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+  "text": " And that's a beauty emograph. It's like you could you could kind of build these complicating looking things that are actually really simple and pretty easy to, you know, navigate and control, which is nice. And that's, again, like how I like to always approach this kind of stuff. So Sakane, I'm so excited to get into the nitty gritty and starting geeking out about like what you did inside of Cinema 4D to like execute all of these awesome shots here. And I think one of the main questions I always love asking artists is like how much of this work was modeled by you, how much of it was like sourced models and sourced materials and textures and stuff like that because like these rock textures look beautiful. You know, there's some plant models in there as well, which I'm assuming you probably didn't model yourself, but But how much of this was assets that you found and sourced and how much of it was made from scratch? Yeah, actually, surprisingly, I felt like I modeled many of the things in a lot of these shots minus the forest one. I obviously didn't model all these plants. No one got time for that. But yeah, you know, most of it is I've done myself. Reason being like when you want something and I'll just kind of go through this shot by shots so we can, you know, die suck you'd see him. But if you want to get something that's bespoke and unique, more than likely you have to make it yourself or modify a model to kind of suit your needs. So for this one, I mean, the room is actually made up of like really simple sweep nib shapes. But the plants themselves, they like mega scan models moving on to the next one. These stones, I just modeled myself just using a sphere and the sculpture sculpt tools in cinema 40. Really, really simple to get like that organic shape. Yeah, I modeled nothing in here. Well, the bamboo maybe because it's like a like a tube or something. Yeah, it's so much of that is like, you know, material. It's like it's a cylinder and a really awesome material, you know, exactly. Yeah. So for this scene, pretty much everything was pre-made models. Yeah, this everything in here is bespoke and created by me. Same of this scene besides the bees. I had to grab a bee model. Fevers I made in Cinema 40. Interesting. All right. This scene. Yeah, it's modeled besides the cocktail. But yeah. Yeah, you didn't buy cubes online from like TurboSquad. Those are your custom cubes. Dude, this was 100 bucks a cube, bro. Yeah, I love like, you know, with the advent of mega scans and all this kind of stuff, it's so easy to get all these models and just kind of populate your scenes with them and give whatever kind of vibe you want. Like the addition of the cactus in this end shot, it's like, oh, we could be in New Mexico or something like that with that kind of vibe. Now, as far as me, we'll just go shot by shot, you know, how you kind of built up each individual thing. So you've got some project files first to dig around in. Yeah, let's start with this one. Yeah, let's do it. And the first thing about this one was just trying to figure out like how to create this organic shape. It's really just built out of a lot of like simple shapes. So we would kind of like start with this exterior layer. So this is just here to kind of keep the light out. So Let's go ahead and disable that too. This one. So we can see this whole shape. It just made up of these sweep noobs, and that's all within a cloner. So if I disable that cloner and this fracture, you would see it's all built up of just irregular sweep noobs. So you got a bunch of like hand like custom adjusted swept splines in there this Like it's only really made up of one Type of oh, yeah, it's just one and how we're getting all that variation that we're seeing Like when I enable the mo graph. Yeah, this so this is all being kind of generated and by MoGraph, which is nice. It's all procedural for the most part. And then we just have this, see if we can get a nice angle here, I thought. It's such a small seat to navigate because there's so many things. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing too, is building to scale with all this stuff. Like I assume you probably didn't adjust the scale of those plant models or anything like that. I feel like that's such a lost thing. Like I didn't learn about that until I started really diving into Redshift and Octane and these physically based renders, like everything is physically based. So it's gotta be the correct real world scale in here. But yeah, it's kind of annoying to navigate around when you're dealing with dinky objects. Yeah, exactly. So usually I put down a cube and like this cube is just a little shorter than a human. So that's kind of, yeah, like if you put like for, you know, Fred that used to be the default. Yeah, always put the little stick figure dude in there. Exactly. He would come up around here. So kind of I got you. This was like my human height base. So actually physically put a human in there. So yeah, and just like conceptually trying to figure out how to do the