and the sweep. As you'll see, we're getting this fats tube thing, which is obviously now what we're going for right now. But if we go back in here, we can actually have some more options here. So let's click the circle, which is really symbolizing how thick this thing is, and we're going to Click T, which is scaling, and we're just going to click and drag until this thing scales way down. If you want to pay attention to this area here, so let's make sure that matches pretty closely around there. So that looks good. Generally what we're going for. Then what we're going to do is take the chili spline and actually take this and go to uniform. That'll make it a little bit more uniform. If, especially if you're supposed to, if you go to hidden lines here, you'll see that we have enough segments to work with here. One thing I always like doing is going to the sweep and going to, I think it was caps and instead of triangles is make this end guns. So cleans up this area here. So back here, while we're in the sweep area, this is where we can decide on a few things, especially the cap. So the front cap, I believe this is the start. Let's go to filler cap and hit constrain and now if we were to jump this radius up, we can see how you can get more of a curved edge here. So if, especially if we add some more segments here. You can see what constraint as a kind of keeps the general shape, how we want it and so that's looking pretty decent there. Of course, we're going to add some stuff later using the volume measure. But what about this guy? So we're going to actually do the same thing and create a filler cap, and we're going to go all the way down here and add some more steps. So now this looks like a worm, not necessarily what we're going for. It's not chili pepper, it's just a worm. So we need this edge to be much smaller. So to do that we're going to go to object and go to details, and then we're going to go to the scale here. So as you can see, this is how you make one of the sides much smaller and you actually have some leeway here to do what you want. So if we took this guy all the way down here, hold down Control. That'll create another point and you'll see we can really actually morph this thing exactly how we want. So you've got another one. Just depending on how slim we want this to go and where. That's how we do that. So we can actually grab the points. Its pretty non-destructive as of now. So if we can grab just a single point and just keep controlling where the stuff goes. So I'm happy with that. Again, it really does not have to be as accurate as you may seem or is it may seem like even this I wanted to be happy with and I'm not mad at this as of now. Let's see. Don't want to rotate anything. At least not yet. Take this with a little bit more on that side. So we'll see here we're actually getting something that looks much more like the general shape of a pepper. I think we can probably do something with this little pointy. So we're going to do is go back to the object, the settings here we might extra just raise that up a little bit just so, I believe we can actually zoom in here. So as long as we get this decently lined out over there. So I'm pretty happy with that. I mean, it's not perfect, but we're going to put some bumps in the displacements on this thing. So I think it should be more than fine for what we're going for. So that should be good. 4. Building Chili Pepper (Intro to Volume Mesher): The next thing we're going to want to do is make sure this sweep is actually a single object, because we're about to crush this thing, current state to object. The first thing we want to do is right-click this and current state the object, of course, keeping this here and hiding edges, because in case you need to go back, it's always safe. We have this guy here, decent amount of polygons, but it really doesn't matter right now, because we're going to have this whole thing in a second inside of the volume measure. As you'll see the picture, we have "Shift V". If you want to look at that, and turn this off. It's not a 100 percent perfect. It's got some ridges out there. I believe the last chili pepper I made, I actually did something where I hopped some spheres into a volume measure and made this a little bit less even. What I'm going to do is exactly that. I'm going to go to "Volume Builder" and "Volume Mesher". I'm going to hop this sweep into, and I guess you can curve this chili into the volume builder, and you can't see that because we're just into hidden line. If we were in this mode, we could see it. But as long as you pop this into the measure, we will be able to see it just fine. If we take this tunnel like maybe five, that'll be good for now. That's a lot. We have a lot of segments now to play with. It's even looking more organic with the way this is playing out. One thing we want to do is just create a sphere and drag it near this area. It should be good, and I believe if we have this thing into a cloners, if you go "MoGraph", "Cloner", which is just a cloner. I want to radiate this thing around, bring this around here, and take the plane and go "XZ". This as if you can see by now, just doing this will give this thing just a rigid outer edge and a bunch of these chili peppers that I've seen have this feature on here, and so what we'll do is just help the whole cloner inside here. Just like that, we're going to get a pretty nice and even looking result here. Of course, we don't want it to even so we're just going to "MoGraph" while this cloner selected go to "MoGraph" "Effector" and I believe "Random". What that's doing here is you can see just randomizing every clone. That's a