- [Steve Teeple] Thank you, MAXON, for having me, this is a big honor. Watched
NAB almost every year so it's really exciting to actually present here.
My name's Steve Teeple. Most people call me Teeps, I think it's a little bit
easier. I'm a 3D artist. I do a lot of, lately, it's more conceptual art and
virtual reality asset creation, but I'm also mostly known for stuff I do for
concert visuals. More recently worked on stuff for the rapper Future, the Weeknd,
and more recently as well, Flying Lotus. So before I dive into my work, let me just
show you my reel, real quick here, to kick things off so you have an idea what I do.
♪ [music] ♪
- First time ever making a reel, so hopefully, that looked all right. Yeah, so
a lot of what you saw in that reel was stuff I did last year for Flying Lotus's
Hypercube show that premiered at Coachella. The show was designed before
that, but we revamped all the designs for the show, in a lot of ways, with a few new
animators. And for people that don't know what that show is, it's essentially...
This is what the actual stage setup looks like.
You have a cube inside of a cube called a tesseract, on its side,
with a transparent screen on the front and then there's a screen shaped like a V in
the back that is actually solid. And we create content for the front and back
screen separately, and when you combine those two with a transparent layer on the
front, it creates this optical illusion that there is some kind of energy or
things emanating from the artist that's standing in between those two.
This actually went on to win best light show of Coachella last year, so that's
pretty exciting. And let me just show... Right away, I'm just going to dive into
Cinema. So before we start making any content for this, the stage was recreated
inside of Cinema. And it's really simple here, but we do this because there's
content creators from all over the world working on this. So people like Scott
Pagano, [Carlos Sa], people contributed to this, a lot of amazing animators. I even
feel honored to say their names next to mine. But you need consistency for when
you're re-projecting onto a stage like this, so we all have a template we go off
of that has a locked camera with the same field of view and focal length and
everything like that, so we all know we're looking at the right angle.
And we basically recreated this with...
This is just an atom array with a transparent level on here for the front
screen and then you actually have the array in the back for a solid. So you can
just... basically, anytime I bring in a file, I throw this on a layer and hide it
so I can make sure things are animating inside that area. What I want to show
really quick is a lot of people don't really create stuff for visuals with
music, so one thing we do is... you'll notice here there's a 140-click cube and
I'm going to show you what that is in a new file really quick. All you can do is
load in a cube. And this is for anyone that knows music. It's basically
a metronome. So I'm going to hide this cube, and when you go to open your
timeline here, drag this cube down there. You can right-click on it and add special
track and you can add a sound file, which I didn't know about this for the longest
time, but it's incredibly helpful for when you're animating for audio. And when you
actually go to your attributes here, you can load in a sound file.
Let me just load that up really quick.
So all this is is basically an awkward bongo hit. And I'm going to change this
to 408 frames, which you'll see why in a second here. So you actually zoom out.
You can see now that you basically have a perfect eight-bar loop of audio clicks.
And when you actually hit play on this, you will hear...
This just simple bongo hit, right? What that's doing is
it's letting me know that Flying Lotus's live show is going to be synced to this
tempo for most of it, right? And it also gives us a template to animate from. So if
you actually look, you can see that these hits are coming in at about exactly 50
frames almost each interval, which to me, all I know now is that if I'm confused or
need to start something to animate, I know that I can make things in small
batches, in 50-frame intervals. And then I know it's going to be in sync with one
another, which I think is really quick and easy for animation. And so that's really
easily how you load in a click track and you don't even see it, obviously. But you
can see that in your timeline at all times and you can just rename this something
like 140 click. So you can drag that between files and you have something
to animate to. So back to this design here. Let's open the [finder].
So just so you have a visual representation,
you saw it a little bit in the actual reel, but when you actually have
the two screens together, you get shows like this. You get visuals on the
front screen, and then you have solid visuals on the back screen and you can see
that the front screen is a little bit different designs. And I'll go over that
shortly here. So the general philosophy is that the front screen is more centered on
the artist in a very energy, centered blasts of...looks like stuff's emanating
from the artist itself, right? And then the back screen tends to be environment
studies traveling through. So the creative direction I was given was to design these
biomechanical spaceships that he's flying through this crazy environment, right?
