Cinema 4D Roadshow 2016 - Adapting Warm Winter for Octane: Creating the Crystal Material

Photo of Patrick Goski

Instructor Patrick Goski

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  • Duration: 10:38
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In this video you will learn how to recreate the crystal material in Octane.

In this video you will learn how to recreate the crystal material in Octane. This includes setting up a Specular material (Transparency), using the falloff node to simulate the fresnel effect, the gradient node which can function like the Colorizer, a Scattering Medium to simulate the Absorption attribute, and finally, setting up a Texture Emission to simulate Luminance.

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Transcript

In this video, we're going to take a look at recreating the crystal material in Octane. So to make our lives a little bit easier, we're going to copy the crystals into a new scene. So let's just find some of our crystals here, and we can select those. Then, hit S on the keyboard just to find our main crystal here, and then we will copy that and paste it into a new scene. And we don't need to worry about the paths here. Okay. Then, we're just going to zero out the crystals, so that they're in the center of the world. Next, we want to create the Octane material. So we'll go to an Octane Material here. I'll duplicate the purple material, and then copy the Octane material over the original. And this is just handy, as I can easily swap out the texture, but still have the original material to reference when I'm recreating the Octane material. Now, we can go to Octane, and then open up the Live Viewer and we will start that. Now, we have no lights in here. We could use the Daylight. But with this one, we really want to get a good idea of the scattering and stuff like that. So we're going to use a Targeted Area light. And now, you'll see that as we move around, we're going to get a good idea of how the light passes through these crystals, which is going to be important with this texture. So to get started with creating this material, we'll start by opening up the Material Editor for the Octane material, and then we'll open the Node Editor. Now, this is handy, because we can then go back to the crystal material and see its attributes in the Material Editor, while still having access to the Octane Node Editor here. Okay. So we'll just minimize that, and let's take a look at the Octane material. So the first thing that we can do here is just try adjusting the color, and we can see that that's going to update in the Live Viewer for us. Now, if we want to create a Fresnel effect, which is what is being used in the color channel of this original material here, we want to use a Falloff. So we can connect a Falloff map to the Diffuse channel. If we click on the map, we can then start adjusting the parameters for that Falloff, using the sliders up here. Now, if we wanted to have this be a gradient, so what we can do is use a Gradient node. We can drop that in between the Falloff map and the Octane material. This gives us access to a Gradient slider here. So we'll go back to the original material, and then we can go into the Fresnel and we'll just copy the gradient. Then, we can paste that into the gradient in Octane. Now, this gets us pretty close, but we do run into an issue here. If we take a look at the Octane material, we have an option for opacity, which will allow us to adjust the overall opacity of the objects, but doesn't allow for anything like refraction. So in this case, we actually need to change the material type. So a Glossy material will give us a shiny coat on top, but no options for a transparency. So we have to use a Specular material here. But when we do that, we lose the option to use the Diffuse channel. So we're going to have to plug this gradient into a different field. Also, if we want to break this connection, we have to make sure that we go to a field where it exists. Then, we can disconnect it and switch back to Specular. Now, the material that we're viewing is pretty much just like pure crystal. So there is not a whole lot to see. Also, you'll notice that when it refreshed, the crystals disappeared. If we take a look in the viewport, they're gone as well. We do have to make sure that we are on a frame where the animation exists. So let's just frame that up again, and go back to our Node Editor and we can start trying out some of these different options here. So we have the Index, which is going to be just the standard refractive Index. For crystals, we can set it to something like 1.4. Or if we really want, we can go to the original material and we see that this has a Refraction of two. So we could go with a similar value. Now, when you want to change the color of a Specular material in Octane, you'll notice that there's not a Transparency tab. Where this is done is with the Transmission. This is going to control just how much of a color can get through the object. So if we set the Transmission to be yellow, we'll see that this allows yellow light to go through the object. So this is probably a great place to plug in the gradient that we had created. So now, we're going to get a little bit more of a blue Transmission on the edges, and more purple around the front. Now, if we want to see a bit more light in here, we can actually bring in that Octane Daylight, just to see the material a little bit more clearly. Okay. So at this point, this is obviously a bit too dark. We would like to get something with a little bit more lightness to it. So we can go from the Gradient, and add in a Color Correction. Then, with the Color Correction, we can go in here and we can start adjusting the Gamma. And this is going to allow us to lighten the colors while still keeping more or less similar saturations. The other thing that we want to do here is add in a little bit of a scattering inside, just to carry some of that extra light through. And to do that, we're going to use a Scattering Medium. So the Scattering Medium gets plugged into the Medium slot here, and you can see that our crystals become quite opaque. And that's because we need to connect something to the Absorption and the Scattering. And for that, it could be a texture. But we're just going to use RgbSpectrums here, so Absorption and Scattering. And then, for the Scattering, we want to set that to a fairly low value. The absorption, we can kind of keep where it is. If we want it to be a bit more blue, we can add in a bit blue there, so that we're getting something like that. Now, the Density here is quite dense. We want to lighten that up a little bit, so that we're just getting a subtle hint of scattering inside of here. And it should be fairly low values. We can also try adjusting the Phase to see what that does to our material. Overall, maybe let's go back to that Color Correction and change the Gamma a bit more here. Now, the original crystals also had a little bit of a luminance, and the Scattering Medium is a great way to add this in as well. So you'll see there's a link here for Emission. This means that we can add in something like a Texture Emission and connect that in. And that's going to allow us to have some illumination cast in here. Now, just having the flat white illumination come off of this, or the flat white emission come off of this, we want something that's a bit more interesting. So in this case, we can actually take the Gradient that we created for the color, and we can connect that to the Texture. You'll see just how much brighter that is. We can even turn off the Daylight to get a good idea of how this is going to look in a darker scene. Maybe we can go to the power here, and we can reduce that just a little bit, so that we're only getting a very subtle sort of illumination on this. We just want to brighten up some of the darker areas. We can maybe go a little bit brighter than that, though. Again, if we're not totally happy with the color, we can take this node here and we can add in a Color Correction. So we can just go like that, and we can adjust the Gamma on this to change the Saturation of that. And then, still just using the Power so that we get something that we enjoy. Maybe we take out a little bit of Saturation there. The last thing that we need to do here is add in the Bump map. So that's going to be an Image Texture that we connect to the Bump channel. Here, we're going to link to the maps.hi.12 and we'll just go No, and we'll let that do its thing. So that's going to roughen the surface up, but also bring a lot more light into the actual shapes. Okay. So now that we have completed the material, we're going to make sure that we have renamed it to "Crystal Purple", and then we can copy that and we will paste it into our main scene. Then, hold ALT or OPTION, and replace the old crystal material. So at this point, you are ready to move on to the next video in the series. Again, I do encourage you to not try rendering in Octane at this point, as you have not finished converting all of the materials. Okay. So hope you enjoyed. Have fun.
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