little bit too much. But we are going to have to think back inside here and go into the random effector and change, one second, we are just going to change the settings here. We're going to go zero, zero, zero and this is going to have it how we had it originally. First, if we want to start with the scale, we can go to "Uniform Scale" and change these up a tiny bit. Then maybe take the "Y" and go maybe a little bit. Now, I'll just look a little bit chunky and a little bit displaced at the top. But still it's pretty nice. If this looks, and if that you're ever looking at this thing and it looks a little bit too rigidly. There things you can do before you actually have to decrease the voxel size, which is essentially upping the resolution. One of those things actually grabbing a smoothing object and dragging in-between the mesher and the builder. That actually smoothes this out a little bit without actually having to increase the segments or decrease. Maybe something like that looks good. Because generally, I think you want a smoother model of the thing, and then use shaders and displacements to rough everything up, so it's easy to rough it up after the fact. But I think for this I will actually be jumped us to four. I'm looking at this edge here, it looks a little bit junky, three. Then maybe at a smooth layer, which obviously makes it way too smooth. But lets back this up and just up this strength a little bit to where we think it looks decent. Maybe one iteration. Looks good to me. We're still getting some nice little deformations here, so nothing too crazy. I'm happy with that. If you want to take this down to like 12. Cool. Looks good to me. Once we are happy with this, we are free to actually current state to object it. Turn off this volume mesher and build it. Because actually if you were to leave those on and just hide it, Cinema has still to calculate every change it makes and it will actually slow down your system a little bit. Make sure you just turn these off and then hide. These we can start packing the things are not using into a group by "Option G". Just put like nondestructive or something. If we ever need to go back and start using that stuff. I guess we can pop that random effect are in there as well. We have this here, this chilly model thing, which we're pretty happy with as if now. This looks good, decent amount of segments. Of course, we are not making this movie or anything, so it really doesn't matter too much. You can always go back and decrease the segments as you will. 5. Chili Pepper Stem (Volume Mesher): The next thing we're going to do is work on the leaves. As you can see, let's get this thing out of here. We have this stem area with a little bit of stuff going on there. I actually created my own one earlier in a way you probably wouldn't expect, but to me it actually turn out pretty fine. It's starting with a plane, and let's actually just turn off the chili model completely, and we're going to call this the leaves or something. Using only a plane, and I'm going see if I can remember how to do this but, we're going to hop this guy into a subdivision surface, which is going to heavily increase the amount of segments. Then we're going to hop a displacer on top of the, what do you call? Plane. Go to the Shading tab within the Displacer, Shader, Noise. Obviously this is going to give you some deformation noise. We're just going to hop this, and see what happens. Looking like a wavy water stuff going on here. I realize you don't have to do too much to this stuff, if you end up using either displacements or using a bunch of shaders. Just messing this thing up, and roughing it up a little bit, does the trick most of the time. If you take this to 200, looks cool. It's just finding the right noise that won't make it look necessarily like leaves off the bud, but that is a good start. Just messing with these looking what works, what doesn't work. This one looks cool, maybe popping this down to 20. Yeah, it looks pretty decent. I think this should be good for now. We always may go back to it, but I guess we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. We're going to hop this whole thing into a Volume Builder, and hop this thing into a Volume Measure. We can not see this as of now because there's just really no surface area for us to be able to see that. If we take this down to five, still you can't see it, take down three, still can't see it, take down two, nothing, so what we're going to probably have to do here is go to this section, and get a reshape. Reshaping the whole layer actually, it just adds volume to this whole thing so that it's much easier to see. We'll just take the reshape down to where we'll be able to see it. This actually adds natural deformities or maybe rips in the leaves that we previously wouldn't have been able to do. If we were to take a smooth layer on top of this, the smooth layer really takes a chunk out of it. I'll scale this back a little bit. I'm going to take the reshape layer and increase a little bit. Already we're getting this unique looking texture, which almost looks like cheese at the moment. But you'll be surprised, I think after messing with this thing, it'll look pretty nice. Let's see here, what do we need to do? Let's add the stem object to it. You really can just build this like you're building, it's almost like you're just stack in Lego's until this thing works out. The generic shape of this thing is like a cone, and then a cylinder. I guess if we dropped the cone right here, and hopped it in this guy right here, I think we're going to have to take this cone and go underneath the smooth layer, and underneath