So the first thing I wanted to design was some stuff for the front screen, and a lot
of them were these loops of just these spinning UI elements, right? And they're
just pulsing on that 50-frame mark. And these are all just slight variations of
the same thing. But these look like something almost you'd make in After
Effects or something like that. And they're all done in Cinema. They're very
easy to make and I'm going to show how you open those files really quick. But this
was a starting point for me, and I reused these elements and techniques a lot more
in the actual show. So if we actually open this file up here, so if you actually hit
play, you can just see that this is what one of them looked like in the raw
viewfinder, but I'm going to show you how to do one of these here. Before I do that,
one thing I'll say is that if you're going to start diving into making little
individual elements like this, the layer management will help you a lot with this.
So if you actually have this huge nested thing of files here, so you have all these
cubes nested here, if you actually click the topmost item that they're nested in
in the hierarchy, and hit select children down here, it will select everything it's
nested in, and then you can right-click and say add to new layer. And what that
will do is then give you a color assignment here and where you can come
down here and rename them. Don't be like in Photoshop. Please rename your layers.
it will help you a lot. But you can go in here in the neck and solo this layer,
I can hide it from visibility. I can hide it from the hierarchy. And so I always
have one set up with my scene files that I actually have turned off right now,
so I can see that it's inside that cube area pretty clearly. And I just hide that
from the actual scene, as well as the hierarchy it's set on to see it when
I'm actually animating. But what I'll do is solo one of these here, and just show
you some quick techniques. So this is just a couple of things going on, and I'm going
to recreate a new one here. So to do this, all you need is a few items. So let's just
go to new. Let's do a cube. And you need a spline of some kind. So let's just do
an end side here. And then we need a deformer called a spline wrap.
And if you go to deformers here,
it's something called spline wrap. And you've got three objects, you just drop
the spline wrap onto the cube and then you need to tell that spline wrap what spline
to use, so you just drag in the end side, right? And now it looks broken, but that's
all being determined by the cube's segments. So if I actually crank up these
segments here, you see it starts to trace this cube in a really weird way. I'm going
to bring the size down a little bit, and turn the segments up, and that's all just
determined. You can make it smoother or more angular depending on what you're
actually looking for. So if you want it to trace perfectly, you can match that. I'm
going to do this more organic rounded edges. Now in the spline wrap, you have
a lot of settings here which you can play with. I'm going to change the two down to
more of a lower, so you can see that this is what actually traces over the outline.
So if I set this to something like five here, and let's set, like I said earlier,
I start with small elements, so let's change it to 50 frames. An 8-bar loop
seems intimidating, but if you just break everything down into 50-frame chunks, you
can actually just expand those and loop those over and over again. Or make them
slightly different which will make this a lot easier to digest when you're trying to
make an 8-bar loop. So let's see here, X-axis. So if you notice when you actually
move this offset slider, you can actually get this thing to slide around, right?
So what's easiest is just setting a keyframe on offset go into this, changing
this to 100, making another keyframe. So two keyframes, you got this thing looping
around, tracing around this spline, right? If you want that to go perfectly without
any of that easing on there, just open your timeline, select those keyframes and
right-click and say linear. And now, when I actually hit play, you'll see it just
loop seamlessly for 50 frames. You could loop that endlessly. So you have that
tracing. That's the basic premise, right? But what you can do, which gets a little
bit more exciting is you can go into spline wrap, and if I change the size of
this cube to be a little bit bigger, go to spline wrap, you get these things like
size, so you can taper one end, so it's a little bit more pointy like this,
and then you can actually change the from, which is the direction it's going from.
So what's cool is to do something like setting the two here, going down about
halfway, maybe turning this up slightly, keyframing it, and then bringing it back
down to something like 2%. And so you can start to see this stretching,
it's a little bit more life to it. And so when you create something really
simple ones like this, the next thing you can do is put these all into a null by
hitting option G and then dropping them into, my favorite item in the entire
software, a cloner. And what you can do when you actually have it in the cloner is
I like to change it to something like radial, and that's what I did in this.
And one thing to make sure to check is this render instance boxes when you're
making a lot of copies of something is it will make the software not have to
calculate each one of those individually, so that will make this a lot faster.
And then you can already see, when you crank up these count and the radius here
and when you hit play, each one is animating individually, but it's being
repeated over and over again, so you can get this really mesmerizing shape
endlessly looping with about four objects and about three keyframes.
