Cinema 4D Tutorial - Create a Detailed Mars Landscape Using Octane Displacement Video Lecture | Create stunning 3D Graphics with Cinema 4D - 3D & Animation

hey everybody what's up it's David Aria
of here yet again for I design calm and
you know when I come around its octane
time so today we're going to be
developing a pretty intense Mars
environment using sand and rock
displacement textures as well as
displacement deformers and a bunch of
color matching lighting and
compositional techniques then next week
we're going to be using kit bosch 3ds
excellent space colony buildings to add
an even higher level of quality to our
final renders it's gonna be a long one
but I hope you join me the whole way
through because it's packed to the gills
with content let's get in there and make
something cool alright so first off I've
got something pretty cool for you guys
kit bash 3d and I have teamed up to get
you a 15% off promo code so just go to
kit bash 3d comm and then when you add
something to the cart for instance this
future slums kit go to checkout and then
enter the discount code Aria of bash and
that'll get you 15% off your order
so hopefully this will be especially
helpful in part two where we're using
these kit bash packs a lot alright first
let's run through some of these renders
that I created using the kit bash 3d
space colony first I started out with
this moon environment and I liked the
lighting that I developed I liked the
crater and the different levels of depth
in this image where I had a foreground
mid-ground with a crater and then a
background with this asteroid belt and
some nebula action going on but the
buildings felt really weird like they
felt kind of like miniatures and I
couldn't put my finger on it at first
but the way they're grouped was really
hurting the scale in this scene and at
some point I realized that when humans
build cities even if they're small space
colonies they're not going to spread
things out evenly like this they're
going to create clusters because we
naturally build cities where there are
hubs and then there accessory buildings
surrounding them and also building on
slopes even though I kind of wrote it
off as oh there's less gravity here
that's just not something we're
accustomed to seeing and it looks just
messy in this context so you can see in
this next still I took out these
buildings on the slope and I focused a
lot more on creating clusters of
buildings and to me this feels a lot
more logically laid out like we've got
these bigger buildings that are the hubs
and then we've got smaller buildings
surrounding them kind of here and then
this smaller building surrounding it and
then out towards the perimeter we have
things like these solar
that are lower laying and we could
equate this to farming an industry like
maybe this is where a lot of the work is
happening to keep the colony running
whereas here maybe we've got the major
scientific centers that's all kind of BS
but you get the point that this looks a
bit more convincing I also felt the
craters here made the buildings feel a
lot more miniaturized so I brought the
displacement down and this felt a little
better but I still wasn't totally happy
so I ended up using an entirely
different texture that I feel like help
sell the scale a bit better though I'm
still not totally happy with the scale
and I feel if I had gone a bit further
and added in little lights and maybe
people or moon Rovers and things like
that that I would have sold the scale a
bit better
here are some other angles you can see
here that I've got a totally different
displacement on this foreground than
this background and I liked that this
texture kind of brought out the
building's a bit more and this one
really enhanced the craters in the
background like here with this texture
because we don't have the craters we
don't see the buildings getting so
buried but in the background we can see
these craters and that creates a bit
more of an epic moon surface kind of
vibe now I wasn't totally happy with
this whole setup and I wanted to try
something a bit different with this kit
bash and maybe see what it would look
like if I tried to build out a Mars
environment so this was my first still
here and I think this is a lot more
successful at communicating the scale
because we're down in the buildings we
see things like this door here in this
vehicle so we know how big a human would
be and we've also got some atmosphere or
Martian dust or whatever you want to
call it that's causing this fall-off in
depth and making us feel like we're
seeing a great distance and here's the
final still in this Martian environment
that I made where I feel it's
interesting seeing this foreground Rover
as well as the city in the background
with some volumetric light in here as
well as the sand texture with a bunch of
rocks poking through to break that
pattern up and give the surface some
variation alright so we're gonna work on
building the Mars scene because
ultimately I feel like the look I
developed was a little more
sophisticated than the moon one but if
you guys really want to know how I built
that space scene then leave me a note in
the comments and if enough people are
really itching for that tutorial then
I'll make it happen alright first I want
to highlight this program called PRF
which is actually a free download just
go to PRF comm and it's super useful
because when you drag in images it
maintains the source resolution so you
can come to any of these and look full
res and also zoom out to get an overall
idea of what you're going for in the
other mode I have it set to is if you
right-click and go to mode you can go to
always on bottom so when I'm working say
I have a window pulled up I can work and
then just minimize to see this in the
background at any time almost like a
desktop background so this helps me get
an idea of the color palette that I want
and gives me some kind of inspirational
imagery like I'm never gonna get
something as awesome as what's in the
Martian but I'm gonna try to get like I
don't know 50% of the way there like
this is really cool here seeing these
ripples of sand everywhere but then
broken up by all these little rocks and
things this is real Mars right here
these three are real Mars so there are
some really interesting cliff formations
and I'm pretty sure that this is real as
well it's like a stitched panorama and
it's kind of amazing what Mars
atmosphere does like this blue here is
very cool and alien and something that I
want to reflect in my render this is my
favorite still here even though it's
from movie and is probably CG but I love
the variation in the ripples of sand and
then areas where the sand is collected
and we've got these different formations
as well as mountains that are off in the
distance that have been buried by the
atmosphere it can be really frustrating
looking at some of these stills because
there's tons of detail and and terracing
in these mountains and then there are
these subtle details like where the sand
has buried the rocks and it's clear that
it's like kind of eroded and blown over
the rocks and stuff like that is really
hard to create in CG but we'll see what
we can do but again we're just creating
something quick and we'll get as close
as we can to things like these but just
try and let it be a source of
inspiration rather than like crushing
your soul and making you want to give up
I struggle with this personally all the
time okay so first we're gonna start
with creating the Mars environment and
later we'll move on to adding the KITT
bash 3d buildings in so let's take a
look at some sites that have some really
useful assets that you could use to
create environments like this but also
keep in mind that I'm going to show
some techniques in c40 if you're on a
budget where you can create rock
formations without having to go out and
buy things okay so first off this is
pretty obvious but polygon comm I feel
like I've mentioned this a bunch of
times before but this is my favorite
site for gathering textures and here
I've gone for this ground sand rippled I
just searched for sand and then you get
all these different sands but this one
has a nice displacement map and I like
the look of it next we've got real
displacement textures calm and under the
shop there's a section for packs and
we've got this Stones pack which is
really useful for scattering rocks on
surfaces there's also this Quarry pack
here and this one has one of my favorite
grounds that we'll definitely be using
it's rock ground oh six though Rock oh
eight looks pretty good too but here's
Rock ground oh six and then quick soul
mega scans this is another great site I
picked up this rock sandstone as well as
some of these cliff faces to play around
with and they've got some really cool
detailed like volcanic rocks and other
extremely detailed 3d scans that you can
poke up through the sand and stone and
create some bigger features off in the
distance
next is textures calm and they've
actually been adding some really
interesting 3d scans to their site as
well like this layered cliff is super
detailed and cool and so are some other
things like this rock based one here
this could be your ground or another
cliff face and interestingly they've
actually got the biggest collection of
different sand formations so I would
definitely check these guys out and play
with some of these assets here now
finally I want to give a shout out to
blender gurus the rock essentials this
is definitely the most expensive
solution but you can see there's some
amazing stuff in this pack you get a ton
of different rocks to choose from and
there are even these extremely cool
large rock formations which can really
help when you're trying to get something
detailed from a distance that doesn't
look repetitious alright so let's just
start with building out the ground I'll
drop in a plane and I'll scale it up
quite a bit and this is just kind of
arbitrary I'm pretty terrible at working
to scale but if I make it bigger then I
can come
for myself it this is a big scene now
first I'm gonna play with creating big
shapes and then on top of the big shapes
will add our micro details so really we
just want kind of smooth hills and maybe
some slight mountainous terrain but
nothing too detailed or else when we add
displacement on top of it
things will get pinched and weird so
let's just start by adding a displacer
to our plane here so we'll come down
here hold down shift as we add the
displacer so it drops right in there and
next we want our plane to have a lot
more segments and I'll start out with