the reshape layer. There we go it's uniformly on top. It actually takes a significant amount of this stuff here. Let's go up, and let's go take a cylinder now. You can see how this thing is actually taking shape now. Again, remember the way we're making the stuff, it doesn't have to be a 100 percent realistic. It just has to sell the idea of what's going on here. What we're going to do is increase this pretty heavily depending on how, this is where you guys can go on a tangent, depending on how you want your stuff to look. If I were doing this, I would probably actually hop out the cone here, and add this into a group, and just call the stem. Right now, these two objects are in one group. I'd have to go to the Display, it should be good. Let's add some height segments to this because we're actually going to wrap this around. We're going to bend this stuff a little bit, and we'll definitely need some height segments on the actual stem itself. With that, while you have the group selected, let's go to a Bend former, hold down shift, and release. Now, if we put this on unlimited, keep y-axis length, and start twisting, this stuff will actually act together as one. Once you combine that, this whole group within the volume measure or builder, this stuff really starts to look like one part. Remember, we're all non-destructive so far because we can still edit the segments and all that, and we'll just drag the stuff below. We're actually looking much better. It's starting to look like a stem. Remember, we haven't used any shader effectors or any shader displacements or any bumps or anything like that just yet. We're looking pretty decent. Again, it doesn't have to be exactly replicating all of this, but it may help. One thing we might want to do is actually at a Bulge deformer. On top of that wall, you have this group selected, shift and release. Now, you've got this in the group there. Again, we can go unlimited, and start bulging this thing out. You'll see it gets very slow, and we're working with the stuff. Then we'll just be able to take the bulge, and move it up. You can see how this bulge is working here. We can take it down, and maybe some like that works. I'm happy with that, and it should be good. Again, obviously, we were working with a lot of segments. We don't have to keep them all because if we go to the volume measure here, and we're going to click just on the adaptive arrow once up, you see it starts to take away some of these segments we really don't need. This can be very helpful as well. It does make it a little bit junky, but I think most of the stuff we can replicate or take back to normal in the shaders. This works for me. I want to take this displacer, and up a little bit more. You'll see just depending on how wavy we want this thing, that I really do the trick. I think I might actually take this, and go 400 percent. We're getting pretty wavy on this thing. The more we actually go on the scale and the height of this displacement, it might look more uniform. We're looking at something like this, it doesn't look too bad. The segments, they're looking fine for now. I think people who know that they're using the volume measure know that they don't, right now we don't have to worry about reading any of this stuff. This is just for a still image, so it doesn't matter if these segments look junky or anything like that not for these specific purpose. There's a million different ways to make things in Cinema just like Photoshop, and anything else. This looks good as is, and so now, let's see what happens. Let's right-click, and state to object so we had this object backed up. Then again, remember to turn off and hide the volume measure. We can put that into the non-destructive folder. We have the chili and the volume measure. Let's hop this onto the chili so that this thing will always be intact. Now, we just got to go because they should be on the same plane relatively. Let's size this guy down. Bring it over here, and I guess finding the right axis that we want here. Obviously there's ways we could fix this up, and finesse this out, but I think for the most part of this should be pretty good.. We're getting something there. It looks like the shroud of stuff is gone a little overboard, but I think adding the displacement and materials will actually help with that. This is just generally showing you how I made the process. We could have spend more time, going over that area. But, I'm decently happy with this, I think this looks good. I think once we add detectors, it'll look just fine. I think we're ready to actually start lighting and texturing this thing. Looks good to me, segments aren't too crazy. It's a very dense model don't get me wrong, but this is actually how I made it so, let's go pop in a camera. I think the first thing we do is go to our Render Settings, changing this. It's a very sad day, but we want to change this from physical to octane render. Let's lock this ratio at 20 by 1080, and maybe you're 1200, because reason octane now we can afford to have this bigger raster sizes and go crazy there. 