And this is just one of these items once, and then it's all about
repeating those. So what I did is I made a bunch of these individual elements like
this, and then when you just bring them back into the one scene, you just combine
them layered on top of each other and you can create these crazy loops. So that's a
really simple overview of that technique, but I reuse this technique a lot through
the show, and we're going to see how I evolved it a little bit later. So yeah,
and then another thing I did there to make it start from zero is if you actually
change this end angle and keyframe this, and then go to something like 25 and set
this to something like 360 and then keyframe it and bring it back down to
zero, this is what I was doing with that is it actually starts to draw them out
from the original angle. So that's just determining, if you actually see how
you're changing this, you're just drawing how much it's actually circling around
that spline. So really basic stuff, but that's the general idea I did for those UI
elements. And now when we switch back, you'll see all I'm doing here is that
one's just circling with an angle and it's just looping around with the same offset
animation. But when you actually bring in the rest of the scene, all these are
doing the same thing. Now I drive my animations primarily with Greyscalegorilla
Signal, which you'll see these little graph charts next to here. I will say that
Signal has been incredibly helpful for concert visuals because you can basically
set an interval. So I know that it's every 50 frames, right, for the 140 BPM click
track, in Signal, you can basically set a frame range of where you want things to
animate to. So you'll notice that I'm doing a start and end time of 50 frames so
I know that each one of these attributes that I'm animating is going to come in on
those frames, which if you switched it to 130 BPM, and all of a sudden,
the intervals change, you could just go in there and tweak the end time. And then you
know you're in sync with everything you're animating, which is super, super fast.
You can do the same thing by hand, obviously, and I'm going to show how you
used to do this with no plugins whatsoever. But I will say it's a huge
time saver when you're on a two-week deadline, like I was for this show.
So next thing I want to show really quick was those spaceship designs. So
before I get into that, you can use that same technique to do things like this
where this is just using that same technique for the front screen,
so the artist would be centered here on a transparent screen and I just threw these
hands in there that were animated with Signal as well, but all the UI lighting
element was done with that same technique. As well as in clips like this. The blue
lights were all done with that same technique. And this is just a model I
brought in that I sculpted in ZBrush, but you can see the same techniques being used
over and over again in different parts. And I'll show how I used them for this
tunnel sequence later. But yeah, reusing the same technique over and over again,
but starting with really small, little pieces is the way to do it for me.
So the ship designs I had to do was I went through a lot of iterations of this,
but I came down to about two or three main ones we ended up using. So I don't know
a whole lot about animating complex models in Cinema. I'm not a power user as a lot
of the people who presented here are. But what I can do is I can create some really
complex models. Since I was on a two-week deadline, I didn't really optimize this
stuff very much. And I'm going to show you, with hidden line, you'll notice that
the wireframe on this is awful. There's probably a modeler in the audience that's
very angry right now at how awful this topology is. But I didn't really need to
worry about that because all I was doing is under here, if we go back to display
and punch hitting, all I'm really doing is when I hit play, I'm just moving
individual elements, either changing the scale, the rotation, or the position,
and then just having it pulse on these 50-frame intervals. Now this is moving
really slow, but it made it look like this thing is pulsing it alive and we know we
added some steam and particle stuff in post that made it look like it's pulsing
outward. And this is something where you actually see him standing over this, like
a pedestal. And one thing to keep in mind, when you're designing stuff for visuals
too is if you notice the back here, it's really ugly and things are just floating
and things like that, be aware of what you're actually projecting it on the end
result is because no one's going to see this backside. So don't spend time making
it look pretty or working on mattering it, if these are floating or not. It doesn't
really matter because all you're seeing is from this angle. So most of the time,
I was working with a locked camera and stuff was like really far back, but that's
how it looked the way I wanted it to, so you don't really have to worry about that
if you're only using a fixed camera the whole time. So really quickly, that was
just a way to use Signal, but you can just keyframe these by hand very easily.
it's just rotation on Y or this red part here is just doing scale by 1 to 1.5
on the X. it's just all that's doing. And when you actually see this,
I have a really low-res video of this because I don't have a very good clip
of this clip being used, but you can see, when he's actually performing,
he's standing right in the center of it and his computer is right at the top
of that and so you can actually see, how in conjunction with the back screen,
he can create it to look like this crazy podium that he's standing on.
And that ship actually, this is just like one of the raw renders of it.
It's not complex at all. Another thing to keep in mind is when you're projection
mapping stuff, especially on a transparent screen, don't worry about little
graininess or detail loss or an outline. You're going to lose all of that fidelity
by just having it projected onto something like a transparent screen. So the audience
is not going to see these little inconsistencies, which is great.