555 by 555 and you can see how much
geometry that's added so that when we
add a noise to this displacer we'll get
a much smoother result so if we come
over to shading we'll just add in a
default c40 noise you can see that's way
too small it's just creating this
crinkly texture so let's jump in here
and add some ones to our scale maybe
even bigger like that and then we'll
come back up here and go to our object
and just increase the height so now
we're getting some generic looking Hills
and then I'm gonna hit n/a so that we
can go back to the shaded view here okay
so now we can create some additional
displacement looks if we jump over here
we can add this into a layer shader and
this way we can add additional
displacements that will then blend back
with the original noise so we can just
right click and copy shader and then
right-click and paste shader and we'll
have another noise and we can jump in
here and we've got all sorts of stuff to
play with so let's try Luca and
obviously this is too spiky so let's
just increase the scale and now we've
got something a little more interesting
though it's looking too geometric so
let's increase the octaves and now we've
got something that's more organic
looking but this is too high frequency
for what we're going for we want this to
be handled by an additional displacement
map on top remember we're just going for
those big shapes and then we'll create
the small shapes afterwards so let's try
something like maybe Hamma
and if we bring down this high clip we
can kind of see what's going on though
again I think these are a bit too
computer-generated looking they could
work though I think with all that
additional displacement there's no way
you would ever notice these straight
lines but I still want to try something
a bit different so let's go for stupa'
l-- and we're gonna have to take the
high clip back up here and let's take
our scale back down to something like
whatever this is 41,000 like this is
maybe getting general enough that it'll
work but another thing we can do is
bring back down the octaves so here
we're losing detail but that's actually
a good thing we just want the general
shapes so let's see how far we can push
this before it looks a little too
geometric like this is too much so it's
gonna maybe let's just try five I think
this is good so like if you're down here
even though there's some detail you can
imagine that each of these is a little
hill and there's still plenty of room to
add tons of additional detail okay so
let's do this again we'll just go copy
shader and paste shader and let's try
one more noise type na keys kind of
interesting though earlier I was having
good results with Ober this creates some
cool break up on the surface and these
kind of look like ravines and you can
always change the seed if you want to
see something different
let's just try this for now okay so now
we can play around with blending these
back you can literally just take down
the opacity here and blend them together
or you can use an actual blend mode if
you want the effect to get more extreme
so overlay get overlay all three of
these together and get something totally
weird and unique or we could screen them
on top I'm liking the way that's looking
and this original noise isn't actually
doing anything right now so if we drag
it on top we could set this to overlay
mode and this would actually increase
the contrast of our terrain so those
bumps are kind of getting added into the
mix whereas if we just have this at
normal mode and we dial back the opacity
this would kind of flatten everything
out and water it down versus overlay
which is a mode that's designed to
increase the contrast basically brighter
brights and darker darks if that makes
sense from your After Effects knowledge
that seems to be working pretty well we
could also enhance this by jumping into
this noise and playing with the low and
high clip to exaggerate it even more
though I don't think that's necessary I
think I was happy like right about here
now let's just store this displacer away
for a second and try one more thing so
let's turn off these other two noise
patterns and set this one to normal and
let's make this even bigger so let's
just set this to two and now so we can
really see what's going on let's just
boost the contrast until we've got
something like this so a noise pattern
like this that's super large and kind of
general can really break up the terrain
into these large patches so when I
increase the contrast there are areas
that are white that are causing it to
displace upwards like this and areas
that are black that are causing it to
displace downwards and we can use this
to our advantage if we jump back up here
say we want to essentially mix this is
almost like an octane mix node where
we're saying this noise will mix between
these other two and designate the
different regions of the other two
noises and to make this really obvious
what I'm doing I'm just going to create
a new noise shader that's really small
scale
and this one is going to be set to this
one that we just created is going to be
set to layer mask and this will function
just like an After Effects where it's
referencing the layer above it so if I
turn this on you can see this is driving
the regions of what noises appear where
if I crank this contrast up to 100% you
can really see these patches but if we
actually pull back on the contrast then
we'll start to blend these together in a
much more smooth way where here we've
got one patch and here we've got another
so really I just wanted to show you that
you can use this to drive different
regions and create more variation in the
displacements that you're making here we
don't want this really high frequency
noise we just want to mix between these
two where one is over and the other one
is stupid I'm gonna jump back to our
first example because I found this a
little bit more detailed and interesting
but I definitely encourage you to jump
in and play with this layer mask thing
because you can create all sorts of
interesting combinations of noises using
this technique another thing we can do
is just extend our plane out so we're
not cutting off this ravine here and
maybe give ourselves a bit more room to
play at this point I'm gonna option G
group this in a null and call it old and
I'm gonna duplicate this out here turn
this off and right click and go current
state to object so that we've got a bake
down plane because I'm just gonna commit
to this and use this as the base for my
ground and low-lying landscape will add
mountains and jagged rocks and stuff
like that later the other cool thing
about making this editable is now say we
had a composition that we liked up here
for instance and we wanted to bring in
some more foreground elements we could
just hit MC to bring up the brush and
start moving around our terrain so if I
set this mode to normal we'll just be
affecting the polygons in their normal
direction so either towards the normal
direction or if you hold down control
away from the normal direction and this
way we could just increase our brush
radius by holding down middle click and
kind of popping out some terrain
and giving ourselves somewhere to rest
the camera to maybe create some
interesting foreground to like we're
looking down a hill into this terrain
and we can also go to the smoothie mode
here and start to even out our terrain a
little bit if it's getting too pinched
okay next I'm just gonna add in a few
landscape objects to block in some
mountains so that when we're lighting
and texturing we have an idea of the
perspective and the depth haze and stuff
like that it's just good to have these
elements in there for compositional
reference that we can go back and then
replace with more detailed mountains
later so here I'll just scale this way
up and we can increase the width and
depth segments but we don't need a ton
of detail because this stuff's going to
be in the pretty far background we might
have one poking out of the landscape a
bit closer so let's bring this up so we
can play with the scale we can play with
the height here so that's a little
extreme let's take down the scale and
there's also rough furrows and fine
furrows I don't think we need we can
have it be a bit smoother we can also
art direct this from the cameras
perspective and maybe stretch this range
out it's also good if you hit shift V to
up the opacity on your tinted border so
you can really see what your end
composition is going to be
so maybe that's cool and then we have
some further in the background and we
can always go in and change the seed
and just hold down control to duplicate
and we can always scale these up as well
so we're creating something that looks
like a mess from this perspective but
when we're down in these it doesn't
really matter because we're never going
to see that it's not joined to the rest
of the terrain at some point it clips
off so for that we want to hit control D
so we can continue seeing what we're
doing and we'll just turn this view
clipping to large or huge would also
work and to me it feels a little more
interesting if we have kind of an open
space like a path to lead the eye
through this image before this middle
mountain was just kind of blocking the
whole composition so let's change the
seat again let's move this back further
and just try to give it a layered depth
and sense that we're looking at a very
large-scale scene all right so next we
want to start to texture this landscape
so I'm gonna go for a rock texture as
the base so I'm going to open up that
real displacement texture Rock ground oh
six that I showed you guys earlier and
remember that you can use any kind of
photoscan ground texture here and one
really nice thing is that they have c40
and octane project files so that when
you load these up all the textures are
already linked up in the node editor so
if you come over here you can take a
look and let's just give ourselves some
room to look at this real quick you can
see they've already piped in the
displacement the normal in the normal
map we've got a bump map and here this
is kind of interesting they've got a
roughness map as well as gloss maps that
go into the specular but there are two
different gloss maps one that's normal
and one that's a high gloss and the high
gloss is just more crunched down than
the regular gloss and they're mixed
together with a mixed texture node at
50% so nothing too crazy going on here
just a big time-saver so let's take this
and copy it into our other project file
bring this back over and then let's just