6. Intro to Octane (Basic Textures & Lighting Setup): Let's go to Octane Live Viewer window, and here is something new that we haven't seen before. We are going to really hop this kind of square here onto the side and now we have our view port and Octane Live Viewer window, which happens to be the latest version of Octane right now. I'm using 2 RT-X 20-80 Ti's on top of each other. I don't know what you guys are using, but for this journal, I think everyone should be fine if you have Octane in the first place. So what we're going to do is hop in a camera. Object, octane camera, hop inside of it by clicking this window and I assume if everyone is paying attention and, you know, has been using cinema enough to have octane in the first place, I think certain things like hop into a camera, you guys should probably have done by now. I like actually popping this grid on with the camera. It just helps with composition and the cross hair as well. So I'm gonna go to the coordinates and 0 everything out except the z-axis. Keep the scales at one and back up. I'm going to back up a little too far because in the object I'm gonna go back to a portrait or 80 millimeter camera. This looks more than fine for me. The next thing we are going to do here is grab a cycle. I have this kind of plug-in package from gray scale gorilla that pretty much this allows for the sidewalls to be pre-built. So I think I'm going to go to presets light_kit_ pro, Cycs and then drag a studio in here into the objects tab. I'm just going to drag that to the bottom and if you'll see, it's easier to see what's going on here so I'm going to drag this here. You will see based on the scale already this chili is massive. So what we're going to do is actually take this whole thing and scale it down to like there and then just zoom into this guy, then just take the studio and scale it up. If you want to be very accurate, of course you can turn this transparency down and make sure we are still looking right here with the edge. I think that should be good. For this specific instance, I think I wanna go down on the Y. Just so we are kind of more leveled with the chili pepper and a little bit up on the rotation. So looks good. Let's see what happens when we start this render. We're looking great here, and as you can see we can actually move this up a little bit down. That should be good. You'll notice because this is not an octane material that just kill this right now, if we re-render, that'll be kind of a diffuse material. That should be good. Let's take this material off and let's create an octane diffuse material. We'll make this the background material for this thing, and one thing I always like working with is the Node editor. So let's pop that guy open here and this is where everything really changed for me when I was building shaders and I had no idea how Nodes worked. I'm still getting used to it to this day, but I think it's already much easier to make complex textures than before. As you can just stack stuff and just like combine things like you never could before. So we're going to take this Diffuse texture here. Drag this out, and let's see what color we wanna go with. I think for these the best is really darker colors because we want this kind of pepper to pop, right? What we're going to do is create another material, a glossy material this time, as we're going to work on the pepper, and just drag that onto the Chili model. What we'll do real quick is just take the diffuse just so we can see what's going on here and make it red. What we'll do is create one more material. Guess we can use a Diffuse material. We'll call this pepper and stem and we'll drag the stem material on the actual volume measure. Now we at least have two things covered on here. So the first thing we wanna do is grab an HDRI so we can have some pretty accurate and nice lighting, and that I believe will be in the objects, texture or HDRI Environment. We are going to "click" that and it's obviously going to be black because we have nothing assigned to it. So we're just going to go texture, load image here, and I'm just going to go to my textures or HDRIs and pick one that I use a lot. This one you guys can do on your own. Feel free to use any kind of HDRI that you find online or whatever and kind of hop that in there. You can see, if I were to take the power up, you can see it's getting some reflections there. Not the craziest reflections, but there they are. We are going to keep that at one. The last thing I'm going to do for now at least is drag an octane area light. And I'm going to rotate this 90 degrees, this will give this nice highlight we are looking for. I'm going to drag this all the way up, that's looking pretty nice there. If you want to hop out of the camera without disrupting what we have going on here, let's go to Options and check cameras. Now that if we hop out of the camera, everything still stays as is here. I'm just going to drag this highlight here so we get this nice highlight that we want. Then I'm just going to take the octane light and take the power down so it's not overbearing. As you can see we are getting this nice key light or I guess overhead light here. It's really making this pepper pop. We really haven't even mess with the textures yet. So this is looking good. I think this material is kind of going a little overboard. We want this a little bit darker so we can drag this to something like that. Because remember, we want this thing to really pop. 7. Texturing (Pepper): We're going to take the stem, and just for now, so it looks somewhat like a February and just take it to the green. This could be finished depending on what the job is, or who you're working for, this could be finished. If they're gone for like a simplistic cartoon, I guess a little bit more realistic than cartoon pepper, those looks great. I'm just going to take a sip here real quick. Those looks great. I'm actually expecting to, once we finish the texturing for everything, we're actually going to hop this stuff into a cloner and make these things go everywhere. That's what I want to do, but we'll see how much time we have, but this looks good. We're going to hop back in the camera here and start working on the pepper