So you'll notice that some of my stuff is a little bit sloppy
on the render because you can fix a lot of that by
losing the fidelity on something like a projection screen. So the next one I'm
going to show you is using a technique I use a lot which is the next model was a
really dense mesh, and this is the other ship design. And this was just the render
here. And this one was so dense that it was hard to animate too and I didn't
really know what to do with it. But if you notice that it just sways back and forth
and it pulses up and down and forward and side to side. And that's just using two
bend deformers, but if you notice all the actual textures are animating and moving
with it which gives it more life for something that's moving not much at all.
And you can see here, when you actually see it animated, it has a lot of movement
to it which is these textures going, almost like energies pulsing through it.
And this was the actual final design with those UI elements comped together and
everything. But you can see how it's barely moving, but there's life to it by
this texture animation. And that's just using a really simple technique I use
a lot and I'm going to show you how to do that. It's just moving the UVs on
a texture and animating it. So let's just make something really quick. I like using
the [i codehsion] for this because it's a great example. So let's just make a new
material. This is the technique I use way too much. So all we're going to do is just
make a quick striped color. So if you go texture and change this to filter, you can
go into filter and you can add a gradient. And that just adds a gradient color on top
and making this vertical, let's just drag these in, and then if you need to make
another color, you just hold control and you can just drag another color over here,
and how you have a stripe right? The closer you move these diamonds to the
edges, the sharper the edge is going to be, so if you want it more faded in
subtly, you can do that. Otherwise, you just drag these in to make a sharp
texture. Let's change this to something a little prettier like a blue. Okay, very,
very basic texture. But you notice, when you drag it on here already, you get
something a little bit interesting. We're going to change this to flat so you can
see what I'm demoing first. And similar to how we did the spline wrap and we just
made it loop seamlessly. That's what I'm always trying to do is make little
seamless loops that I can then repeat because then you know everything's going
to be in sync with one another. And we change this back to something like 50
frames, keeping it in line with the pulses of the music. So if you see this UV offset
V down here, if you notice when I slide through this, it actually moves that blue
texture since I made it black on both sides, it's just moving that stripe.
So if we actually set this to zero and keyframe it and then go to 50 frames and
set this to 100% and keyframe that, you're going to get this looping, right?
Now it's got that easing, so I'm going to turn that off
with that same linear that we did earlier, so now seamless loop of just the texture
pulsing over something, right? Now when you change it though,
by clicking on here once, and we change it back to that UV mapping,
you actually get something a little bit more interesting, where it's going on each
face. And this model's not moving at all, but obviously, you now have something
a little bit more interesting, where it's seamlessly looping on each face.
And then we can add in those deformers.
I had a bend deformer on there before, right? So let's just reuse that.
So if you drop it in here and actually hit fit to parent here, that's going to
just shrink the deformer down to fit that object. And if we actually just set
something on here from strength 0, go to 50 frames, set this to something like 360,
you're going to get this weird deformed shape. And obviously that looks kind of
exciting, I guess, but it's this weird shape, right? But it's got the texture
moving, it's looping. So what you can do is then do that same technique we talked
about before, where you can add another deformer if you wanted to. So we could add
in something like a twist deformer too, where that is maybe doing something like
this, so now when I actually play this out, it's got even more distortion going
on, right? But if we actually group these together and then put them into a cloner
again, like we were doing before, you can start to, from very simple keyframes using
that same cloner repeating technique we used before, but you know now you can get,
let's just hide these, you can actually see how you can get a lot of life
out of something that's relatively simple. You're getting that one animation looping
but you're now getting this really complex shape with the texture looping as well as
that animation deformer. So I actually made a few examples of how you can do this
really quick. So a couple of variations, and the great thing is you can take that
one file, duplicate it, change one of the deformers to five different settings and
you have a completely different look entirely which is really awesome. And so
this is just an example using that same technique with a Taurus, a twist deformer,
and a spherify deformer on the whole thing. And you can see when you can zoom
in on this stuff, you can get this really complex animation for about three
keyframes and four objects. I dropped a cloner, if you take it out of the cloner,
you can see that it's just this weird abstract shape going on. And what I did is
I dropped that into an array, and you can basically take a cloner inside of a ray
which is taking something that's already repeated a bunch of times, but then
repeating it again. And you can render instances on both, so it's going to move
really fast with being all driven by one object. But the power of that is if I go
to the Taurus, and I resize it, you're seeing everything changing because
everything's just being driven by one instance of something. So if I scale this
up, you're going to see it all of a sudden changes to a different look and it's
a little bit more complex. But it's all driven by one object, so it's a really
quick technique for iterating on something and then you can see how, when you enable
other ones around it, let's hide this one it's a little crazy, but you can see how
when you layer it with other pieces, you can start to get some really crazy complex
stuff. You can zoom in on this, and I know a bunch of DJs and producers who would
probably want this for their live show, just by rendering this out in about five
minutes. So it's very easy to iterate on this stuff for really complex, trippy
animations. And so that was the general technique I used on a lot of these
animations. And that's just using the same stuff you saw on that spaceship design
which you can see here. And let me just show you that one more time, just so you
have an idea. Yeah, so the texture's just moving it. All I did was made the UV
offset at different speeds and different intervals. So some were moving faster than
others, and those are combined with those UI elements that we saw earlier.