scene. Again, I always like to do things the easiest way possible. So what I did is I created this one shape and I had it cloned. But you can see it here like we have a fracture object. And the reason the reason that is is because like when I actually had to see like if he went back to the animation itself Like you could see there's like plants attached to the movement. Oh Wow, I did I didn't notice that until just now it really helps integrate everything in there. Wow, right? So then to get those plants to move with the environment I needed to make that clonor editable and like make the plant like a child of, like I had to put the plant in that queue. So it moved. Physically in that hierarchy. Exactly. Yeah. So it kind of moved with demograph, but I'll kind of show you what's happening here. So if I re-enabled this, now we're seeing like we're getting this nice kind of organic looking environment. And all that's really happening here, if we jump into the effectors. This is like a random effector just to get a little bit of random motion in here, random motion. But then it's really just a step effector that's giving a lot of the organic nature. And I'll jump into that and explain what's happening here. So what we're doing is altering the scale, but not knowing why it acts as just the x and the z. But we're doing this using this pattern here. So that's kind of like, instead of it just being like linear and just scaling everything down, it's scaling like certain parts like here, but then not this area. So it's kind of giving us like that really kind of organic shape. And that's really like the crux of what is kind of giving us that look. Again, if I just turn this on and off until the random effector. The step effectors such a great way to be able to control that effect of the strength, cause you would think like, oh, use a falloff or something like that. But there's so many low hidden features within all these old effectors that we've been using for years, you know what I mean? It's almost like you forget about the step effector and these different effectors. Exactly. But we are using some falloff to kind of give us that animation. Oh, okay. There's like a huge cube falloff. So five friends. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the scene itself is really tall. It's actually something really cool in the step effector. I think you can actually animate that spline and offset it. Oh, yes. I believe. Yes. Which is like another thing where it's like, oh, wow, I didn't like I always forget that that little fact that you can just set up this procedural animation like undulated. I see a lot of people with the wavy kind of animations. and that's all procedural, like no keyframes whatsoever. You just control it by that spline graph. And we'll get into the animation a little bit later, but mostly like just how you built this. It's crazy because you, like when I looked at this, I was like, this can't be just one single like piece of geometry, like there's gotta be a bunch of different layered stuff like that. And it's just incredible how much organic randomness and variety you can get with just a single object using MoGraph. You know? Yeah, 100%. And that's a beauty of MoGraph. It's like you could kind of build these complicating looking things that are actually really simple and pretty easy to, you know, navigate and control, which is nice. That's, again, like how I like to always approach this kind of stuff. And then, you know, I wanted to put like some trees and stuff in the air just to kind of add to that like natural vibe since everything was made out of wood to just compliment the aesthetic. Yeah, I feel like I wish I worked in this space. Yeah, like I just set up my stand-up desk and just plopped right where your logo is. Yeah, I mean, that's the feeling I wanted to carry across like this kind of like futuristic, cool working space. And again, just like that random effectors. You know, it's like kind of given those like little imperfections, like with the random, without the random, it just feels too, too uniform. So yeah, it's just like those little subtle touches you want to add to just make it feel like a little bit more dynamic. It was that, and you know, just choosing some really nice wood textures. Um, a lot of these are just pulled online and it just piped the correct maps into the correct areas. Do you use COO textures or sites like that? Yeah, I think I probably pulled some of these from Polygon. Yeah, I mean, those asset sites are just incredible. And the detail and the bump maps and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. It's really, really great. Like you go a long way with just like a good bump map, a good roughness, and a good diffuse, especially for this type of stuff. So the texturing here wasn't bad at all. It was really just coming up with the technique to create this type of space and make it make it feel like it was alive. I think that was a pretty important part of it. Yes, it's such a welcoming space. It's like you're you're just fed down this area. You got the really warm lighting and