itself and how that looks. If you look at regular peppers, this is by no means, as smooth as it gets, there's some thickness to it, and most people would just call that realism. Let's work on that right now. If you'll notice the colors are not even the same on certain parts, there's a tiny bit darker shade of red there, lighter shade, darker, and a lot of this is because of the lighting, but I don't think really anything in this world, especially this stuff is purely one color. We're going to match that using the node editor. We're going to open here, up in the node editor we can close this right now and drag this down. I do have a separate window on the left here, but I think that's pretty complicated formula, try live streaming with that. I'm not used to using just one window here, might be a little bit hard, but we'll get through it. The first thing we're going to do here is, as you'll see, if you guys are just getting used to nodes, and as I understand it, this is your main thing here. So you got all these different options. Whereas before if you were to create a texture, these things would correspond to this hierarchy here, and after seeing how you build textures and octane, it's much harder to grasp how you'd even make something complex using this mode. Like if you wanted the color channel to match the reflexion or transparency or whatever, you'd have to redo things. There are ways to duplicates certain aspects and be linked to the color and diffusion, but it was much more complicated than it needs to be. We're going to delete that material and we're now back into pepper. If you notice, we got all these things to the side here, and these are all elements you have to build your shaders here. If I wanted to take like an RGB spectrum, which is pretty much just color and drag this to diffuse, it's essentially the same thing as changing the color of the diffuse. So pretty much the same thing we just made, only we created a node. You might ask yourself why would I want to do that when I can literally just not do that and change the color this way. Because if you wanted to make your own mix of colors, or do anything further than one single color, this is where you run into a problem, which is how you run into problems using the standard way of making textures and cinema 4D. What we're going to do here is think outside the box and we're going to create. Let's say we want to mix this texture, white, and I'm going to hold down control and drag another texture, maybe red, so we have red here and we have white here. If we were to drag both of these onto the diffuse, it would not work because only one node is able to slip in there. What do we do? We grabbing mixed texture. What we're going to do here is you'll see that there's texture 1, texture 2, which correspond to exactly the two things we just made. So we're going to drag texture 1 here and texture 2 there, then the output, that will be able to go to the diffuse because that's pretty much essentially what we're trying to do here. Combine these two and have the output into the diffuse. You'll see by default this thing acts as like a mediator. If I go all the way to the left, all the way to the first texture here, if I go all the way to the right, it's a 100 percent the second texture. Already we have many more options in this aspect than if we were to do it the first way. However, it doesn't really give you that many options on how it will be projected onto the diffuse. Because if we didn't want like a pure gradient, that's going hurt us here. If you'll notice there's an amount section and that's what exactly what we'll do. The easiest way to show you this is to grab a image texture, and that's exactly what you think it is, it's the same thing here. We're just going to grab an image that we choose from one of my textures. Again, I'm leaving the texturing up to you guys on which images you guys want to use. I'm going to use just a random image I have here. Let's see, one of these guys here. That's pretty much, is just going to be this image here, it's like this chrome plated steel thing. That'll work fine for this. If I were to drag this into the amount, you see what it's doing here, is creating a base on the light and dark values of this thing or the gamma, it's creating this intricate looking pattern here. We don't really need white, we just need another shade of red here. If I were to take apart and delete this and create a duplicate of this red and drag it in here, you're not going to see anything because it's the same exact color. But if I were to take this red now and darken a little bit, a little bit darker, we'll see some subtle variations, and this is really what differentiates introductory three people, can make really simplistic objects to people who can obviously pay attention to detail. You're not seeing too much, but if we were to take the gamma here, which is really just the contrast of the image, take that down, or up I should say, you'll be able to see different contrast levels of this stuff and you'll be able to see that here. The reason we're not seeing too much right now is because, we don't have enough contrasting colors, so let's bring this down even more a, nd bring this one up even more, and maybe make this a little bit more orange, something of that nature. I think this texture is actually stretching, so the one thing we want to do is, you might say, "Well, we pop this texture in here and it's giving you a nice texture, how do we manipulate that? How do we changed the way it's projected?" That's going to be these two buttons here. It's going to create two little nodes, introduction or transform and projection, and