Architectural Visualization with C4D and Octane: Using Substance Plugin

Photo of Brandon Clements

Instructor Brandon Clements

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  • Duration: 06:02
  • Views: 4265
  • Made with Release: 18
  • Works with Release: 18 and greater

In this video we will explore the Substance Asset Manager and Pipeline tools to effectively utilize these features. Octane will bake this process in the background. It is important to understand that the global parameters, in Octane Render, equate to your desired texture output size.

Note: Due to the file-size of the project files. It has been split up for easier downloading.
Project File without tex can be found attached to this tutorial.
Tex, Part 1 can be found here: Creating Dielectric Materials
Tex, Part 2 can be found here: Creating Conductors In Octane and C4D

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Transcript

So, welcome back. In this video we're going to talk about how to use Octane and Cinema 4D, and some of the Pipeline tools, and solving some issues that you may have when you are looking at your live viewer. So, I'll go ahead and open this up. And if you just start Cinema 4D R18 and start using the actual substance plug-in, sometimes you'll notice that your substances don't look so great. For example, this marble texture will be perfect, just to display how blurry and how low res this looks. Okay? So, we just have three examples here. So for the first cube we have a standard Cinema 4D Shader on it, okay? And this is what you'll get if you come up to your Pipeline on the top bar, go to the Substance Engine, and have the Substance Asset Manager open. And I'll just dock this over here so we can see it. When you actually load the Substance Asset Manager, you'll just load a substance and it'll appear right here. So this is the marble white. And like I said, this is a perfect example because there's very thin lines and there's low contrast between this texture, so... And we can see that it's not showing up like we need it to. You can right click here and than you can say "create standard materials," and that's just what I've done here. So, it's a standard C4D material. You can see that it renders in the Octane live viewer. Let me go ahead and just hide the info here. But it is low res. And we're just getting this substance shader plugged in to every channel that we need it to actually go into. There we go. So, this is what happens straight away. And if we go to our second position... And let me just back the camera out, it's just key framed here. We can see on the second cube we have an Octane Shader, just an Octane material with the Substance Shader plugged into each channel, respectively, that it needs to go into. And if I dive in here, you can see this one's set to "Roughness," this one's set to "Diffuse," this one's set to "Normal." And then we have an index roughly of a plastic type of material. We zoom in here. And we still see that it's just not... it's not clear, it's not looking great, it's not what we want. So, then, let's go to position number three. And on position number three, I just have a regular Octane material. And in the Diffuse, we just have image textures, okay? And they're 2K. And look how nice and crisp this is looking. Okay. So, does that mean that our Substance Shaders aren't going to work in Octane? No, not necessarily. We can actually fix this. It's just something that is happening behind the scenes and I want to show you these three types of examples where it's going to pop up. So, we can actually use a regular Cinema 4D material, if we needed to, inside of Octane. The thing that's going to happen here is you're going to have to look at your overall settings for Octane. So, before you open up the Octane settings, we go into the Settings tab. We see C4D shaders. Right now the render size is 128 by 128. Okay? So, we just need to make sure that Octane behind the scenes is baking these textures into the size that they need to be, all right? Which is going to be 2K. Let me just click onto the Asset Manager and show you that these should be appearing as 2K, but the bottleneck is actually happening here behind the scenes when Octane is actually baking down the C4D shaders. So, let's go ahead and change it to 2K by 2K, and we'll come over to the live viewer and we'll reload. And now as you can see, once we go into our closer area, we don't have that bottleneck anymore. So, let's move over to the next position. In this position, we can back out again just so you can see that it's at position number two. This is just a Octane... Sorry. Here we go. This is an Octane material with a Substance Shader plugged in. So, all of them work as long as the actual bake is set to the correct resolution. So, if we come into the comments tab, we can do this on a perm material basis. Right now it's set to default, so it's looking at the overall setting here in the actual C4D shader. So, if we needed to, we can make this guy just be...let's do 512 by 512. Okay. So, let's pause and refresh. So, if we zoom in to number two, we can see that this is lower res than number one. Number three is just a regular image texture. So, you can see the difference there. So, this is how you can cut down on your actual VRAM memory. So if you want to use the substance integration and you don't want to have every single asset at 2K by 2K, you can change it on a material basis, you can change it on a scene basis with the actual Octane settings, or you can just load in just your standard image textures. So, I hope this video has helped clear up how you can use Cinema 4D, the Substance Integration, and Octane render all together, and how you can actually cut down on some VRAM with texture memory. We'll see you guys in the next one. Thank you.
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