stuff like that. Just it sets the mood of your real so well with this nice warm, comfortable. It's like everything's undulating. It's like it wants the room wants to hug you and bring you along this journey through your real. Let's check out the rock shot where we're going from like a Zen room to some like Zen floating like magic crystals. So how is that? You said that you modeled all of this stuff using some sculpting, right? Precisely. Yeah. So, you know, I didn't want to go on download stones. I just thought, you know, stupidly. Right. like, if I had to show you an example like it, it's so easy to kind of just do this type of stuff, you just, you know, give it enough polygons. And immediately, like if you just shrink it down and move it out, you'll already start to get someone that shape. Right. It's just like a matter of like adding some of those imperfections. So if I go into like these brushes and they add like a grab and I made this bigger, like, you know, I could make this way, way bigger. Just kind of, you know, move it around, just add like some little imperfections here and there to make it feel like more organic. And yeah, that's pretty much the technique I used to, I mean, there's nothing like this is the stone. It's, you're right, it's nothing, but it's, it's great. Like I don't consider myself a great model or anything like that. And I feel like there's so many people out there that don't even realize the sculpting tools are not just for like sculpting highly detailed faces and characters and highly detailed meshes. Like you can literally use these brush tools just to add that little bit of imperfection, little organic kind of feel to these rocks. And I think, you know, it's the little things that really sell it, you know, and I know we've talked before and you have such a great eye for detail and just adding just that subtle little like the variations just that totally changes everything and makes everything look that much more realistic. That was the key too to just create like a few varying type systems like some flat some a little bit thicker you know just so it all doesn't feel super duper uniform. Right yeah everything feels really really natural and like you just picked up these rocks and you know just combined them all together you know it just looks so natural and the variety is great. As far as uh we'll get into the the animating this a little bit better in the next couple sections here but it looks like we got a lot of MoGraph here as well but like you hand placed a lot of these objects too so you know it's always this little dance between like, can I achieve this with a cloner and doing some randomness or am I just going to get what I want by just literally placing things, you know? Yeah, for this stuff, you know, because like it's so unique in this book, I had to actually hand place these just, you know, because I had like a certain shape and design I had in mind. So just to get that, you know, and it was kind of cool to set it up in a way where you think, could this actually balance? Oh, I don't know. Is it? You know, like do some real world tests, like give me some rocks. Let's see. Right. But also make it, you know, like how a certain level of tension, like this big one is like balancing on this super, super small one here. Yeah. I'm afraid this woman. So I mean, you could easily test this. Just turn on dynamics, you know, watch it fall apart and let it fall. If I was like, well, my calculations were off. Yeah. But I mean, you also have floating rocks. So, you know, I don't know how realistic we want to get there, you know, defying gravity. Awesome. So a little bit of sculpting action here. And I think it's really important to show how useful the sculpting tools are in just general MoGraphy kind of purposes, you know? Now, as far as the next shot, this is like I want to live in this shot and just like do some Zen meditation. And one thing I want to point out is that I know, I don't know if you, a lot of people know this, but you primarily use Redshift to render. And when we were talking about this before recording, I was like, you know, that's incredible that you got such a good looking nature shot in Redshift because I feel like nature shots and something like this is the domain of octane and everyone talks about octane scatter and how it's so perfect for this kind of thing. So I guess I would just wanna see like, how you achieve such amazing realism with Redshift, kind of tricks and tips do you have for doing something like this? And then how do you just like build up the scene? Like, as far as I know, Redshift doesn't really have a scatter, like Octane's scatter kind of deal. So I assume you relied a lot on just like MoGraph, like C40 MoGraph stuff to kind of populate everything up easily. Yeah, I don't need a scasa when I have the Matrix object. What are you talking about? Yeah, I mean, you know, like the Matrix object is a super duper light object to work with, especially the viewport. And recently, I think, Reg... Well, I guess recently at the time that I made this, Regshift that enabled being able