it's exactly what it sounds like. I'm sorry, I'm working with such a small window here. But in order to see this, and this at the same time, we're going to have to work with it. Here's the transform, here's the projection. What we're going to change is from this to Meth V2 box, and you'll be able to see now that this is actually projected much cleaner on the surface of this stuff. If we go to the transform, this is where we can really actually start messing with the projection. As you can see, it's tiling and that's because obviously it is, we are way too low on the scale here. But even like this it's starting to get pretty cool. If you were to drag this all the way up, you're going to start to get that texture. That's much more apparent, even more apparent. Looking better. One trick I usually do is this is the way it wraps around here. So if I were take this to mirror, if I were to go back to a little bit of a smaller scale here. Let me see, once you can start seeing some patterning, you'll see that we're going to start seeing patterning here. But a way to at least double the amount of leeway you have is instead of wrapping around, you'll see the tiling, go to mirror. To me that makes it so, you have to double the leeway here. If you increase this thing and mess with the projection or how it's being projected onto this thing. It's going to be a little bit easier to see this stuff not be tiling as easy. This is where we're going to start to get some really nice little artifacts and I'm not sure I like the orangish that I added in, so we can probably chill on that. Go a little bit more to red. Again, it doesn't have to be exactly what we saw in the first place, but this is looking fine to me. As you can see, we have this decently complex node system here, which really isn't complex. It's just really two things with colors, and projection and transform nodes. But you can see why it's very intimidating to first get into nodes when you don't know what anything does and that's the problem I had when I was working with this at first. I'm going to take a sip of coffee real quick one second. We got this nice little texture here but one thing we don't have is, we see that this key light is still 100 percent perfect, which means this texture is 100 percent smooth, which is not what we really need. What we're going to do is jump into the displacement. Unfortunately, you can't just drag an image into the displacement, but it's pretty much as simple as that. You're just going to go to displacement tab and add displacements. That creates a node which I guess this is an adapter in a sense and will allow certain images to be projected. With that being said, let's grab an image texture and grab really any texture you can think of. I realized if you know how to manipulate this stuff as well as you can, the texture used to displace things. Obviously they're going to matter, but they're not going to matter as much as you think. I've used crack textures to make certain objects that have nothing to do with cracks and vice versa. I think for this I might use something like, I got this picture of even like smoke like this made and work like let just see. Let's open a picture of smoke and drag this into the displacement and. Off the bat, the displacement is set to 10 centimeters, so no matter what happens, this is going to look a little janky and probably god awful. I'm going to drag this in there. Yes, we are looking awful, but you'll see other than it looking terrible, it looks somewhat decent. What we're going to do is increase the level of detail to like 4k. This is much more detailed now, we're going to take this amount down to like two. Already we're getting something that looks pretty decent and this is a smoke texture. No one would actually look at this and be like, "Wow, this is totally not the texture of a pepper." But one thing we want do is if you'll see, it's hard to see here, sometimes they'll get some ripping and tears during this method. Just go to the chili model here and go to cubic. That just helps the way this thing is portrayed and sometimes it actually makes it worse. See we're getting some cracks there and sometimes fixing that will be within the mid level like this. But I think we're fine before, we're going to take this down to one centimeter. Even that, see it's roughing up the texture just enough to where we're not getting that perfect line anymore. I think actually the way we had it, let's go, UWB mapping was fine but I'm not convinced yet. Let's go back to cubic and jump this guy into projection and transform. We had the wrong one. We're going to do the same thing, we're going to go to box and then just change the textures until we're happy with them. We can probably increase them and this is more just an eye game so once you think it looks good, it's good. That looks pretty decent to me. I'm pretty happy with that so it looks pretty decent. Trying to think if I need to do anything else here, looks good to me. For this specific case, we have these tears here. I think that's tears, I'm not sure what we're actually looking at here. Let's try spatial and that might be our winner there. Let's hop back into the camera. That's actually looking very decent to me, that should be good. Let's go back into the note editor that we have here and mess with the transform again. Get that down a bit. We're just getting a little bit more wrapping here, which looks nice to me. I don't think we need as much so we can probably take this from one to 0.5. That probably looks good to me. The last thing you guys can probably worry about is the roughness. If we want and take this steel texture we