So now we're getting into the more interesting stuff here. The basics are
a little bit covered. What I want to show is this giant tunnel sequence.
So this is the bigger breakdown I wanted to get to, which is good that we have some
time now. So this was the main background environment that I designed. And this was
all done in Octane and Cinema, so it looks really complex. There's a lot going on,
a lot of moving parts, but you'll notice it's pretty much the same techniques
I was using earlier. So if you notice those pipes pulsing on the sides,
I was using that UV offset to give those static items some life.
But I'm going to show you how you can take a really complex scene
and make it a lot more digestible and a lot easier to work with
by using instances and some other stuff. So I'm going to open that file.
You can see it's just really long hallway, but using what we talked about earlier
with layers, this is exactly why this is amazing. So I'm going to [inaudible]
the hallway section. So this is the first thing I made. I made one of
these sections here. All I did was duplicate it over once more. So let me
expand this down so you can see what I'm talking about. So there's this section,
there's this section, and then I took the next two and I just moved them up slightly
to give it some variation. And then all I did was take those four sections, and when
you actually highlight something and then you go up to here and you choose instance,
it will actually make an instance of that. And what's powerful about that is if I go
to the section one, and let's say I want to tweak something, like I want to change
the size, you'll notice all the other ones that are instance from it change with it.
So great way to make one piece of a hallway and then be able to change the
actual what it looks like and have it not be all this geometry filling up your scene
and taking up all that time for rendering and things like that. So if you notice the
viewport's really fast, they're all being instances. So there's only about this many
pieces actually being used in the whole thing. And so if you have all these
instances here, so I made one section of the hallway, that's all I did once, and
then what we did was we added in, let me turn on... By the way hidden line is a
blessing for really complex scenes like this with dark textures because you can't
really see the detail of what you're doing. If you turn on display hidden line,
that will actually show you just the outline, so you don't have to worry about
what it looks like until the end. But if you notice, the next thing I turned on was
these pipes. And all I did was I actually soloed these pipes here. These guys are
just some elements that I had from... I think these were from some kit I bought.
This project, I really dug into my asset libary because I had a two-week turnaround
and I didn't really want to model all this stuff by hand. So these are just some
pipes that are all individualized elements. You can move these around
and I arranged a few of them. But what's great is these are
all individual pieces and all they are is instances of one piece, right?
