Architectural Visualization with C4D and Octane: Shading the Fireplace

Photo of Brandon Clements

Instructor Brandon Clements

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  • Duration: 06:52
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  • Made with Release: 18
  • Works with Release: 18 and greater

In this video, we will demonstrate a custom Substance asset. From here, we will tweak those parameters in pseudo-real time using Octane Render to create the desired look for our fireplace.

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Transcript

In this video, we're going to actually shade this fireplace with a substance asset that I had created in substance designer. So the interesting thing about this fireplace is that we have a wood shelf, we have some subway tiles, we have a little bit of dry wall, and then in this corner right here, we have this being iron, where the actual logs are going to be able to sit. So, it creates a unique problem with trying to load us up into Octane, and have both dielectrics and conductors in the same substance. So, we're just going to go ahead and load our actual fireplace substance. And once that comes in, we have all these different parameters that I was able to expose inside of substance designer. So, we're left with the…I have the number of bricks that we could change on the fly here in Octane. The actual bevel of the bricks, the smoothness, round corners, the color of the bricks and this is a float for, so we get a alpha channel with that, and then we also have this parameter to clean the bricks, or not. So, it's pretty cool, so we can actually just select our C4D material, come up to plugins, C4D Octane, we're going to convert that for us. We're going to go ahead and get rid of that. And we're going to name this one, Fireplace Dielectric. So, we're going to make sure that everything is loaded up here correctly. Base color is fine for the diffuse, and we're going to go ahead and change this to Specular. And then we are actually going to just steal this one. We're going to paste this and go to roughness, and then make sure that our normal is correct. And then in the index, we're going to put this at, let's say, 1.5 for the plastics. And also we don't need displacement, we can use our normal map for that. We could use displacement if we want, but it takes a little bit longer for this to load into the scene. And since we're not very close to the fireplace, it's not going to do us any justice rendering at 4K and having the camera back as far that it is. So, let's go ahead and apply this to the fireplace, and load that into octane. So everything is acting accordingly like a dielectric. The only thing that we need to do is, change this so that this feels more like iron inside. So, a quick way to do that, it's just to hold Ctrl and left mouse-click, and then we're going to change our copied material to not be dielectric, but let's just change this to conductor. And then we'll come down to the index, and we're going to set this to one. And if you had followed along in the other videos, we're going to come over to the Specular. We're actually going to multiply this, bring this down to the bottom part, and we are going to use a fall-off map. So then in the fall-off map, the minimum value is actually going to be a value that we're going to get from the refractive index website. So, here we are on refractive index, and I went to head and navigated to iron, and we're going to use this value right here. So we're going to copy this, we're going to paste this into the minimum value. And now we just need to…we don't need the diffuse amount at all. And then we can go ahead and uncheck that. Okay. So, when we actually apply this, you can see, we kind of get a metallic look on the actual iron, but everything else is appearing metallic as well. So, we can actually create a Octane mix material, and we can call this Fireplace Mix. And we're going to create a texture slot here, and we're going to use the substance shader. We're going to load in the fireplace, and then we're going to change this to metallic. The metallic channel is a matte built into the substance that defines the area that should be metallic and white. The mix material will apply one material in the white areas and a different material in the black. Then we'll drag and drop that onto our shader. And it looks like I actually got that backwards. So let's put the conductor in the first part, and let's put the dielectrics in the second part. And just to go ahead and test this, and make sure that it's working, let's change this to a RGB spectrum. And you can see, immediately, it changes. So this is only working on the iron part. So, if this is looking a little bit too dark for our iron, we can actually come in here and do a color correction node, and we can actually brighten this up a little bit. And we'll leave the final tweaking for the actual scene. So it's looking good in here. Of course, if we ever wanted to come down and maybe say, the bricks be a little bit more clean, we can adjust this perimeter here, and you can see that it diminishes. We could also change the color of the bricks, maybe we want this a little more orange, a little bit more saturation, and Octane will update all that for us. So I'll go ahead size this back down. It's about 7% saturation, and maybe bump this up to 0.35. Also just to, for example sake, we can go ahead and change the amount of bricks. So, our subway tiles could be a little bit larger if we want them to be. So I'm going to go ahead and set them back to six. So the substance assets have proven to be very useful for us in our studio work here, just because we don't have to go right back into substance designer when we know that we can expose parameters that are going to be able to be tweaked here in Octane to our liking. So this is the best way that you can set up dielectrics and conductors, and still have control over the metals and non-metals inside of one Octane mix material, inside of cinema 4D and Octane. So, I hope this has helped, and we'll see you guys in the next one, thank you.
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