had, just the steel texture not the transform nodes we had with it. Drag this into the roughness. This is going to literally do exactly that. You'll see now if I were to go to compare store render buffer, actually I'll have to change it now. If I were to take this roughness off and see what this looks like before and after. This is 100 percent reflective, like we had the glossy and this is what the roughness maps. Some parts are and some parts are a little bit rougher. I don't think we need it to be this rough because this is starting to look a little bit fake. But if we take the roughness map and take the Gamma all the way this way. That'll eliminate most of the roughness. I keep coming back to these textures here. I think we can get that fully red and bring it down like that. That's looking good. Now I think it's on to the stem. 8. Texturing (Stem): We're going to follow really the same process here as I was before. What we're going to do here is going to do what we did before and if you want to save time, you can honestly just highlight these guys right here, command copy. I go back to the stem, command paste, and let's see, let's highlight all this stuff. This window is so small and drag it all the way over here and drag and then Diffuse, which is not what we want. We need to change these colors to somewhat of a green shade, back to green, and let's see how we're working here with the textures. You can probably scale this down. Sometimes, you really have to hop into the camera and see what we're looking at here just so we can get a sense. We probably have to make these things a little bit less. Let's make this a little bit darker, a little bit lighter than that, and this Power is, for some reason, on zero, so there we go. The Power is just off on that one. This is looking much better. I think, this can be overall darker though, be a little bit more color and the actual, what do you call, the displacement on this one is really going to be the one that makes the difference, so let's go to the "Displacement" tab, "Add Displacement." Let's go to "Image Texture." Such a small window. Drag around the Displacement and really just pick a texture that's kind of works for us here. For us, that could be something like just this random picture of mud. This looks crazy, of course, but what we're going to do is take this down to one and increase the resolution to around 2K. May even be able to take this down to 0.5 and take the "Mid Level" all the way, so it looks more leafy and less bulgy. I think leaves can be somewhat shiny, so maybe we can convert this texture to a gloss and just take the Roughness up a little bit. What else are we going to do? Let's take the, I'm not happy with the color just yet. That's going to add a little bit more life to this thing and hop back into the camera. Just like that, I mean, we're looking better, so I don't think many people would question this thing as is. We can hop back into the Node Editor and mess with the Displacement a little bit more because we really haven't messed with the transformation of it. We're going to go all the way to Box and just crank this up. Looking good and that's honestly as good as I need right now. This whole thing looks good to me. I'm going to save this for the first time, which is awful, and we're just going to go back to the Skillshare and just call this Chili Render and so, this looks good. I'm happy with this. 9. Creating Abundance of Peppers: There's so many other things you could do if you wanted, like making different deformations of this pepper. But what I'm going to do actually is save it like we just did and hop this whole chili model into a cloner, and just being conscious of what's going on here. What I would actually do is hop this into a grid array. Notice this thing starts to get a little slow, and that's primarily because this is set to instance, when it should be set to render instance, which will actually speed up this thing much faster. You'll see now, if I were to shrink this stuff, it's much faster than it was, and they don't need to be as big as they were either. When we have all this stuff here, let's go to effector random. We got a bunch of random chilies here. Let's go crazy with the rotation, and there we go. Now it looks like these things are flying around, and of course, we can mess with the scale a little, make these things look even more random. I'm seeing this stuff, I think the displacement on the pepper is actually a little bit too much. I'm going to take this down to 0.2. That should be good. We're getting some nice looking textures there, just enough to break up the reflections and everything like that. If I went to the camera and go to the coordinates, maybe I can hop this up a little bit more, just so I'm seeing less of the ground and more of these floating chilies. We can take this whole thing and move these guys up, so it looks like they're falling. You could do that or you could actually have these physically fall, by just right-clicking simulation, rigid body, and then taking the studio plane simulation collider body. Changing the shape of the collider body to automatic MoDdynamics. If I were to pause this and click play, they should all fall. We're actually going to get some pretty realistic results here. I don't know if on your system this might be a little tougher to handle, but I think we're looking pretty decent here. If I were you guys, I wouldn't go too crazy with the dynamics here, but you could probably increase this stuff just a little bit, and let's have these things fall. What I want is most of them to be in the air. Then we can clone this, right-click and MoGraph tags, MoGraph