This original section in the front. And if you notice when you hit play on this,
the pink lines, that's using that exact same technique
that I just showed you with the UV offset. So these were static and I was like,
"Well these pipes look cool, I guess, but they're not really adding any motion
or movement to the actual scene." So just by adding a UV offset with Signal just
pumping the actual really fast, it almost looks like energy or something is passing
through these pipes while it's going down this hallway. So that's a really easy way
to add movement to something that's not actually moving at all. So we can add
those back in. And then the next thing under display here, the next thing were
these reactors. And now the reactors themselves also look complex but are very,
very simple. And let me just show you one of them. So I should actually turn of all
these instances. You notice that it's just one repeated with a bunch of instances so
I my play on this, all this is, once again driven by Signal, but you could just hand
keyframe this. All it is is rotation, position, moving on different individual
pieces, right? And you can zoom in here and these are all little, this is a piece
here, this is a piece here, these are all just little things. I do a lot of work in
Zebra, and I do a lot of kit bashing and a lot of concept art, so I have a huge asset
library of hard surface materials, organic pieces, anything I can pull from and I
actually encourage you to start collecting your own asset library that you can pull
from for projects like this, because concert visuals especially are very tight
deadlines and a lot of short notice gigs that you get hired for. So I actually
turned down doing some Coachella stuff before I was prepping for this, because I
had about four days notice. So stuff like this comes really fast and it's nice to be
able to be like, "Hey, I need this weird scifi reactor thing, " and here's a bunch
of pieces I have, and I put it together in about 10 minutes. So these are all just
pieces spinning, individual speeds, moving up and down. And I have this rod moving up
and down. So all I did then was instance that one a bunch of times and if you
notice once again why the powerful of this instancing is if you're not happy with
this tube shape, you can resize it and it's going to do it for all of them
instead of having to do it for one at a time. So if you rotate these,
you can animate this and it's going to do it across all of them
without having to do it manually, each one,
which is really exciting. So you can see that that's just one really complex object
being repeated with instances. Something I actually just learned maybe other people
don't know about this, I just learned it before this talk actually, but when you
actually instance something, you can actually render instances of the instance,
which sounds weird, but if you just highlight your instances and go down here
and hit render instance, your scene is quite a bit quicker. I wish I would've
known that when I was actually working on this because it's now a lot faster when
I'm demoing it. But yeah, thank you, MAXON for telling me about that right before the
talk. And so when we actually combine all these pieces, you can see all I did then
was I took that one tunnel section with the pipes and the reactors, which is this
huge, complex hierarchy here, and all we did then was instance that whole section
three more times. So I know we're getting a little Inception here but it's instances
inside of instances inside of instances. And so it's all about making a really
complex scene from very small elements individually, but then being able to make
it repeat it very much in a very complex way without taking up very much resources
at all, which is kind of my workflow. I did this all on a single video card,
two gigs of VRAM in Octane, so it's very difficult to work on one card with this
software. Cinema 4D is a champ but it's the rendering engine part that I have an
actual issue with, so it was all about optimization on this scene. Yeah, and the
only other thing I did here was in the actual camera view, you notice that
there's these squares spinning. If you didn't know, you can actually take any
objects you want, and if you actually make them a child of a camera, it's just going
to lock them to wherever the camera moves to, so you can actually have them almost
like a null in After Effects. And I just have three different rotations going.
Let's just solo the camera so I can show you what I'm talking about. The inner
square's just rotating one way, the outer square's rotating another way and then the
camera's rotating 360 slower over the course of the whole scene. So it adds a
fixation point almost like a crosshair you can look at. And sorry, and then it just
gives something to guide the light and I also like the two squares as
a symbolization of the tesseract cube. It's a little easter egg of that, right?
But if you actually turn this off, you can see that these little cubes or these
little squares just follow the camera anywhere because they're nested as
children of that. So that's really helpful if you want something to stay with the
camera at all times, no matter where you're looking which is just super simple,
but it's really a nice little effect for stuff. So yeah, that's all I'm doing
and then the reason I repeated it three more times is that was just to make
a seamless loop where when it gets toward the end of this first section, it looks
like it ended right where it started. So there's a lot of ways to do that,
but that was just an easiest way. So I have a little bit of time left,
and now, I want to show you how I actually get some
of the rendered looks for some of this stuff. To make this easier, we'll just
open one section of the tunnel. And so this is the first thing I made, right?
Before I made that whole tunnel, I made this one piece. Now I am pretty terrible
at low polybox modeling type techniques. I really do more crazy organic stuff in
ZBrush, so I'm trying to get better at this, but honestly, this is using one tool
and I'll show you, it's all extrusions, so if you made a cube, literally, this entire
hallway was just by...I just took a spline and I actually made the default shape
first, and then if you actually just hit C and make something editable,
you can click on any face here. If you right-click, you get all these tools,
right? I know about three of them. And if you go to something called extrude inner,
it's my favorite tool ever, and you can just click on something and you can have
it draw these vertices out and you can just keep drawing, and then you can start
to move these in. And you can click on any face here and start drawing in faces,
right? And literally, if you look at it in detail, it's all just square extrusions
everywhere. So click on this section, you'll see that all it is these actual
extrusions. I can go in here and move something out, right? The other thing to
do is the symmetry tool I used a lot on this, so don't do more work than you have
to, right? So if you're doing something and you want it to look the same on the
other side, throw the whole object in a symmetry object here, which is right here,
and now, whenever I go in here and actually... so go on this, sorry.
so if I click on this, you can see, if I drag this out
it's going to do it on both sides. So super time saving so you don't
have to try to match the exact distance you pulled things out and stuff like that.
