Cineversity

with rock, mountain, grass, and stuff.
How do I make one of those?
With this new version “16”, how would I or someone make a realistic mountains and landscape scene?

Hi Jamestown,

You ask specially what new options are in R16 to create something like that? I might miss here something, please elaborate a little bit more, thanks.

Realistic is a big term, you might not see me using that term very often… if in that area at all, especially not with CG landscapes. It is certainly a lot of stuff needed (skills and hardware) to get close to what larger studios produce, which I think is the best we have currently.

If you like to go somewhere into that direction, and have the application supporting that from the beginning, have a look into Vue-xStream.
http://www.e-onsoftware.com/products/vue/vue_2014_xstream/

Again, if I miss here something, or I got already too cautioned with the term “realistic”, perhaps you suggest this theme, and request a tutorials series. For me, landscape can be a lot, just some sand-dunes and the Sky object, but also something like Yellowstone or Yosemite park, with uncounted trees and millions of plants and details.

There is to a certain degree something possible, but the best use, with a reasonable amount of work seems to be the combination of Digital Matte Painting, and here I have a lot of use of photography in mind, with the great options in CINEMA 4D to do Camera Projection and to a certain degree the creation of objects. As it is called since nearly ten years “3D environment creation”, CINEMA 4D is certainly a good host application, even Vue is very closely connected to it. A fascinating theme—no question. It is possible with a patience and skills, but I fear, that whole package to get to the level of “realistic” takes some time.

I guess a comprehensive series, that leads “students” to a higher level and to a comprehensive understanding of all parts of this advanced job, might take 100 or 200 parts easily, excluded the photography part, which I did mostly already.

Perhaps you can share first a sketch of your ideas of a landscape, and this might limit the possibilities and enables anyone to answer more specifically.

All the best

Sassi

Just some simple background scenes to make such as valleys, mountains, some with green landscape, some desert, others ice.
Doesn’t need to be totally realistic.
So when I make it, doesn’t look like alien landscape, or something silly like a piece of land that looks like a spotted cow.

Thank you, Jamestown. This helps to reduce the possibilities.

The first idea that comes to mind is of course something that is part of most landscape images/panoramas, but perhaps not really seen as “landscape”: the sky, and with it the atmosphere it sets. Besides that, the time of the day plays certainly a role in the final result. It helps to get an initial direction for the whole mood. Use the Sky Object and the provided presets. It will certainly help.

The Grass Shader should be used more for close by areas, anything beyond might end up in long render-times. For anything a little bit more far off, check the Fur or Hair Object. Also here, if you render it out from specific points, you might get away (with the same image-quality) if you use Camera Projection. The rendering would help here to manipulate the rendering in Photoshop a little bit. (paint in it, or place stones and stuff into it.)

The geography itself can be taken from DEM data bases, there is even a plug in available, that allows for a fast creation. Have a look here:
http://www.cineversity.com/forums/viewthread/1397/

Besides that, you could use the Landscape object and place many of them, with different settings, in your “field of view” or what the camera will see later on.

Weathering Shader, Pavement Shader, Colorizer Shader, Layer Shader, Filter Shader, Gradient Shader, Noise Shader, Subsurface Scattering Shader, Falloff Shader, Mabel Shader, Nukei Shader, Terrain Mask, and perhaps some other shaders are the essential tool kit to create out of the Landscape Object more or less nice mountains, especially with the use of Sub-Polygon-Displacement.
You might see with the collection of shaders, the variety is already huge.

Besides that, you might as well use the Sculpting tool in C4D, to change and transform any object into landscape objects. If the amount of pixels exceeds after a while the power of the installed system, you might bake those to lower levels. have a look here:
http://www.cineversity.com/forums/viewthread/1409/

IF the topology is set, perhaps you take some images from trees and place those on Plane Objects. With that you use the MoGraph Cloner to populate the surface with trees and other plants. I talk here about 2D trees, especially for distant objects with a Target Effector, during set up. For trees closer to the camera, you need more detail. Very close trees often have a high demand on details before they look kind of believable. There are many options for trees for C4D. Onyx Tree might the oldest with two+ decades, X-Frog and other providers are frequently mentioned on the MAXON web-site, if there are some news about.

After all the option to camera project landscapes to a small piece of geometry, as discussed in my JET series is always possible.

Use the Fog Shader of the Environment object, to get some depth perspective into the scene.

As I get not tired to suggest this, here we go again: Get reference images, lots of. Collage those perhaps to something that comes close to your target. It might help tremendously to get clear about your targets and helps to compare your results with what you had intended to do.

For some parts, you might use BodyPaint3D as well.

Again, Vue has even a free version, I didn’t suggested it, as you used the term realistic. Since you cleared that, here you go: http://www.cornucopia3d.com/products/vue/vue_2014_pioneer/index.php
You can create your ideas there, and perhaps render out images that you project then inside of CINEMA 4D. I have done it with Vue XStream in that way for a movie that was printed on 35mm cinemascope. It is a fast technique and allows certainly for teh background for impressive images. Have a look.

My best wishes

Sassi

The plugin and the application look like fun to use.  It’s probably better for me to know how to just make some landscape itself, that being by starting off converting a landscape object and using the sculpting tool, then doing the textures.
-Is there tutorials on this?

Yes, Jamestown, to do what you can do natively has some advantages: you can do it with any other version of C4D without hesitation.

I think it is a good idea to start out with just one object and explore the options. I know that it is very tempting to start on the final version directly, but “playing around” delivers perhaps some new ideas and options in the create itself.

Find your mix between procedural and manual work. Procedural here means the use of shaders with, e.g., Sub-Polygon-Displacement (SPD), and manual more the work with the Magnet Tool or the Sculpting options in C4D.

Have an image as reference while you are working. It will push you further. It is so easy to get distracted with simpler techniques and lose the quality you could have gained—if your target would have been clear.

My best wishes

Sassi