drop it onto this plane which I'll named
ground
all right let's send this off to the
live viewer okay so a couple things
obviously we're not getting any textures
yet but see these black weird smudges
here this is a ray epsilon issue so I'm
gonna jump in here and then just
increase this a little bit and that
should go away this is because our scene
scales a little bit too big and if you
ever see weird artifacts like that just
mess around with ray epsilon now the
other things going on is if we go to
window texture manager you can see that
these are all unlinked because I just
copied them over so if you go edit
select missing textures and then edit
relink textures this is actually just a
search window so whichever folder you
choose it'll search within that entire
hierarchy for the textures that it's
looking for minor in this my mega assets
library folder and then textures and I
got a folder for 3d scanned so I'll just
hit okay and it goes through and links
them all up at once which is awesome
okay so at this point the texture is
scaled up way too high and we could go
into our node editor like we usually do
and replace all of these bitmap
materials with image texture nodes so
that we could drive all of them with a
transform okay but the easier way is to
actually scale from cinema 4d s dialogue
here because this controls the texture
all at once whereas here we would have
to set up a transform node that's linked
into each one of these but these two
systems work together you can scale from
here or you can scale an offset using
this dialog here so I'm just gonna set
it down to something like 20 to start
and sometimes it gets hung up where it
only accepted one of those transforms so
let's just refresh okay so there we go
but we're actually gonna have to scale
this down a lot further so let's go all
the way down to two cool so this is a
pretty good base and what I'm looking
for if you just noticed a jump in the
color it's because I had some octane
camera settings going on that I'll go
over in a little bit but for starters
I'm not liking the tearing that's going
on with this displacement so I think
this needs to be cut down so if I jump
in here
to the displacement I can just set this
to 25 and I think that works a little
bit better so now let's add in our
daylight here and let's rotate it until
we can actually see the Sun
there we go okay so now I'm gonna jump
into the camera imager settings and
enable the camera imager then turn up
highlight compression all the way I like
this because it gives you a bit more
dynamic range and now I can actually see
the Sun a little bit better see there we
go so I want to match this a little bit
more closely to our reference images
which if you look here and here
something really interesting happens on
Mars where the Sun actually appears a
little bit cyan and then it falls off to
this dusty orangish brown so let's see
if we can recreate this with our
daylight system if I go into my daylight
here and change the sky color to a bit
of an orange we get that and then let's
change the Sun color to more of a cyan
and that's like too extreme so let's
take this down and boost up the value so
that it's not gray okay let's push this
a little bit more towards brown so this
is getting a bit closer but it's still
kind of money and at this point I really
like to add in a custom LUT in this
field here so one of my favorite nut
packs is called Osiris just Google
Osiris Luntz and in here I like to use
the REC 709 Lutz because those are meant
to go on footage with a normal color
profile versus like a log curve which
would be a lot flatter so I like the KTX
LUT here and you can see that it's
making things a bit more extreme but
what I want to do is change the
underlying colors of the Sun again so if
I go back here and change this more to
an orange and then desaturate the Sun
color and maybe take down the amount of
orange here so it's a bit paler okay
let's go to our camera imager and
continue to play with this you can see
what the LUT is doing here let's bring
up the exposure maybe and then down on
the gamma to add a bit more contrast and
then let's go to the post-processing tab
and enable it and take the glare power
all the way down and then up the bloom
so we just get a bit of that haze coming
in now I feel like we've lost some of
the orange vibe that we need if we look
back here at the reference images
there's definitely more a little bit
more orange going on in some of these
so let's boost this up a bit I think it
helps taking down the power and maybe
saturate the sky a bit more but then we
get a bit too orange so maybe we take it
more saturation and less brightness just
keep going with that let's push this may
be a bit more red so I'm liking the look
of this sky gradient but now we've lost
all the detail down here so if we go
back to our camera imager we can just up
the gamma and this is kind of a delicate
balance but I want to see some blue in
the Sun but not in the rocks here so I'm
gonna take this back a bit maybe down to
like 7% or even all the way down to 5
and now I feel like these highlights are
no longer tinted in that kind of gross
incompetence and ring in the sky which I
like ok and let's also take the bloom a
little bit back down so that it's not
kind of so overwhelming and here if I
want to bring a bit more orange into
these rocks what I can do is I can just
pull in a mixed texture here and then
put this in to the diffuse slot and
replace this and then bring in an RGB
spectrum which is just a color so I'll
pop it into texture one so now it's
blending 50% between this white color
and the original texture but here we can
just set this to a pretty saturated
yellow and then dial that in so you can
see as we bring this slider back a
little bit we're getting a lot more
orange here but it's also still too dark
so if we go to this color correction we
can just set the brightness to two and
maybe this is a little bit too yellow so
let's take the value down a little bit
and like this is looking a bit nicer to
me I think we're getting a bit closer to
some of these colors and I think the
last week I'm gonna make here is
shifting the sky color a bit more orange
because I don't really actually like the
red that much it's getting a bit weird I
think this looks a little bit better now
all this is gonna change a ton when we
add in atmosphere so let's add an octane
fog volume now we're gonna need to scale
this up really really big so in order to
not crash our computers I'm just going
to
Souths this voxel size which effectively
makes the volume super low resolution
but I'm not actually gonna add any
detail to it like clouds this is just
gonna be for the purpose of creating
some haze and if I pull back here I want
this volume to be pretty low hanging so
I think we could just do 500 and then
from here let's add some numbers and
I'll show you what happens if we're only
covering this section of the terrain
first so let's make this like I don't
know about this big where it's covering
some of the mountains but not the
entirety of our scene let's jump back
now sometimes if a box isn't big enough
it won't actually show up at all so I
think I need to set this number a bit
higher and there we go now we can
actually see that we've got a volume and
so that's totally blacked out our screen
the first thing I want to do is hide the
volume in our viewport so we can
actually see here and then I'll come
into our medium and then jump into the
volume medium and take the density way
way down now we also want to make sure
in our absorption and scattering we've
got these set to white
and so this is already looking a lot
more interesting but the thing that's
happening is if you look at the line of
mountains here we can't distinguish one
from the next because these all exist
outside the volume box so we need to
make that volume box a lot bigger so
let's bring back the visibility on our
volume here and in our generate tab I'm
just gonna add some additional numbers
let's make this even bigger four by four
so that's super huge that's gonna get us
coverage right there but I'll scooch
this over so it's covering everything
and maybe even make it taller cool let's
jump back into our camera and now you
see that we're gonna have to take down
the density even further so let's just
say 0.05 0.005 cool so now you can see
we've got this deeper draw distance and
all these mountains appear distinct from
one another
let's compare store render buffer I want
to see what this would look like if we
did the same thing in our medium tab of
our daylight so I'm just gonna add fog
here and this is a bit more of a cheat
but it has its own distinct look that
I'd like to see so I'm gonna uncheck
enable a be comparison so we can see
what's going on and then I'll just
increase this medium radius until things
start to go dark then jump into the
scattering medium and make sure both of
these are white cool and now we need to
drop the density so now if we go to
compare enable you can see we've got a
lot more control with the volume object
and you can pair both systems together
like sometimes this can be good for just
some general haze on top of your initial
haze like here we're adding an even more
dustiness on top of this fog volume so
that could be a cool look for later and
in order to store that I can just
duplicate this daylight and turn this
one off so this will be the one that has
the fog so you can just name this fog
and then this one we can just remove the
medium here so we're back to where we
started
okay the next thing I want to try with
this volume is the scattering phase so
let's go compare and store this again
and if I move this upwards the volume
will get much stronger closer to the
light so some of this is definitely good
though at some point we start losing the
distant mountains so we can compensate
by making this even lower and then
pushing the phase up higher
okay now the phase is too high let's
bring it back now another fun thing to
play with is putting colors into the
absorption so say we add in a bit more
of a blue in the absorption you'll see
what happens this is kind of like the
diffuse color of the fog and this will
be even more apparent if we set the
scattering phase back to zero now you
can see it's really inheriting that
color but really for the distant haze we
want more of this dusty Brown or even
this orange could work here though I
feel like this photo is hyper saturated
and not exactly the look I want to go
for so let's set this to an orange color
maybe a dark brown and we could also try
going back to our volume and taking the
