Architectural Visualization with C4D and Octane: Shading Miscellaneous Objects

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Instructor Brandon Clements

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In this video, we will take a look at all of the miscellaneous objects that have been placed around the interior to create a believable rendering.

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Transcript

Welcome back everyone, and in this video, we're just going to talk about some of the miscellaneous objects that have been placed around the interior, just to kind of give some more detail and make it feel like it was lived in. We've talked in depth about dielectrics and conductors, and I just kind of want to show you a little bit more of these shaders and how they were kind of put together and the actual room setup. So, in this video, we're just going to be talking about how we can use, like, portal materials and other things to kind of direct the light into the room and tell Octane a little bit more about what the setup is. Okay. So in this room, we have our dry wall, and we actually have the baseboards and everything here. And if I just actually go into Polygon mode, what I've done is selected areas where I wanted the light to come in. So, if I actually go around this way, we see we have polygon faces here, we have a polygon face here, and then we actually have another face here as well, okay, for different directions of light, and one on the back. So each of those that I've pointed out, which were four different areas, have a portal material. You just go to Create Shader, C4D Octane, and then Octane Portal Material. So portal materials are going to be on the doors and the windows. And what that's going to do, it's going to allow Octane to look at the sun spot on our HDRI, those incredibly bright pixels, it's going to fire into the scene and it's going to direct it and tell it where the openings are on this building. So for the interior, it's, in most traditional cases if we're not using this portal material, it's going to be very hard for Octane to be efficient, and to be quick, and to know how to light the inside of that room. So we can apply those to planes to help Octane out. We can also apply it to certain polygon faces here with a selection tag in Cinema 4D. And there are no settings on the actual material. You just have to apply it. I've also added this tree model to our scene, and instead of having multiple variations of this tree, what I'm going to do is automate that with the Octane Scatter. Okay? So, the Octane Scatter is different from the Mograph Cloner that we have here in Cinema 4D. What the Octane Scatter allows us to do is to talk directly to Octane, and we're going to start drawing instances onto the GPU. So in that case, it's talking directly to the hardware, into all the [inaudible] technology that is driving Octane, so it's going to be much lighter. And what I've done here is, you can see some of the settings are pretty similar to a Cloner Object, so we have this surface area that I'm going to distribute it so you can use vertex surface or a CSV file. So the surface is going to be just this area right here that I've kind of selected from some polygons that I've pushed and pulled around, and that's just going to be kind of our dirt area. And then with the surface selected, it allows me to set the count, and, of course, we can change the scene, and how we were going to actually align it on the normal. So you can see that from the indication, not all of them are straight up. Some of them are kind of at an angle. From there, we're using an actual random effector. So you can use Cinema 4D effectors with the Octane Scatter. So this is very powerful and allows us to do some really interesting Mograph variations if we need to. So we have a little bit of variation in the scale in the Y, and also in the rotation. Definitely check out using the Octane Scatter in your project, see where you can use it. You will be surprised by how many instances you can actually draw onto a GPU. It's pretty insane. I've done a lot of different tests with it. It works really well with vegetation and trees, and it's going to work perfect for us when we actually send this to Octane. It's going to keep it very lightweight. On that note, I'd like to say that with the cloner, you can go ahead and check on the render instances and that will help load it onto the GPU as well. There's been many cases where I've had to use a cloner for certain Mograph type of animations in the past, and having the Render Instances box checked here helped me a lot save on VRAM and to, overall, just speed up the scene. Before we wrap this video up, I just want to talk a little bit more about this pillow here. We have two of them with a hair object, and when you're using hair in Cinema 4D and Octane, what you want to do is just go ahead and apply an Octane tag to that, and then once you apply the tag, come down to the hair and you can check this and say, "Render as Hair," and set the root thickness and the tip. Now the only thing that the hair material is going to allow you to do is set the thickness and the length, and then you can do things like frizz and kink and also curl. So you're going to drive the color and actually how it looks by Octane Materials. Okay. So you're still going to have to use Octane Materials to shade it. Another thing that you're going to want to check on is when you come up to your render settings, make sure sometimes there's a hair module that will come in, this hair render. We just want to take that out, okay? And taking that out is going to allow us to see it in the live viewer, it's going to help us with the picture viewer as well when we're sending it for animations. So this material is actually pretty heavy. The diffuse, if we go into it, it's actually a 32-bit 4K EXR for the color information. You're probably wondering like, "Why use a 32-bit image for your color channel?" And it really just helps a lot. This particular asset was actually scanned and actually processed as a 32-bit EXR. So there is a ton of color information in here. But I just want to point it out because it is going to take longer to send to Octane. And if you feel like you need to actually take this into Photoshop and make a PNG or a JPEG or something that's going to be a little more lightweight. It's going to save you a little bit of time on the front-end, but it will look very good in our scene and it's going to be very photo realistic since there is that color information. Another thing that I'd like to point out about this scene, we have these vases and some of these other smaller detailed objects, the lamp, you know, the painting, these vases over here, the table, also the table and the book. These other things that we haven't talked about. They're basically following the same rules and the principles that we talked about in earlier videos with dielectrics and conductors. They're kind of like tertiary objects, and these shaders are very simple. So let's look at this specular material. This shader is, like I said, it's specular, so it's going to allow light to penetrate through it, and it's just kind of set up as glass and the transmission is set to a different color so we can actually see that. Now the Fake Shadows option is not ticked on. What that's going to allow us to do is when the light rays actually come through this object, the color of the shadow is going to be tInted. You can see that here in the preview. If I turn on fake shadows, that tinted color kind of goes away. That's going to allow you to have a lot faster processing time that's going to be much quicker to render. It's also going to give you a different result. So that's something that you want to kind of check if you're using, like, smaller objects, something you're going to have to play around with to make this scene look correct. But the fake shadows will speed up the computation of the scene. Another thing to mention about the kernel that we're using, path tracing, now we have the path tracing Monte Carlo renderer kernel, and that's going to be much more intense. The only time that I can really recommend using the path tracing Monte Carlo in production is for, like, large print stills. Something I've noticed in the past from just doing tests is that if you're using the PMC for animation, sometimes you're going to get some flickering just because each frame is going to have a different calculation. So in turn, that's going to give you a different result per frame. It's going to cause a little bit of flickering. Now the good thing about the path tracing Monte Carlo render is that it's going to give you things like caustics. It's going to look very, very good. It's going to be the most intense kernel that we can use. So the path tracing is different from the direct lighting. The direct lighting kernel is actually a biased kernel, so it's very fast to render the direct lighting. Path tracing is going to be an absolute full path tracer, and it's going to be unbiased, and it's going to react like we're used to things in the real world reacting to light and shade and shadow. Now that we have all the shading out of the way and building of the materials, we're going to talk about lighting which is my favorite subject. And I have three different examples that I'm going to talk about in these next videos. So, I'm really excited to talk about that with you guys, so stick around and we'll see in the next one. Thanks a lot.
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