I'm all about symmetry. It's very helpful. And so this is all just basic square
extrusions. Now if you notice when I hit play on here, these things tracing the
entrance way here, that's using that same exact spline wrap technique I showed
earlier. So I reused that for all over in the show because it's a really helpful
little technique for getting stuff kind of tracing around the object. Those are just
those cubes tracing a spline and then they're thrown into a symmetry object as
well, that's right above here. So let me show you how I actually some basic Octane
stuff for renders to make stuff look a little bit nicer. If I actually open up
Octane here, drag this over, if I hit render... This is just really basic stuff,
but what I want to show is I got a lot of people asking me about getting into Octane
and the biggest thing is these glows, right? So the mission textures inside of
Octane are just amazing. You have a lot of ways of getting these really beautiful
glows from stuff without having to do any post work whatsoever. If you notice,
there's only three textures being used in this whole thing, but if you actually
double click this, you have a few ways to do glows. So if you just make a new
texture, it just needs to be a material type diffuse for Octane. Word of caution
also, if you're new to Octane, it has it's own texturing system built into the
application, so if you have a ton of texture packs from other stuff in Cinema,
you might have to do some changing around to get it to work with Octane. There are
ways to convert those textures, but just a heads up, it's a little bit different so
if you notice these texture options are a little bit different than the default. But
if you go down to emission, you can do a couple of options. I prefer to use the
option texture emission which gives you more of a subtle glow like this, so if I
go into this and you set this to color, you can come in and you can change these
on the fly. And what's powerful about Octane is you're just looking at it in the
live viewer at any time. So you can really dial in like, "Hey, I really like this
with this lighter blue," and really quickly, you're going to see and try to
render that in real time. So getting different look devs and stuff like that
inside of Octane is incredibly powerful. But the other way you can do an emission
texture is if you go to here and change this under Octane, you go to black body
emission, and this is where you get more of a realistic light. So if you wanted to
get something like a fluorescent bulb or a halogen or something, you can come in here
and you can actually change the temperature down to something more
realistic. Now if you notice though, it's very, very intensely bright and sometimes
you can lower the power and you can get more subtlety, but if you want to change
it to a very specific color, I use the texture emission compared to the black
body emission. Now there's probably ways, there's 1000 ways you can probably do this
but these are just the two easiest for me. And so let me just undo that and change it
back to the color emission. So if you notice, you can get a lot more of a subtle
look, it's not as blinding. And then to get that actual outside glow, if you go
into your settings here, there's a post field, and if I turn that off, you notice
that it just looks like this by default. But if you turn on the bloom is incredibly
awesome inside of Octane so you can really crank that up, obviously. But if you just
give it a little bit of subtlety there, you're getting this just beautiful glow on
all the stuff around it, and you don't have to do any after effects work.
You can just tweak that with a curves adjustment
or something, and it's the least amount of work I've used on
an after effect since getting Octane, which is really exciting. It's a lot less
of that integration. I just can get really nice renders straight out of Cinema.
And you can change the glare power, so if you want those beams really shining,
obviously, this is going to an extreme, but if you really want to tweak that stuff
out, you can get these really nice glows. So the other thing that's going on here is
if you notice the purple metal here... So let me open this up and I'm going to
zoom into the hallway so you can see a little bit better here what I'm talking
about. Let's just move this over so you can see a visual example.
And this is moving pretty fast,
but just fair warning, if you're on a single graphics card or something, don't
try to resize the live viewer window too much. You might slow things down a little
bit. So just try to keep things pretty stationary while you're doing these look
devs. So you notice there's alot of texturing going on on this metal here. If
turn bump and roughness off, this is what the actual model would look like without
any kind of texturing work on there. It's just really shiny really clean, really
reflective. Now that might be the look you're going for, I was looking for more
of a grungy scifi look so all you need to do is... speaking of this asset library,
I have a lot of alpha maps. Just black and white images, you can create them in
Photoshop. You can take any image and pretty much convert it to an alpha map.
So under the roughness channel, I just have this plastic texture,
and it's 2000-some resolution. Not super big, but all you can see here
is it's just black and white and it's got this grungy texture, right?
I have a whole folder of stuff like this.
It's very, very convenient. And if you just load that into the actual roughness
channel, you'll notice right away it dulls down a lot of those reflections. It adds a
grittiness to the scene itself, and it gives it some kind of actual texture going
on there, so it doesn't look so 3D and fake, I think, a little bit. It can go
a long way with just one alpha in the roughness. And you can go in here and
you can actually turn up the power if you want to be more apparent,
if you want it to be a lot grungier. And then the other thing
is a bump channel. And if you notice here, you can see here, it's just this
little shape, and I use that in ZBrush. Those are just for like little alpha maps.