size of this bounding box a lot higher
okay and to bring a bit more lightness
back to the horizon let's bring back
some of our scattering face not too much
let's go a bit further and let's change
this absorption color to more of a
bright orange and see what happens
let's move it even more towards yellow
okay I think I've taken it too far let's
desaturate this a bit and then finally
if you increase the volume step length
this can change they look a bit but
it'll also really decrease your render
times a ton so now it's rendering way
faster okay I'm liking this more but now
the whole image has gone this shade of
orange and there's not enough color
variation going on so what I can do is
go to my white point and try to dial
against that by pushing some orange in
and that'll get me the color opposite so
that's D saturated things a bit but then
I can compensate by upping the
saturation so actually I'm finding that
if I bring this saturation down to
something like one point three here this
is getting a lot closer to what I want
and lastly we can play around with these
response curves and I was finding that
this one here adds a lot to the look and
now if we flip back to our references
you can see that we're actually getting
a lot closer to some of these colors we
could still maybe up the exposure a bit
and then drop the gamma to bring in a
bit more contrast and maybe pulling some
vignette increate more of a sky gradient
here and then back up a bit with a gamma
to compensate and if we rotate around
the daylight we can see that this can
still look interesting from other angles
as well just don't push it too far
because then it starts to reveal all the
weird colors we've got going on and this
just goes to show how important the
lighting is to creating a compelling
image so let's go back to this backlit
look okay now that we've got the look
dialed in I'd like to point out
something if we're a bit higher up we
can see that this texture has tons of
repetitions because it's just a tiled
texture and if we wanted to do an aerial
shot like this we need to find some way
to fix it so what we can do is we can
call this medium rocks
and I'm gonna duplicate this set up and
also duplicate the texture itself and
I'm going to replace this texture and
call this one small rocks and then it's
just a matter of coming here and I'm
gonna decrease the size to one by one
now keep in mind that when we scale the
texture down it's gonna get a lot spiky
err and look more displaced because we
haven't actually changed the
displacement amount so we want to jump
in and change this to something like
twelve and we can even go and offset
this texture by some amount okay and now
let's make one for large rocks so we'll
duplicate this again call this large and
then duplicate our texture one last time
and replace it and here we want this to
be let's just do four and again with the
displacement now we're going bigger so
with the bigger texture we actually want
to increase the displacement amount so
with this one we had it at 25 so this
one we want to be fifty and we can
offset this one differently as well now
hopefully it's obvious we've got a lot
more variation in our surface but if we
come up here it should become really
apparent so before with just our medium
rocks let's take a look at what that
looked like so the pattern is a lot more
obvious here especially with this rock
repeating over and over but adding back
to small and a large rocks there's
enough variation that our eye isn't
going to pick that pattern so let's go
back to where we were okay so next I'm
gonna create the sand let's just
duplicate one of these terrains and hide
the others and this one will remove the
texture and create a new material I'll
drop this on here and I'll call this
sand okay let's jump into the node
editor and give ourselves some space
okay I'm going to take an image texture
and if you drag directly onto the dot
here it'll automatically connect now I'm
gonna look up and find
in my assets library here I've got under
polygon I've got this sand texture that
I highlighted earlier so I think it's
under ground sand so here are some
different options and the one that I
want is this ground sand desert rippled
high-rez okay so in this case we're
gonna control everything with a
transform node so let's drag in this
transform and let's scale it down and
now let's duplicate this by holding down
control drag in our transform node again
and then this one will replace with our
roughness map and I can find it easily
by typing ground sand desert again so I
want this gloss high-res and I'll pull
this into the roughness an interesting
thing with polygon textures is that they
use these gloss maps but gloss maps are
actually the inverse of roughness maps
so in this case we want to invert this
okay and we're not actually seeing any
glossiness because this is set to
diffuse so let's set the type to glossy
and now we're seeing something ok let's
duplicate this down again and pop in our
specular map and you can see it's
already saved this so if I just delete
this gloss here I'll find a list of what
I want so here I want the reflection map
high-res and I'll pop that into specular
and this one we don't want inverted so
there we go that's brought down the
specularity a lot which is good okay
let's duplicate this again and put on
our transform in there and let's grab
the normal map this time so I'll just
delete this off and come down here to
normal high-res and put that in there
cool and now we've got a sense of how
large this texture actually still is
because you can see these sand ripples
are massive so let's bring this
transform way down so that's more of the
scale that we're looking for and a good
way to change this texture is if you go
to the specular channel if you mess with
the gamma you can make this a lot less
shiny
or a lot more shiny depending on what
you're after I think I'll leave it where
it was but just good to know and just to
prove to you the thing about the
roughness map if I uncheck invert you
can see just how weird this gets there's
just fireflies all over the place and
this never fully resolves last but not
least let's add in our displacement map
drag this down attach our transform
again and then let's search for our
displacement displacement high-rez and
the source on this is 8k so let's go to
our displacement channel click add
displacement make sure that we're using
8k and then plug this in and so we're
getting these crazy breakup patterns all
we have to do is change from follow
geometric normal to follow smooth normal
and now let's disconnect the normal map
so that we can kind of see the
displacement working by itself so this
needs to be increased
let's try 50 that's way too much let's
go back to 20 okay I think that should
be good enough let's add our normal map
back in now we can see the contribution
that the displacements making and
honestly I'm not sure if we need
displacement in this case one issue it's
creating is if you get pretty close to
it you can see that there's still a lot
of artifact and going on it is creating
actual ridges which is really good but
we might be able to get away with just
using a normal map in this case one last
thing we can play with is this rotation
on Z here so if we want the stripes to
go a different direction or if we want
them to be coming towards us this can be
really cool and I'm gonna decrease the
scale a little bit more okay so I feel
like these grooves are a little bit too
intense so I'm gonna reduce the normal
map until that effect is lessened so I
think that's a bit nicer and I realized
one reason the displacement wasn't
working too well was I think I selected
an 8-bit displacement map rather than
the 16-bit and so that was causing some
extra artifacts so let's go back and
select 8k and follow the smooth normal
and then let's duplicate this and pull
our transform back in
and again let's locate this displacement
map here and you can see we've got a
bunch of different options for
displacement map I think I selected the
high res but I want the 16-bit high-res
so let's add that in there and already
this is looking a lot nicer and I think
I actually want to up the scale of this
texture not quite that large but
somewhere around there might be cool and
then let's bump up this displacement map
even higher okay cool I'm liking that a
lot so let's add our rocks back in right
so we're barely seeing any of the rocks
and that's because this displacement is
set to zero and if we set the mid level
to 0.5 it'll drop down the surface okay
cool so now you can see that there's a
pretty big difference between the color
of the rocks and the color of the sand
we can kind of get these closer together
by altering the color of a sand so let's
come up here and let's add in a color
correction node and let's try taking the
saturation down a bit and maybe moving
the hue a bit more Orange and I also
think the sand looks a bit better if we
drop the gamma so it gets a bit brighter
okay so now let's see if we can blend
these rocks into the sand better as if
they were covered in dust if we look
here at some of these rocks this is an
actual photo of Mars and you can see
that the dust really covers up the rock
surface so let's see if we can do
something along those lines and credit
to this idea goes to Andrew Price who
also did a Mars tutorial in blender and
went to pretty great lengths to get
these to blend we're going to do
something a bit more simple than what
heated so let's go the large rocks first
as our demo because they're the easiest
to see and let's just disconnect this
diffuse for the time being and we'll
pull in a couple RGB spectrums and a mix
node and then let's also pull in a
fall-off node this is pretty similar to
a technique in the advanced shaders
tutorial where I created some dust so
here let's pop this in the diffuse and
let's put these two RGB spectrums in
here the first one we'll just make
bright red and the second one we'll make
bright green so these will stand out a
ton
as color opposites and then we'll plug
the fall-off map in here to the amount
now we want to select normal versus
vector 90 degrees and this should work
as a slope where vertical faces get one
color and horizontal faces get another
color so let's pull down the skew factor
and you can see what's beginning to
happen we're getting green on some
surfaces and red on others so that's
good so we want this original texture to
be on the red so let's find where our
red is and replace it and now maybe we
want a little more of the original
texture to come through like this might