cache, bake what we have, it will take a second. This will just allow us to have these positions here saved. I'm happy with that. Let's work on the camera settings now. If you'll see, we have a decent amount of reflections here, some highlights. If we want, we can take this Octane light and bring it up just a little bit, just increase those a little bit. What I do like is that, with the Octane camera, as well as the Lily camera, let's take this Fstop all the way down, and you'll see that messes everything up. But if we take off auto focus and we move freely here and zoom in, click this little F here. Now, any one of these peppers we touch will be in focus, which looks very nice for cinematic purposes and stuff of that nature. What I think I want to do is take the stem and just raise them a little bit. See this guy is popping through. Again, I just want to do something like that. I think that looks good. I might just increase the power of the HDRI, just to lighten this whole scene up a bit. That looks good to me. We're getting a bunch of peppers hitting each other right there, but we don't want them to collide. I think taking off that dynamics will be a good idea for this. I'm not going to include dynamics. I don't need that cache that we'd baked out. Let's see here. We can probably take advantage of a push apart effector. I'm sorry, I'm going on a little bit of a tangent now guys. But we'll see here that, here if I delete that push apart, kill the focal length thing. If I have this selected and if I go to MoGraph effector push apart, that's going to push all of these guys part. We're going to take these iterations like 80, and take this down to zero again. We were exactly where we were, so this stuff is pushing us each other. But if we increase this radius little by little, none of these should eventually be hitting each other like that. Something like that works for me. Then, once we have something like that that we're happy with, go as crazy as you want with all these peppers, and should be fine. I'm happy with something like that. I'm going to focus on one of these peppers. I actually do like the look of this guy right here. That looks good to me. I think we're ready to bump this out here, after we do one thing. Let's go back and add some bloom. Let's go post-processing and enable. Now, if we were to add some bloom power to this thing, the highlights will begin to gloss up a little bit, so as well as the highlights there. That looks good to me, maybe some spectral intensity and that should be good. I'm going to uncheck the focal length thing here, save. Go to the Octane settings here. Let's see here, Octane settings are all good. Let's just make sure we're at the correct length. We're going to go to Octane settings. For this exact render here, we can put this on diffuse, and we should be good after we hit this. I always set to something like 800 and pause it, so it doesn't go crazy rendering and we're going to hit "Render". I think we should be good. These are some nice-looking peppers that we made here. I'm pretty happy with this. If you guys like this, I hope you show some love. I'm going to work on this in Photoshop for a little bit, but because this doesn't take too long to render, I will actually just do all of this right now. There's a ton of segments in this one, but I assume if you guys are using Octane, you guys' system may be able to take it. It looks good, as you can see, I got my temps reaching up to 82 degrees and it's looking crazy. Let's see here. Pretty much covered it all. I'm just waiting for this stuff to render. We get a very shower that the fields and nice glows happening here. Again, this is my first Octane class here. Hope you liked it. We should definitely be doing some more. The next one may have to be physical though, you never know, to get back to those who definitely rely off those. Yeah. Let's see. It should be done any second now. 10. Posting Coloring (Photoshop): There we go. I'm going to save as 16-bit TIFF. Save this here, Chili Render. Hop into Photoshop. What we're going to do here is, actually, hold on one second. Then, happen here, open the Premium Chili Peppers, Chili Render. There we have it. I'm just going to duplicate this by using Command J, going into Camera and straight off the bat, increasing the vibrance, the blacks contrast, of course. Maybe killing some of the shadows, and going with the split toning here. If you go to maybe a little bit of green there for the nice vegetation. Let's see what else we need. I'm liking something like that. If you're not happy with the exact how the green came out, you can always take the green slider and just change it to something close. I think I'm happy with something like that. It looks good to me. Maybe adding a little bit of green just to match the blurs. Here we go. That should be decent. Let me check the clarity a little bit. I'm happy with this. We got a faded looking render to a much more exaggerated, nicely performed, realistic render. Yeah, guys. That's pretty much it. I'm happy with this. I'm going to save as and bump this out. I hope you enjoyed this class. I have no idea how long this took, but it seemed pretty quick. Let's see what we're doing here. It's over an hour. Well, I hope you liked it. We created this in a funky little way. I disclosed of that from the beginning, but I think we came out with something that was pretty enjoyable. I hope you guys liked it and can't wait to see you guys to come up with. Also, feel free to reach out to me on Instagram with any questions and submit to me you work. Hopefully, I'll share it. I guess we'll see you in the next one. Take it easy, guys.