to instance objects on a matrix object and seeing that, I'm like, oh, this is perfect because I can work with it within the scene and at render time, it kind of pop plates everything. So if I turn off all these matrix objects, you will see that it's just like a ground play in with displacement, that's the base. And then as you enable some of these matrix objects, you kind of see like, it's just like a layering different elements. And that's what makes the scene feel really good. If you have like, like the same plants all the time, and maybe I'll just kind of zoom in here. So yeah, I mean, the first thing we have here, some, you know, some grass, as you start to build up the, you know, forestry, that's how it begins to look more realistic. Because now on top of the grass, we have some larger shrubs. Like if I hop into this redshift object here, we see the objects that are being kind of cloned on here. And these are all stored in this area here. These are the different plant assets that we're kind of cloning on. And then. Not too familiar with, because this is the, is this redshift instance system? Exactly. So this is all instance. You see how as soon as I hit this, like as soon as I hit it, And it's like hundreds of plants. It's just, boom, it begins to render. You just have to literally have all the models that you want to, all the plant models that you want to clone and have that just, you just have that in a hierarchy somewhere that's hidden, I guess. And then you just clone these matrices all over the place. Because you can see on the left, like there's just all these little tiny cubes and those are the matrices. And within the, I guess that's a, is that a Redshift object tag? I'll just do a quick example to kind of showcase how it looks. I feel like I'm totally unfamiliar with using the Redshift instance stuff. Cause you said, is it a fairly new feature? Sometime last year, maybe a year before. Okay. Okay. At this point, it's been also a little bit like a little while ish. Gotcha. This is the thing about using like a matrix, you know, you could, you could like, you know, you can really crack it up in the scene. Right. Yeah. Like this is in, you know, in the scene. You could probably drop a little on those zero here and hopefully it doesn't explode. Well, it's like a million, you know, it's like a million different things in here. You can always just turn that off as well. And, you know, that works. But let's, no, no, let's do like, what is this, 10,000? Maybe a hundred thousand. Why not a million? Let's do it. Yeah, like a million and like that. Let's go high. Let's drop the scale of these so we could actually kind of just, you know, wow. Right. Actually, see, yeah. Yeah. That's even with the scale low. There's still so many of them. We could drop these even lower. What does a million of these look like when they're really tiny? I mean, it's basically like, you know, little flakes of snow. Oh, yeah. I just realized I was putting this into the wrong place. That's why I didn't. Oh, there you go. All right, there you go. So what's the object we could put in here? Let's use our 21. New thing. I don't know. The new asset browser. Yeah. Yeah, the placement tools are incredible. Like I feel like for this kind of shot, if you had it and built it using it, it would probably been pretty nice, putting those, the like rock stairway and stuff like that. Yeah, even placing those rocks in the last shot and make sure that they're like actually resting on the stones. It's it's so nice. Okay. There we go. Close that. It's going to make it editable. Boom. There's a person drink it down. And then Kia's. Let's just create a red shift tag. And it's super simple. going to make sure it's on the matrix objects. There's already the particles tab. OK. All you got to do. Yeah, like this is a smart tag. So once it's on an object that can close or create particles, that particle table comes up automatically. I got you. I feel like I've never, why I've never seen that is because I've never placed that tag on a matrix object. Exactly. Or if you do it on like an X particles image or something like that. And there's a feel here for custom objects. We can literally throw anything in here. And then boom. I hit render and see what happens. Crush your fingers. We don't make something crash here. And now will they be shrunk down to the size of that the matrix, the matrices then? Yeah. Gotcha. Because they'll they'll they'll adapt to that size, I guess. But oh, man. They're all lying down. I think I just need to. But I mean, that's a million of these objects. That's incredible. I mean, this is this is like your octane scatter for those of you out there that might not realize that, you know, something like this is possible within Redshift. Exactly. And it's nice too, because you could just alter the scale, you know, in the target itself. Oh, there you go. Now, can you like say you want to because you can place a bunch of different objects in there. Is there any way to control the randomness between the two different figures in there? Could you easily randomize with, would