be a bit too extreme so let's go back to
a fall-off map and increase this even
further now you can see we're getting
our original texture coming through but
green on all of these surfaces that are
close to the ground so that's perfect
now we just have to shift this green
color to something that matches more
closely to the environment so let's grab
our green here and we could even color
pick and maybe let's go a bit brighter
so let's store a render buffer and see
what happens if we bypass this whole
thing so that's kind of a
before-and-after so now you can see this
dust coming in here I think we could
brighten it up a bit and maybe
desaturate it so interestingly the
closer we get to white the more these
dark shadows disappear and it starts to
blend in with a sand a lot nicer and now
let's see if we can't finesse it a bit
more by increasing this skew factor just
a touch cool so that's helping a lot
let's get rid of this red color here and
we can take this whole chain here and
copy it and then go to our other rock
textures and paste and just replace
what's in the diffuse currently and get
rid of the old stuff same thing for the
small rocks
cool so now we should be able to see how
extra dusty this is all looking I feel
like a lot of this is too shiny so I'm
just gonna swing the octane daylight
around and now it's feeling like a much
dustier Mars okay so I'm really not
feeling these sand ripples enough so I'm
gonna go back to our rippled texture and
just double the displacement here to 44
I'm finding this a lot more interesting
looking the next thing that bugs me
about this picture
other than the mountains obviously which
we'll get to texturing at some point is
that it's too uniform if we look at our
references here you can see there are
big patches of sand as well as other
regions where there are a lot more rocks
so let's try to mimic that in our render
so let's just take this sand and add a
displacement áformer so hold down shift
and it'll become a child of that as we
select it now here under shading I just
want to drop in a noise so this is kind
of meta because I'm adding this
displacer to the terrain that we already
created with a bunch of displacer x' and
then baked down but what this will do
for us if we increase the height you can
see that we're bubbling out the terrain
in certain regions now this is way too
high frequency we want to go in and make
the noise a lot bigger so now we'll have
patches where they're just sand and
patches where there are just rocks and I
think this is a bit too high I was just
pushing this up to show you what was
going on but let's bring this down to
something like 10 so they're pretty
close but there are regions that are
slightly higher with the sand and
regions that are slightly higher with
the rocks and now it should be pretty
clear that there are clusters of sand
and clusters of rocks now we can
actually do this again by just copying
our displacer and let's jump into the
shading and change the noise seed and
let's add another digit here so that it
gets a lot bigger so this is our super
big noise we'll just call this super big
noise and we'll call this one big noise
and now we've got regions where there's
just sand and regions where there's just
rock clusters and if we come up here
this is a much more interesting look to
the terrain than what we had
so maybe we went too big on the super
big noise let's cut this in half to
maybe five thousand let's try seven
thousand cool I think that looks pretty
sweet but the convenient thing is you
can just change this seed and basically
see it reflected here in your viewport
like here we know we're gonna get some
sand close to the camera I think that's
pretty nice seeing this sand texture
here and we can quickly make this more
interesting by just pushing close to the
ground and then going into our camera
imager and bringing up the aperture a
little bit and now we want to turn off
auto focus and we're gonna run into an
issue when we try to pick focus here
because we've got this volume on it's
seeing this volume object as what it's
picking focus to so it's gonna be super
close to the lens so let's turn this off
for a second and then let's pick focus
again and obviously things are looking
weird because there's no volume object
so let's turn it back on cool so that's
better and now let's bring up our
aperture and let's kind of get a bit
closer to some of these rocks and let's
set our aperture aspect ratio to two and
our edge to three to get that anamorphic
bokeh look and let's bring down our
aperture so it's not so shallow in the
foreground cool so I think this makes
the composition look a lot more
interesting because we've got this
foreground like we're staring over the
edge of this big dune down into this
valley okay the last thing I want to fix
with this ground texture is that I don't
like that in certain patches like with
the rocks it's a bit more desaturated
than the sand and also if we look at our
reference here the sand is a bit more
orange in most of these like this one
it's a bit more too saturated so we
could kind of go for this but I want to
add in a bit more orange to the sand so
let's go to our rippled sand here and
let's just go to our saturation and
boost it some so that's too far but we
can also bring down the brightness a bit
and play with the hue so that's two red
so these are really subtle tweaks here
but maybe that and then a little less
saturated so I'm liking this a bit
better but now we've emphasized that
difference between the sand and the
rocks even more so let's um create a
copy of this camera and jump into it and
this one will just take away the shallow
depth of field take the aperture all the
way down so we can back up a bit and see
the difference that these changes are
making over here somewhere might be a
good litmus test for where the rocks are
meeting the sand and also here with this
displacement we're never going to get
this close to the sand so it doesn't
really matter but we might be able to
fix this with some filtering on the
displacement so if we choose Gaussian
and set it to something like 2 you can
see it's basically just blurring the
displacement map but I'm gonna keep this
off for now because I feel like it's
kind of processor intensive and let's go
back to our large rocks into this
fall-off map in color so let's change
this color to try and get closer to this
Orange so obviously that's way too far
but now we're getting somewhere
it's still too saturated that feels
maybe more appropriate that we could
also shift it a little more yellow and
that's definitely getting a lot better
now we could also play with the fall-off
map but further we crank this to the
left the more the dust overtakes the
rocks you can see if we go too far then
they just become a solid color so maybe
somewhere around here cool I think I'm
happy with that let's just copy all of
these nodes again and paste them to our
other two rock textures
and we can right-click here select
hierarchy and then delete and paste
again
select hierarchy delete and this one and
this one are two rogue nodes we can also
select hierarchy and just sketch this
upwards okay so I saved out two frames
and comparing these two you can see that
the changes we've made really blend the
sand into the rocks a bit better
a final note is keep in mind we can
always dial back on this LUT so here's
without it so that's making a pretty
dramatic difference but if it gets too
saturated in orange we could just cut
this to about 0.8 and then we'll have a
bit less of an orange oversaturated look
okay so now let's start bringing in a
couple of those scanned rocks I'm just
gonna go to file merge and in my rocks
I've got these three volcanic rocks as
well as a couple cliffs and some
sandstone I'll start with one of these
volcanic rocks here so I'm actually
going to go with the high quality versus
these LOD zero through five rocks which
have lower poly counts but can make up
the detail with normal and displacement
Maps but I'm just gonna bring in the
high quality here cool and now let's go
to our materials here and go to convert
materials and then remove unused
materials then let's go to our node
editor
alright let's pull this image texture
into the diffuse and now we want to make
sure we're in the image folder 4qi vwj
let's go back here here we go let's pull
in the albedo it's the same as diffuse
and then we'll copy this over and pull
in the roughness so there's just a
roughness right there and this somehow
got swapped around just now so let's put
that there and that there and duplicate
this again and we'll grab the bump and
if we store a render buffer we can see
what difference the bumps gonna make so
it's just adding in a bit of detail
there and then we can also bring in the
normal bump which is just a normal map
there are also these other normal Maps
depending on which level of detail you
selected but we just want this normal
bump here
and if we store that and remove it this
side is with the sides without so we're
adding a bit more detail in there so
just pull that normal back in and we
also forgot to select glossy texture so
here we also want the specular map
so I'll just duplicate this up and pull
in our specular right here and now we
should be good to go so we'll just copy
this whole model over and I'll bring it
up close to the camera and let's kind of
roughly position it over here okay now
so obviously it's way too dark let's
pull in a color correction node and
let's start with gamma so that gets us
most of the way there
we could probably shift this slightly
away from orange and we could also
desaturate it and I think I'm actually
gonna move it out into the field here
pretty far and scale it down I actually
think the orange looked a bit better
blends in a bit more and we'll duplicate
this up and move it somewhere over here
and maybe move this one even further
back
maybe we'll move this up here to the
edge of this mound to create some more
interesting shapes along this Ridge
I think that's adding a little something
okay so I've just gone and done that
same texturing process with this other
mega scans asset and it's looking pretty
good but the bump is causing some issues
so I'll compare store this and take out
the bump the bump is causing all these
weird extra details that I think are
unnecessary in this case if we store
again and remove the normal this is what
it's looking like without the normal but
I think the added detail from the normal
map is fine so I'll leave that in there
so I'm just gonna copy this rock over
cool so I'll just position this first
before I fire off another render and I
