Architectural Visualization with C4D and Octane: Shading the Candles

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Instructor Brandon Clements

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  • Duration: 10:48
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We will use the candle as an example to create a material that is dense to illustrate the scattering medium shader in Octane Render.

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Transcript

Okay. So welcome back once again. And this lesson, we're going to talk about some more subsurface scattering on this candle. So here is the final result of what we're trying to create. And you can see on this candle, basically, like, if I turn this camera around so that we get some more light here at the top, you can see at the top, it appears thinner, maybe like the wax is a little hotter, and you can kind of see through it a little bit more than you can in some of these more dense areas at the bottom. If you look at it from where the light is hitting it, it's looking pretty good. And you can again see the difference from the top to the dense-type of bottom part. So I want to show you how we can actually do this using some mixed materials again. And hopefully after this lesson, you'll have the confidence to go out and do some really complex subsurface scattering materials on your own. So let's go ahead and create a new material, so an Octane material. This will be our Wax Spec Matte. And we're going to go ahead and change this to Specular. And let's go to the Transmission, and let's make this kind of pinkish. And that looks okay. And we'll go to the medium, and we're going to add a scattering medium, and we're going to do again a white absorption. Let's go ahead and make this 100%. And you can see how that change as I gradually change that to 100%. And we're going to come in here, and we're going to change this to kind of like an...or just yellowish color. It's going to be kind of interesting when we actually play around with this. We're going to bring this guy down more. Okay. So not that far down. Let's try like 0.2. And let's go ahead and put this onto our candle so we can see what we're doing, and make tweaks. And then we're going to go to our Roughness and let's just place that at, like, 0.1 or so. Okay. So this is looking pretty similar to what the example that I had. We're going to actually turn on Fake Shadows. And let's go into the scattering and maybe bump this up a little bit more saturated. And then, yeah, this transmission is... Okay. So it's mixing some more color in there. And sorry, I'm just going to go ahead and just tweak this a little bit more, move that back up into a higher saturation. And maybe for the roughness, let's try something different at 0.02. I want to kind of be able to see through, but not entirely if that makes sense. I want to be able to see the depth of the object but not see the wall or anything beyond that. All right. So that looks pretty good. And let's just go over kind of what we did again. We increased some roughness here to get the light kind of scattering through there. The index, we can actually bring that up. Almost completely forgot about that. We can bring that up to like a plastic. Let's actually bring that up a little bit higher. Okay. And then we'll go the transmission, this is basically the overall color when the light rays enter and exit. And then the scattering medium is like how the light is being scattered inside of the actual material. And as we move this up, you can tell it gets kind of more dense and dark, and the light rays don't actually penetrate all the way through. But you'll notice on the scattering here, it's changing to purple. So if I actually invert this, you can see it's that yellow color again. So what is going on with this is it's basically saying when it's plain, just this yellow, it's basically saying, "Keep this from going through." And if you were to look at a color wheel, I would guess that the opposite side would be…yes, over here, the opposite side would be that purplish color, that purplish blue color. Okay. So it's basically leaving out the yellow. So if you want to invert that and be able to color pick, then that would be great because as you add the Invert node, it then becomes that yellowish-type color. So that's why I kind of picked that yellow color to start out with. I just wanted to show that. Let's go back down to 0.2. And let's create another shader, another octane shader. This is going to be our wax diffuse matte. Okay. So for the diffuse, we are…let's go ahead and just take off the diffuse right now. We'll go into the transmission and kind of get that to the overall color we want, kind of this brighter red. We'll go into the medium. And let's change this to Scattering Medium. Again, let's bring this down kind of low. We will add an RGB spectrum, change that to full white. We want all that to be absorbed as much as possible. Move this into the scattering, and let's kind of go to that orangy color again. And we will add this to the candle. And when there's actually no diffuse there, you can see that it almost doesn't have that appearance of interacting with the light. So let's go ahead and add kind of a red color to it, a reddish color. And there we have that diffused component. It allows us to kind of interact with that light. So if we move this down to, say, 50% or so, we'll kind of have a little bit of both. Now let's just bump up a roughness just a little bit. And let's look at our transmission one more time. Let's kind of move this down to the pinkish area, and let's try lowering this really, really low. Okay. So that will do for the diffuse part. Now, we're going to create a mix material. And this will be the Wax Mix Matte. Let's go ahead and apply that to the tall candle. And let's go and add the diffuse in the first slot and the wax spec in the second slot. And we're actually going to use an Octane gradient. So before, we had been using the Cinema 4D gradients, but let's go ahead and use this for now. And we're going to go and say, "We want this to be linear," and it's going to add a sine wave in there for us. So if we dive in here, we now have a transform. This transform is going to be able to help us out a lot. What we want to be able to do is rotate this 90 degrees in the Z, and that's going to be able to get us this up-and-down kind of gradient. And then if we…We can really be able to see that if we kind of choke this off. And now, you see we have this kind of gradient tone. So where it is white, we have the diffuse on top. And where it's black, we have the specular. So let's just go ahead and reverse that. So, again, just to recap, black is specular, white is going to be the diffuse. And we can kind of stretch this out with this knot and kind of fade that in however we want it to be. And you get a pretty good representation here in the viewport. Let me change this to just a simple gouraud shading. Okay. So that's looking pretty cool. I actually went ahead and made this effect a little bit more obvious than I did for the project startup example. But you can see how this is being built, and this is going to look really waxy and very slick at top like it's been burning. And then as you move down, we kind of lose this specular highlight here. We can make that look however we want just by adjusting the gradient on the mix material. So if we want that specular highlight to come further down, we can mix it with the knots. One more thing I want to be able to show you guys is how I did the candle flame. So in the Night Time Render, we're actually going to have this be able to light up. So I just have a simple mesh that I kind of had drawn on here. And it's not perfect how it is right now, but when we actually have the camera angle further back, this is going to be looking pretty convincing. And the way that is set up is if we look at the…Let's just look at this flame specular here. The only thing I have checked is the actual index is set to 1, the transmission is, you know, gets all the way to 100 and it's kind of a muted red. Fake shadows are on. So that is being mixed onto this material here, which just has a simple opacity that's turned down, and a blackbody emission that has around 1,800, a power of 5, and that is actually being mixed by a Cinema 4D, 3D spherical gradient. And when you actually grab this and the tall flame together, you can use your Transform tool for your texture and move it with that…since that's a 3D spherical, you can actually move it up and down. Okay. So you can tweak that however you like. It's not perfect like I said. It doesn't look super convincing, but it will, from the camera angle, how far back that we actually have it in the scene. So thank you guys so much for checking this one out. I hope this has helped you with your subsurface scattering shading, and I hope you have gained a lot of skills just from watching these two videos, and you can go out and create some really interesting and awesome subsurface scattering effects. So thanks a lot. And we'll see you in the next one.
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