you use MoGraph for that? Yeah, that's a good question. So usually what I would do, if I want a lot of control, I would just make another matrix. Just make another matrix and totally be able to control that count. Yeah, it's another one of those things where it's like, how do I wanna do the random route just go through all these seeds and hope that I find a good random seed that works for me, or do I just have full control by making two separate matrix systems or cloner systems and getting exactly what I want, you know, full art directability. And yeah, I mean, like this is so... That's so fast. Yeah. Let me just put the... That's incredible. The under sampling all on. So... So the under sampling, I feel like, is another one of those things that probably people don't don't know too much about as far as like speeding up your render. So basically that's just downresing in the Redshift render view. So it just get a snappier feedback. Correct. Yeah. So it just like makes everything look a lot better. And then all you need to do is just create a sun sky rig and boom. Boom. You got a new, you got the 2021 reel already on its way. That's the first shot. I mean, this is so strange. If you never want to get a job again, just start with it. Or really weird jobs, start with this. Exactly. This is a new NFT, sells for 100 bucks. 100,000, 100,000 bucks. Mint it, mint it. Exactly. This front is a depth of field for chits and giggles. I mean, let's do it. Why stop? Right. You are really going to mint this after this. I feel like it myself. I think it would. No effort NFTs. It's a thing. Sometimes you can win the jackpot with these. Exactly. That's essentially that technique. So you use this for, yeah. So you walk through all the matrix objects that you didn't name, by the way. So great job there. Close. I'm going to ding you there. Ha ha ha. The matrix was matrix tree. But then I just knew it was like a different type of shrubbery. So you have how many different types of shrubbery do you have in there? Because I mean, this is, like you said, that's kind of the key to making this look so natural and realistic is, you know, you're not just using one clump of grass and calling it a day. Exactly. I think in this first one, we have like three different blades of grass. Maybe let me see if I could find specifically which asset that is and then find it within the scene so we get an idea of how that looks like. Yeah, it's so cool the way that the, you know, this Redshift scatter system works is that it totally keeps your viewport light as well. Exactly, it's great. So this, I mean, like, exactly, like everything's already enabled here. It's just like those matrix objects floating there. But yeah, I just have like the assets hidden underneath the scene. Oh, so you didn't even turn them off, they're just hidden away? Because that's always the tricky thing too, is like, well, I don't want this showing up in my scene, but if I hide the visibility on it, it's not gonna actually show up in the matrix, right? Because if you turn off the visibility. Exactly, you're not gonna see it. So that's a clever trick. You know, I always forget that too, it's just like, oh, just have the assets in your scene, just move them off camera. So yeah, you know, it's like a couple of those grass models and like the key thing to make it look good is just like getting that balance of getting the specular. So you get like a little shininess on this. Yeah. Yeah, I wanna, when we get into the material section, I can't wait, this is one of the, one of the rock shot, this shot, and the feathers. Like I wanna see, like everything, the hair, all that stuff with the thread. There's so many things I wanna pick your brain about materials-wise, but with all of these, so you built up all this stuff, as far as how you kinda art directed everything after it was cloned, did you go in Did you do any of the tricks of hiding matrix objects and using the MoGraph selection tags or anything like that? Or how did you kind of art direct, like this fern goes here or there's less ferns here? I want to have a patch here that's a certain kind of grass, like the lower grass, because it looks like there's like grass and then like a bigger vegetation. And then it looks like there's very natural, like little bald spots, little gaps in there? Yeah, to be honest, I didn't really need to do much art directing in that sense. It was more so the number of certain types of elements. Like obviously, grass is going to be everywhere. But like ferns, you just have like a lower number of ferns or like a lower number of these. And that's kind of how I approached it. The bamboo, I think, had that's where the art direction came in because, you know, it had to kind of fit within the composition and, you know, just make sure It looked good. But also the lighting for this scene was also like a little bit tricky. Because there was a certain level of lighting I liked for the logo, and then another lighting that I liked for the environment. So I had to do the project include and exclude. Oh, yeah. The little tricks there, yeah. Yeah. Like