think it's a bit too big so I was killed
it on down a bit and then we'll just
kind of bring it over and find an
interesting place for it to rest
thinking it might look better a little
further into the background well let's
try something like that for starters
okay so same deal let's boost the gamma
and drop the power and then let's put a
color correction node in there
shift the hue a bit a little bit
brighter still and then let's desaturate
just kidding on the brightness
I think that's getting pretty close to
where it's not standing out too too much
but I think we can find a better
position for it maybe this is one that
would look good close to the camera but
scaled down
this is starting to look interesting but
we're catching the inside of it so let's
tip it upwards like that and then to the
side
so I finally found a good home for it
over here where it's kind of jutting out
of the sand and I think that's a pretty
cool look so I might do that in a couple
of their spots
it can also be really important with
these super high poly models to create
instances like this sandstone rock I'm
working with is close to 2 million
Polly's so for this kind of thing if you
duplicate it a bunch it's gonna eat
through your vram really fast
so let's go up to this menu here and
drop down to instance and that just
automatically created an instance of
this now if we delete the original it'll
get unlinked but that's ok because we
can just relink it to the same model we
only need one copy of the original model
and the rest can be instances now if you
look closely this is still eating
through my VRAM it's almost up to 5 gigs
but the thing I haven't done yet is
selected all of these and ticked render
instance and so now I'm down to three
point eight gigs and the scene is way
lighter alright let's move on to
texturing these mountains finally so I'm
going to jump into a new camera and
scooch on over to one of these mountains
here and I'll create a new glossy
material and find this landscape and
drop it on come to my node editor punch
in an image texture for the diffuse and
I'm gonna navigate to this textures com
3d scans and there's one in here that I
really like the look of it's this kind
of layered rock so I'll drop in the
diffuse there and let's UV transform and
rotate this so it's horizontal I think
it would be easier to see if we turned
off the volume and I'm gonna also turn
off these other rocks and terrains so
things will move a lot faster ok let's
just rotate this around now I can
actually see it rotating live and we can
scale this down a whole bunch now the
bulk of the work is gonna get done by
the displacement so let's just duplicate
this up pop this into the transform and
grab our displacement here we also need
to click add displacement
follow smooth normal and 8k and now
let's really boost this displacement
height there we go so that's looking a
lot more interesting it's still too big
and that's repeating too much so let's
put the difference so I'm happy enough
with that I think it needs to blend in
more with this color
so let's boost the gamma
and pop in a color correction node let's
boost the saturation and let's play with
the gamma some more
we could also up the contrast decrease
the saturation let's see what it looks
with the volume back on that looks
pretty good to me I think it's a bit
dark compared to this so let's boost it
a bit more that's looking pretty good to
me now let's just duplicate that over to
the other landscapes
so we've got an issue where the textures
running vertically on some of these so
let's just duplicate our camera again
and move over there to see what the deal
is so for this we're gonna need to
create a duplicate texture and replace
it and jump into the node editor and
then rotate this if we ditch the
displacement temporarily we can see it
rotate in real time
that's looking pretty good to me and
maybe we want more displacement that's
more like it I think we want that same
change on the other material too now the
other thing that's obvious is we want a
lot more roughness here because we're
getting all these little fireflies so
let's go into the roughness and crank
that up and now let's just reduce the
specular down and let's really crank the
roughness all the way so it doesn't look
so shiny same thing goes for this other
material roughness all the way up
specular all the way down at 0.15 okay
let's see how this is looking now and
let's turn our rocks back on let's
create another copy of this landscape
and then put our large rock texture on
it and let's jump back over here to see
what that looks like okay we're gonna
have to duplicate this large rock
texture because we're not seeing
anything and replace it and then go into
the displacement here and change commit
level down to zero and then for the
original texture here let's change the
mid level on this displacement to one so
that this one displaces less and the
rocks displace more because right now
the cliff face is overriding the rocks
and not letting them come through okay
now we can see what the issue is when I
put this large rock texture here I
forgot to put four by four for the scale
that's more like it but I think we could
actually go up to something like 10 by
10 and then increase the displacement on
this one so let's go in here and up the
displacement to something like 200
and that's looking pretty cool by itself
but let's see if we can mix the two
textures together so we'll call this
landscape big rocks and we'll call this
landscape striations now let's jump back
into our texture and in the displacement
let's set this to 0.5 so we'll just
bring this up gradually until it
intersects with this rock texture let's
go back to 0 and see what happens
okay so zero is too far let's try 0.3 so
you can see some of these rocks are
poking through it's good at point two
point one and I'd also like to get rid
of some of this color variation which
doesn't seem consistent with this other
terrain so if I just desaturate that's
not exactly gonna help but what I can do
is mix in a color so let's put a mix
down make sure this is texture 2 and
then let's grab an RGB spectrum and
color pick the ground
and so you can see that's looking a lot
more consistent I think the color needs
to be a bit brighter and less orange
and actually a bit darker from that it's
looking pretty close
and we can also just borrow our big
noise from our sand and see what happens
if we put it in there and the big noise
doesn't look like it's gonna be big
enough so let's get rid of that and put
the super big noise in there that's more
what I'm looking for and let's boost the
height to 50 cool so now we're seeing
more variations in there let's see what
it looks like from a distance okay so
all these other landscapes were pretty
okay as far as the orientation of that
main texture so I can probably just make
these editable and right click and say
connect objects and delete so we've just
got one object that represents all the
rest of these landscapes and that helps
because now we can just duplicate this
single landscape and swap out the big
rock texture here and also put in the
super big noise okay so we don't get
confused let's call this majority
landscapes striations and we'll call
this majority landscape big rocks so in
our landscape striations we need to fix
this other texture because right now the
displacement mid level is set to zero so
if we hop over to this camera we should
be able to see that we're only seeing
these striations so we want to set this
to point one like we did with the other
texture and now we're starting to see
some of these rocks peek through but
maybe we'll take this one even further
and go to point two so I think this is
helping the mountains blend into the
ground here because it's adding in that
dirt that we've put everywhere else and
maybe it wouldn't hurt to do something
similar here so we'll go back to this
landscape which is our regular old
landscape striations here and we'll jump
in make sure we hit get active materials
so we're only seeing one material there
we go and this displacement let's set it
to point two
cool and I like that change because the
profile of this mountain here we're
seeing a lot more of these little bumps
and rocks poking through which really
takes away the CG feel and if we look at
the reference from the Martian you can
see the profile on this cliff is what
really sells the scale and this kind of
thing you only get through painstaking
work like maybe sculpting it out in
ZBrush or it could just as easily be
something that was composited in from
actual photo reference of cliffs okay
let's bring back our other rock so we
can check out our progress and let's
reach up the shallow depth-of-field here
and I'm liking this a bit better panned
upwards which should give room for some
nice buildings and profiles against this
sky so this is looking really cool but
just watch out because I have already
almost hit six gigs of RAM so you might
want to constrain your scene and not put
so many high poly models and stuff like
that in there and limit the number of
displacement instances you're using like
with those mountains maybe just use the
striations or the dirty rock texture but
not both because we're quickly busting
through the limit for 980ti s which is
six gigs I'm on 1080 T eyes for this
tutorial so I'm good to go for a little
bit longer but the scene is getting
super heavy one thing you can do to
optimize is any texture that's black and
white set the format to float and it'll
use up less VRAM so I'm gonna go through
and see how much V Rama I can save
myself by setting all the textures that
only need to be black and white to float
so that save close to half a gig of VRAM
not the best ever but pretty good okay
so if you're on a budget I want to show
you how you can make some displacement
maps without having to go out and buy
them this is a tip from Stuart
Lippincott aka Stu's or many of you may
know the great Stu's or so let's just
drop in a plane here and we'll just add
a standard C 4d material we'll drop it
on we'll jump in and we're gonna set
this to luminance mode and then in the
luminance texture we'll create a noise
and this is where you can get super
creative again by putting this into a
layered shader if you want so if you
remember we did this last time for the
general shape to the terrain but this
time we're trying to create those micro
displacements
and one reason we didn't create those
micro displacements in the displacer is
the poly count would get out of control
and it would bog our scene way down
