Cinema 4D Roadshow 2016 - Adapting Warm Winter for Octane: Simplifying the Number of Materials

Photo of Patrick Goski

Instructor Patrick Goski

Share this video
  • Duration: 07:11
  • Views: 1388
  • Made with Release: 18
  • Works with Release: 18 and greater

In this video you will learn how to simplify the number of materials in the scene to make the conversion process easier.

In this video you will learn how to simplify the number of materials in the scene to make the conversion process easier. The real secret of this video is being able to use Alt/Opt in the Material Manager to quickly replace materials.

show less

Transcript

In this next set of videos, we're going to be creating the Octane materials. And the first thing that we're going to do for this process is actually reducing the number of materials that we have in the scene. As you can see, there are currently a lot of materials here, and this can be a little bit overwhelming when it comes to converting things. So we're going to start by collapsing all of these materials down to the simplest possible form that we can. And then if you want to create more variation in your scene, you can simply start adding more materials in from the basic set they will create. Okay. So in all these materials, there's a few that we can't really collapse down. That would be the main petals that we have here, some of the mountains as well. And then a lot of this other stuff, we can actually kind of get down to just one material. So to do that, we're going to start by selecting...let's go with the crystals here. And rather than have four different crystal materials, we're just going to hold ALT or OPTION on the keyboard, and we can drag that over, and we're just going to collapse all those materials into one. Now, for the mountains, let's get rid of the closeup versions that we have here. So we'll select the mountain materials and then, again, ALT or OPTION, click and drag, to collapse those down. We then have these materials here which are applied to the mid ground mountains and they're there to blend between the snow and the mountain itself. This uses a vertex map, which is something we don't have access to with Octane. So we're just going to get rid of these materials. So to make our lives a little bit easier, we're just going to unhide all of these objects from the object manager. And then with these selected, we'll go to Function, and then we want to choose Select Texture Tags and Objects. Then we can hit S on the keyboard with the object manager here, and we can see there are the applied materials. Now, if we want to delete these, if we just hit DELETE, it should work. If it doesn't, you may need to first CTRL click on one material and then CTRL click again just to reset the focus and then hit DELETE again. With those materials gone, we're actually just going to go to a Function, and we'll go with Remove Unused Materials and that'll clean up anything that's not currently applied. Next, let's go ahead and collapse down these centerpieces. So if we take a look here, let's go to the color or luminance. You'll see this one has an interesting gradient, probably a little bit more prominent than the other ones, and we want to try and maintain that. So again, we use this one as their base, so hold down ALT or OPTION and then click and drag that over the other materials. Okay. Next, we're going to take a look at the plant itself. And so, one thing we can do is, if you look at your attribute manager, you can go to the assigned tab of any of your materials and see what objects a material is applied to. So we have like, these three here, are all applied to the leaf. So let's just start with collapsing that down a little bit. So now, we have all of the leaves getting the same material. It's not really the most unique solution but at least it is going to be easier for us to start here. So we can take a look at the other options here. We have a few for the stem. Let's just take this main stem, and we'll copy that over as well. And these are attached to the leaves as well as the stem. So maybe what we'll do is, we'll actually just copy the stem material over to all of these different plant elements, and that's just going to make things a lot easier for us in the long run. Now, there's also a whole bunch of materials here that are associated with a layer that we've had hidden for quite a long time, and that is this old layer. And if we just take a look, it's a whole bunch of elements that were used in the making of the project that aren't really going to be applicable anymore, so we can delete those. And let's go with, A, remove unused materials and you can see that that removes a good portion of the materials as well. Now, this leaf anime is applied to the leaves themselves, and it is just being overlaid on top of a material in Cinema. And this is something that we'll have to set up specifically in Octane. So we're just going to take the stem material and we'll overwrite that as well. We then have a temp material that's applied to these rise positions and this divider. So let's select both those materials. And then we'll choose Select Texture Tags Objects. Change the focus here so that we can see those, and then hit DELETE, and it deletes everything. So let's deselect everything. Let's try that again. We'll go Functions, Select Texture Tags Objects, and delete. So it works that time. Then we just go in, and we remove unused. Now, there's this plant new. Let's just go with our stem as well and get rid of that for now and this other plant new. The snow dirty is applied to the plants as well, so that goes into the stems. And then the last thing here is actually this material for the petals. And this is something that can trick you up, so it is a good idea to actually go in and maybe be a little bit more specific with the cleanup here like deleting your extra texture tags that you're not using. But in this case, when you're doing the investigation for the materials, we can go in here and say Select Tags on Object and then hit S, and we have the two materials applied, the main petal and then the front. So that's going to be the main and the main petal front. Now, this is set to both sides, so it's not actually doing anything, it's just right over top of this front material. So we can also get rid of those. So I'm just selecting the inner portions here now and copying those over top of the front material so that I just have two of the same. The alternative would be to just delete those leaving yourself with one material. Okay. So at this point, we are ready to actually start creating the Octane materials.
Resume Auto-Scroll?