light linking, I still kind of use all the time. And then the spotlight, that's just to generate the God rays. Yeah, yeah, which is doing a lot there too. I love how easy it is to do light leaking in redshift versus octane. Like I hope, I hope they, you know, merge that whole system together. And that's kind of what I don't know the many reasons you use redshift. But as far as like me, I think I learned octane. That was my first third party renderer. And, you know, it's pretty easy to get used to. I think the thing about octane is like it's so easy to end up with a beautiful render just because you can't really fudge it much. It's totally unbiased and everything like that. But Redshift, you kind of have to work to get there. But as far as how the light system works and stuff like that, it's kind of like the samples as well. Like everything feels a lot more like works with my brain more because I was, you know, I'm coming from physical render that's built in, you know. And with the newest version of Redshift 2, like they made it. That's right, yeah. Like pretty simple with this new basic tab where you could just literally set what you want and it renders, but obviously if you want all the control to dial in those settings. You can really get your hands dirty with the sample settings. Yeah, and then the rocks and everything, it just kind of like manually placed it around the scene. And just to make sure it felt vibrant. But yeah, I mean, also this is a thing about like scene creation too. Let me just actually jump back here. Like I always only like to build what the camera is seeing. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. The background background is just like a texture. You know, and you just need to put like enough bamboo for it to get proper depth because the scene has like power locks. So is that one single piece of geometry for the ground that you just kind of deleted polygons wherever it didn't make sense to have them? Yeah, so there's like two areas. There's like this front area that has the grass and all the shrubbery. And then there's like a back plane that just holes all the bamboo. Just the trees, that's smart. Yeah, and this is all instance. it's all pretty, pretty light. There's just a lot. And the reason, like, this used to be a cloner, but I made it editable so I could actually move some of the pieces of bamboo around to add there in the scene a little bit. But the background, I think, is just a cloner because I didn't need to add that. Those placement tools, like, I haven't messed around with enough of them to figure out, like, because I think you can clone stuff, and then once you clone it, you can move it around. So it's like, that's such a huge thing. If that's like a totally new workflow that would prevent someone from having to like, oh, I just want to move a few things around. Like, oh, I got to break all this down and have all of these objects in my object manager. So it's really incredible as far as like scenes like this, how the software is kind of changing and involving. I'm using the place tool right now and it's just like snapping to the surface. Yeah, it's incredible. And you can scale it up, scale it down, all with a single click, you know? Yeah, it really takes a lot of time. That's pretty nice. I wonder how helpful that would have been for getting that art direction in those bamboo forests. And if you would have not had to have broken everything up like you did, it's just so crazy how your workflow can totally change within a matter of months with an update, you know? Yeah. So before you do those updates, man, But they always come out after you finish the project. Exactly. I mean, it's very important. I think it's really cool to show that you're only building out the parts of the scene that you need, because I know when I tried to do this stuff in the past, you would just get a landscape object, make it as big as you need it, and clone rocks and grass and everything on all of it. And that's just needless detail that you're not getting in your camera view and you're just really slowing down your scene. So, yeah, exactly. You only want to put like what is visible, you know, you just want to be always as efficient as possible. And of course it helps that you like, of course you're building towards the camera and it helps that you're just kind of like pushing in, you know, doing a little dolly in, but that's the part of, that's the beautiful part of designing to the camera. Exactly. So usually have like the camera move in mind. And it's just like this first parallax here. Oh, so you OK, this is a little bit of a orbit. Yeah, gotcha. And then push in. That's beautiful. Sweet. So a little bit of Redshift Matrix Scatter. I don't know what they what they officially call that Redshift. That's a good question. But yeah, it's I mean, Redshift has a lot of options because you could use X particles as well. But Matrix for me is just like the best way to go about it. And you have all the details with the falling leaves and stuff like that, which we'll get into when we get into animation, but there's