whereas octane can handle this image
based displacement really easily the
only issue is it can't easily convert
from cinema 4d system into displacement
on-the-fly so we have to bake it out so
let's just go into our layer shader
let's change this one to something like
stupa and then up here we can copy this
and paste it and this one will do Lucca
and here we want the octaves to be the
full 20 and we can scale this up and
this one too we want to make sure it's
20 and we'll scale this up as well
so if we right-click and go to cinema 4d
tags bake texture we can come down here
and choose the width and height so in a
normal octane displacement map the max
is 81 92 by 81 92 but if we do that
exact resolution we'll get an issue
around the borders where there are some
glitches so we actually want to expand
it a little bit so let's set this to 81
96 by 81 96 and I'm just going to use a
PNG at 16 bits per channel and I'll set
this to this folder where I've been
baking out other noise types and I'll
call this combo noise 1 and here we want
to set the mode to luminance and we can
see a preview so right now we're only
getting the 1 on top so if you remember
we can go back here and mix the two of
these together so let's try overlaying
these and maybe the Topkapi we actually
make the smaller noise and the bottom
one is a larger noise so that we've got
a variation in detail where some are
small details and others are super large
ok let's head back to our baked texture
tag and under options we can hit preview
again and we'll get an update as to what
the texture will look like and then
let's just hit bake cool so now that's
done we can just create a diffuse
material so let's come over here and
click on add displacement then drop this
image texture in here and we'll go and
grab our combo noise and now let's drag
this on to our plane remove this baked
texture tag
and then let's fire this off and now
let's drop in our daylight and rotate it
around and our displacement needs to be
at 8k and actually we're still getting
this issue around the textured border so
the easiest way to fix this is by
hitting UV transform here and just
scaling it up by the tiniest bit and
then that goes away so here's our
combined texture and it's super detailed
and you can basically bring in several
more of these and layer them up like
we've been doing so say we had another
plane and I bring in I duplicate our
material here and I bring in yet another
displacement map like this over now I
can push this one up through and maybe
increase the displacement height on this
and change the mid level so it goes back
down at a mid level of 0.5 if I Solo
this turn off the other one
this will cause it to stretch from the
center whereas at a mid level of zero
it'll push upwards and mid level of 1
it'll push downwards so 0.5 is a pretty
good starting place so this one's kind
of cool by itself but then when we add
in the additional texture we get more
variation and again if we were to
combine this technique with what we
learned previously where we put a
displacer that has large-scale
displacements as a child of the plane
then add in a noise and make sure we've
got enough segments here and then scale
up the noise
and boost the height and actually that's
too much on the scale and now the height
is crazy so something like that and then
bring in one of these textures here we
need to change the displacement to
follow smooth normal and maybe reduce
the amount of displacement let's try the
other texture here same thing we're
gonna need to change this to smooth you
can see how these techniques can work in
combination where you're controlling the
large scale displacements with a
displacer and the small scale ones with
a texture and now if we want we can put
a dirt note in the diffuse change
everything to glossy add an a' gradient
and change some colors around
and then take the roughness up or use an
actual rock texture for the diffuse like
this but this should give you an idea
that you can still make some pretty
cool-looking stuff without having to go
out and spend a ton of money all right I
wanted to talk about one last way you
can make these Martian landscapes or
beef up your terrains and that's with
World creator or world machine I've used
both of them world machine I think is a
little more well-known and has really
powerful erosion features and on the
whole I think it's a bit more deep than
World Creator but World Creator is
really cool and super user-friendly and
because it's so intuitive you can
basically jump into it without knowing
almost anything about the software so
let me just give you a quick demo cool
so here I am inside world creator and
alt and right-click will allow you to
rotate around middle-click will let you
dolly around and then I think
right-click will let you pan I'm
extremely new at this program but it's
super easy to figure out so let me show
you what I'm talking about
first off let's just go to this terrain
here and we want to make sure we're
exporting 8k Maps so we can just come
down here to 1/4 meter and now our
resolution will be 8k and the cool thing
about this program is it runs on the GPU
whereas world machine runs on the CPU so
you can see all your changes in real
time and you can export Maps crazy fast
at least 10 if not a hundred times
faster than world machine because it
runs on the GPU so filters is where
you're gonna do most your work and I'm
gonna add a layer and I'm not even gonna
bother naming this because I'm just
gonna create a single layer and do
everything in that one layer and just
get in get out because I really don't
know what I'm doing yet with this
software so let's add a Canyon
let's do sand covered Canyon hit ok so
already that's looking kind of cool we
can control the general strength and
sharpness here so maybe we want a little
less sharp and spiky something like that
now let's add another filter and erode
it to some extent so let's try there are
these different types of erosion but
let's just do soft and now we've got
some of these cool lines here that add
detail maybe it's not that realistic
because there's not water on Mars
I rode this kind of stuff but whatever
if we up the sharpness strength here
something kind of cool starts to happen
and it feels more like a rocky terrain
let's try adding maybe some rocky
plateaus and just taking down the
strength so just a little bit of that
and then maybe we want the erosion to
happen after that so we can just scoot
that over next to make this a lot more
Kenyan like let's add some terracing so
let's just go for standard terraces now
here if we don't want this to affect the
base down here but only the cliffs let's
just select a height and bring this up
so there we go and we can also bring up
the height smoothness to kind of feather
this in even more next I'll take down
the general strength so it's a little
bit more subtle there and we can up the
randomness and I'll push this after the
rocky plateaus but before the erosion
and next I actually want to add a second
Terrace and I'm going to use this as the
smaller terracing so here we can just
take down the strength again and do the
same thing to the height so that it's
only affecting these cliffs up here now
we can take the min size down and the
max size down pretty far too and I'll
come in here to show you what this is
doing
let's bring the strength back up you can
see this is adding a lot more terracing
and they're much smaller so maybe let's
take the max size way down to like three
and then we'll take the strength down so
it's more subtle I'm just trying to
create these striations in the landscape
and I'll bring up the height smoothness
again so from a distance this could be
pretty convincing the last thing I want
to do is add in one more type of erosion
and this one's called wind and if I
increase the length here you can see
that this just kind of streaks
everything out but if we select an angle
then we can choose a direction for this
wind to come from so it's almost like
sandblasting one part of the terrain
which is kind of a cool variation so
let's bring down the length until this
is a lot more subtle
and now we can control the angle width
and smoothness and also the direction so
that's kind of an interesting look
they're like the cliffs have been eaten
away by this wind blasting and this
swirl is pretty fun though probably not
going to use it but just thrown that out
there because that's kind of cool but
the last thing I want to do is probably
add in a bit of sediment so I'm going to
go for sediment complex and it is more
processor intensive than any of the
other effects that I've found
but for this Mars landscape that's
covered in dust and sand it kind of
makes sense to have this in there if we
go back to our base here we could
increase the overall strength by upping
this level one these are kind of like
levels of detail where we're working
from big to small
so for these cliffs that are probably
going to be in the distance it makes
sense to increase their displacement
height because I'm going to want them to
poke up above the other mountains now
there's one more thing here if I go to
add under general there's something
called zero edge and this is going to do
exactly what it sounds like and make
sure that the edge of the terrain is
flattened and this way if I bring this
in as a separate displacement map I can
kind of poke it up through other terrain
without worried that it's going to
bubble upwards and create an issue where
we're seeing underneath it and stuff
like that
and if we want to see other options we
can always change the seed under the
base this is kind of a cool shape here
though it gets a little extreme and
spiky so maybe we can bring that down
and I think I like that that could be
good now if we go to export I'm gonna
use TIF 32-bit float because when I use
PNG 16-bit I got all sorts of terrible
artifacts and lines in my displacement
map in octane so hit export and I call
this Mars Canyon 0:02 and you can see
just how fast this is exporting an 8k
displacement map if you've used world
machine at all you'll know that it can
take up to an hour to export an 8k map
so while world machine might be a little
bit more powerful this program will save
you in terms of how quickly you can get
things at the door and just for good
measure I'm gonna export one that is a
little bit less extreme I might like
this better but it's literally that easy
now back in octane I'm just going to go
and create my displacement map and
create my displacement node and drop in
our map that we just created
let's try at this Canyon 0:03 and let's