If you want to get some little mechanical details on stuff and pull that out of a
mesh, but I just loaded it into the bump map and without changing how it's mapped,
anything, I didn't really want to go in and set this stuff. But you notice it adds
in all these little indents everywhere and it's just randomizing it through the scene
but no one's paying attention to all these little sides. It's just adding some extra
detail, so when you're flying through it, it actually gives it some kind of detail
going on, right? But you can quickly see how just adding those two things to the
filter channel on a purple texture give you a much more believable, interesting
looking texture on the sides here, compared to just having that really clean,
reflective look. And then paired with those glows we did earlier, you can see
how this tunnel sequence can then end up looking like this, which I showed earlier.
Let me actually pause this. That's all that's going on here and then I just have
some glows on the rods themselves. And one thing is, is I made these rings on the
actual reactors glass. so they reflected all that light back in, so that can really
chug your scene a little bit, but it adds a beautiful effect because it's taking all
those lights around it in the environment and it's reflecting those all back into
itself, so you see these really beautiful glass reflections going on in those
reactors. And obviously, I made variations of this. There's a lot of symmetry in the
show, so obviously there's a mirrored version of this, which gets really crazy.
And then this is just a slight variation when I was first making this. It's more of
just a rocking through. So this when he has that spaceship. It looks like
he's flying through this tunnel, just a slight variation of the same render. But
you can see how you can get some pretty different looks by just tweaking some
things. So yeah, I have a little bit of time left. What I want to show really
quick before we end here is I didn't really show these pods too much,
but some people have been asking me online, so I figured I would show these
files a little bit. These are just some slight variations of these pods that
I made, and this pod I made in Cinema, I mean in ZBrush and then brought into
Cinema 4D. And this is using the lights are all done with that same technique,
but what I want to show, if you notice in the background here, how the lines are
moving that's actually a really cool, little trick I discovered by accident,
but I wanted to show people, so they can maybe do something similar.
It's actually, so the background screen here, that's just the solid screen
that's representing the back screen that it's being projected on. But what I did is
on the screen itself, I made the texture, like a glass mirror reflected texture, and
what that did is when I actually hit render on this, it took the HDRI map, if
you have an environment enabled and it's actually reflecting the HDRI map back into
the screen itself. And then if you rotate the HDRI, you get this beautiful reflected
version, and if you have an HDRI that has interesting lights going on in the
background, you can actually get some really cool looks by doing this. So if you
notice when I scrub through this here... Let's see, so if we go to the Octane sky
here, and you actually move this rotation, you can see how really quickly... sorry,
this is where having five video cards or something is awesome because this would go
a lot faster. Let's give it a second here. But what it does is... you can't really
see in the little thumbnail, but this HDRI map is just a black hallway with white
line, glowing lines on the ceiling. But you can see, if you start to rotate
and move the actual HDRI map with that reflective wall in the background,
you get these beautiful neon lines going in the background and you can mirror those
in post or something. But that was a total by accident. I actually put that mirrored
texture on there and I was like, "Oh, well, this really adds somes levels
to the background here." And then I just masked that out and projection mapped it
back onto the back screen and it comes out looking really exciting.
Yeah, and that was just a cool, little trick to get some life there.
And the actual model itself looks pretty complex, but if any ZBrush
users are interested in using Cinema more, there's something called GoZ, which is a
plugin script inside of Zbrush that lets you send something to any 3D app you're
using. I use Cinema 4D, so when I actually make something really complex like this
sculpt here, all I did was hit one button and it takes that entire thing, it
recognizes all my individual subtools and it will just send it all to Cinema, and
it'll open it up like this, and then I can look at those pieces and how they render
inside of Octane, and I can see really quickly, "Oh, this part needs to be
smoothed out because it's getting this really weird light clipping" or something.
And I find that really, really helpful and anything that gives me more synergy
between Cinema and any other app I use is very, very helpful and I'm really glad
that MAXON is very open to letting people link their apps to other apps. And you can
see here all this is. I'm just going to turn the render off because it's really
slow. All this is is just taking those individual pieces and spinning them.
If you actually turn these lights off, you can see the actual object. And that's just
looks pretty complex but just the ZBrush model using radial symmetry and then I
just brought it in with that script into Cinema and did some animation tests like