change our output to 8k and bump up our
height and now we're getting a pretty
cool looking terrain I don't love how
spiky it is in certain parts so I'm
gonna take it down a little bit so it
would probably be something closer to
this and if we want to check the other
map it looks like this this one might be
cool to try out let's take it into our
other scene okay so I pasted it in the
plane and scaled it way up though now we
want to push it way back into the
background I'm only gonna use this as
one of these background mountains now
keep in mind that if we scale something
up a ton we're going to need to increase
its displacement height a lot too so
let's send this off to see what's going
on okay so now obviously we need to
boost the height a ton so let's add in a
couple ones there and that's still not
enough so let's boost it even higher
there we go now if we return to our
previous position here let's actually
bring it a bit closer and now we'll take
the displacement height down by a lot
and now let's scooch it over here and
increase the height again and drop it on
down maybe rotate it okay that's too
close but you can see how this could
create some pretty interesting details
in your image I'm going to scoot it back
again okay I'm happy with that
positioning but I'm gonna decrease this
yet again let's try 6000 and now let's
push it back upwards a little bit okay
6000 was too much let's try 7500 okay
I'm gonna add in this other one as well
okay and I've added in the second
terrain back here as well maybe I'll
scale this one up a bit and then bring
him back to the old 9000 that's kind of
nice over here though now it's getting
in the way so I'll rotate it around okay
this is a more interesting profile for
sure but I think it can be moved
check this away okay I think I'm finally
happy with this profile over here and
this one over here now we just need to
change the color a bit so it matches
this sand texture better this one though
is so far in the background that it
doesn't even matter okay so what I think
I can do is I can just steal the diffuse
color and texture from our large rocks
here so I'll just copy all of this and
go over to this is our plane here we'll
call this closed Canyon and we'll call
this far Canyon
so in this texture here I'll click get
active material to just see that one
I'll paste and I'll sketch this over but
let's store a render buffer so we can
see the difference and plug this into
the diffuse and you can see that's
pretty much solved it okay the last
thing is this texture is currently set
to diffuse so I'm going to compare store
render buffer and let's see if we can
get it looking good with glossy so that
we can maybe catch some highlights on
that Canyon
now we're gonna want to take up the
roughness because the specular is
currently too tight to even see it but
hopefully you can see this gives it just
a bit more visual interest like some of
these rocks are catching the highlights
on the side of the canyon so there's the
before and after it's pretty subtle but
I think it's an improvement okay I
promise this is gonna be the very last
thing that I show before moving on to
the actual space colony part of this
thing and getting into assembling the
kit bash buildings so I'm gonna
duplicate our camera and kind of pull
back on this one and for this I'm gonna
make more of a vertical composition so
more Instagram style so let's bring this
over here and give ourselves some room
and then I'll set this dimension to 1085
1350 which is the tall Instagram format
cool so on this one we're gonna bring in
a couple more planes just for close to
the camera and so that I can get this
done a bit faster I'm just gonna shut
all of these off for the time being as
well as some of these other landscape
objects cool so this makes it a lot
quicker to NAV
so let's take this plane and just dump
it below our camera and reset PSR so
it's in the exact same coordinate is our
camera and now let's just move it down a
little bit and out this away so that's
an easy way to get this plane in the
same position as our camera and I'm
gonna rotate it 90 degrees here and
scooch it over so the composition is
going to be something like this where
we're looking out of a couple canyon
walls and I'll actually stretch this
upwards so that we cover the entirety of
that vertical height and same thing goes
with this one cool and we want to make
sure these are actually out of the
camera's hierarchy so that we can back
up and find the composition here so
we're gonna find the texture for our
striations here and we're just gonna
drop that on to this plane and let's
call this left wall and this one right
wall and let's bring this one forward
and in this case the texture is
repeating way too much so let's just
scale it up
let's try 300 by 300 and obviously we're
gonna have to alter this and it's I
think it's facing the wrong orientation
so let's just duplicate this texture
here so we can actually alter it
properly let's jump back in here let's
take down the displacement and this
transform let's go to 90 maybe easier to
see the orientation if we remove the
displacement so let's try that
okay that's looking right now let's add
the displacement back in and take it
further down let's go for T and I think
what's happening is we're seeing the
wrong side of this displacement so let's
flip this wall 180 degrees that's more
like it
okay now here we could probably boost
this up to point two and if we turn this
away we can kind of see what the texture
is looking like so maybe let's just
stretch this plane out a lot more so
that helps a lot and now let's increase
the displacement let's say 60 see how
far we can push it
Oh point five helps I think that's a bit
too much let's take it down to 75 okay
and let's just copy the server for the
right wall now the right wall we're also
gonna have to stretch
scooch this back and let's stretch it
out to a similar aspect is the other one
this is kind of cool how shadowy this is
getting and there's a little bit of
weirdness here with this sticking out so
maybe we can scale this up slightly that
fixed it and then let's drag this
upwards so that we're not seeing the top
get cropped off there same thing goes
with this one now one last thing we can
do to make this a lot cooler is that
same trick with the displacer in this
case I think I want to try a new kind of
noise type I'll go to my shading here
and add a noise and I'll increase the
height so we can see that's working and
here I want to try Hamma now let's
increase the scale a lot and also we
need our plane to have way more segments
like let's go 500 by 500 we're gonna
have to increase the scale even further
so let's try this maybe half that
something like that so even though there
are these kind of sharp lines here we're
not really seeing them because that's
covered up with the displacement so we
can just change our seed until it looks
like something cooler and then let's
reduce the displacement height I think
that's pretty nice right there so let's
just copy the same displacer over and
make sure we have enough segments here
and on this one again let's just mess
with the seed it's kind of difficult to
see what's going on here so we can hit
nf and then we'll see a bit of a better
view now here I think we need a bit more
displacement let's keep trying a
different seed that looks cooler so if
you're seeing these weird artifacts on
the right side it's because light is
actually bleeding through the cracks of
this wall because the displacement is
tearing things a bit too much so what we
can do is we can actually put this one
into a cloth surface so let's go up to
simulate cloth cloth surface hold down
alt
so that it becomes the parent and then
we don't need any subdivisions extra we
just want a bit of thickness and let's
increase the thickness even more and now
we're no longer seeing those artifacts
so if we bring all the rest of the stuff
back in let's check out what we've got
and actually this is displaced way too
much so let's take this displays our
height back down and that works for me
but maybe I'm gonna change this noise
seed one more time cool that's pretty
interesting
maybe we'll see what this composition
looks like if we go a bit higher and
maybe come forward until we can catch a
bit more of those rock formations out
there and maybe pivot downwards a bit
and we could also widen the camera lens
and when I decrease these to something
like 200 I'm finding I'm getting more
interesting results see now we've got
more vertical repetitions and I think
this is a bit cooler looking maybe the
displacement height is a bit too much
now let's go down to 50 let's go to 65
and I'll change the seat again on this
displacer on the left and don't forget
that just by duplicating your daylight
and changing the North offset we can get
some pretty dramatically different looks
so I think this Sun position is pretty
cool so I'll save that one duplicate
again this one's pretty interesting too
and this is pretty interesting too and
then it goes to show how well we've
matched all these pieces together that
we can blast the Sun in here at a higher
position and all these textures still
look like they belong together for the
most part they're not perfect but
they're pretty close
and by bringing the Sun way down in the
sky and decreasing its power we can make
it feel like a nighttime scene I had
also increased the turbidity which makes
the contrast ratio a lot lower kind of
diffuses the light a lot more okay but
I'm gonna go back to our original sun's
position and then call this Canyon cam
and I'll call this main cam and for this
one we just need to turn back off the
canyon walls and set our resolution back
to 1920 by 1080 and then I'll dock this
back down here okay guys congrats for
getting through that entire environment
creation process I know this was the
longest tutorial to date but hopefully
it just goes to show all the crazy
detail that you can put into your
environments as well as all the
different techniques you can employ now
don't forget there's that kit bash 3d
promo code Aria of bash and that should
get you that sweet 15% discount I loved
playing around in those cities because
once I've got one established I can just
fly the camera around play around with
lighting and texturing and Composition
and imagine trying to do that with
turbosquid assets where you're buying
each building individually it would just
cost a mini fortune so I'll see you guys
next week and I hope you enjoy and next
week is kit Bosch 3d and more buildings
and all that craziness so I'll catch you
next time bye