just so much to dive into this specific scene. So that wasn't the matrix. That's just straight up cloner. That's cloner. Yeah. Cloner with some MoGraph. Real simple. Awesome. No X particles for that. Just that's a great kind of movement that you can can just get with MoGraph and no particle systems. Oh yeah, just a good old plane effector. Yeah, we can jump into that stuff later. I think now the next shot is the thread, right? This one is definitely, definitely a challenge. We saw the boards and stuff like that and your mood boards that influenced this shot, but like I wanna know how, like the challenges, the wins, the discoveries you made while building up this shot, because it seems, you know, it seems simple enough, but I'm interested in what actually happened. And the first process was like how to make like one of these strands put into it in like an efficient way that would render an reasonable amount of time. I'll just kind of like orbit the scene here as clearly. That is a lot of like just splines on splines on splines. It looks like. Exactly. And these are just guide splines. So on top of this, there's like hair that is cloned like 50, 50 times. I should go back a bit and see how we created one of these strands. So, you know, it'll take a little while to load, but let's just turn everything off and kind of build it up from scratch. All right. Let's go from the bottom bottom. First thing we have is like this spline. We don't have like, you know, too many points because you want to just keep everything efficient. Then we put that into a cloner. We move up here, we'll see that and I'll just enable this random effector. So when I put it into that cloner, we're just, you know, getting some clones. And then when we enable this twist, now we have all like those cloned strings beginning to wrap itself around each other. And the cool thing about this twist, I'll just enable this for a second. Yeah, so, you know, the cool thing about this twist is like the further you move it from the center axis is the more like twisty. Looks like a telephone cord now. Right, exactly. Remember those? Remember when phones had cords? Yeah, on the phone and you would just be like, Yeah, you just, yeah, just play around with it. But because we're also like randomizing the position, both in like the yx and z, that's why we can like this natural look, you know, we also this, it kind of makes the pattern feel different. So like you could get a ton of different possibilities there. So then we're taking this strand and then we're cloning that a few times. You see if I could find the way. So cloning a cloned spline. Exactly. And then we're going to enable this random. So now we have this group of different strands. And then what I would do, I would make a guide spline. And then I would spline wrap that entire setup to that spline. Spline wrapping is spline. Wow. Spline wrap inception. Yeah, I was going to say that's going to make Christopher Nolan proud. Yeah. You know, we can move this around, but it gets pretty heavy. Yeah. Because, you know, it's like, it's a lot of points. But everything's so procedural, though, that's so clever. Like the offset, like, because that's the key is that offset that you can do by just adjusting that ram effector. You know, that if you would have just clone that and made it like a matrix clone or a radio clone or something like that, you would kind of lose that a little bit as far as the flexibility there. Yeah, and you know, it came to a point where I did kind of have to bake it, to make it a little bit more efficient. Like it was only when I got to a point where I was happy with how this looked. You know, if we jump back into the original scene, and these are like the difference hair strands, like, you know, if we go back here, it's like strand one, strand two, strand three, It kind of divided them into like different sections. And I mean, just looking at it. It looks like it's a hairy situation, you would say. It is a hairy situation. From the last scene that we just saw, I took that entire thing and I just baked it down into one spline. Okay. So all those clone splines, before you did the spline wrap, you baked all that down. So you baked this down, essentially. Yeah, just so it's a little bit lighter to work with. But still, you know, it's like, there's a lot of points. Oh, wow. And can you adjust, like, can you, when everything's down to a single spline like that, can you still adjust like the adaptive and all that stuff if you wanted to make it light for a hot second or? Yeah, exactly. Okay, so that's like, that's huge too. So this is the thing, because this was so heavy, actually never worked with the splines like this. Actually created a proxy, which is here. And I toggled it with layers. So I'm just gonna do that now to show you. It's so clever, okay. So anytime something's too heavy, I make a proxy for it and it's probably just taking a little. So are these just like, are these the splines that are being used by the spline wrap? Yeah, exactly. So I'm going to turn off the proxies. You see, like when you have the proxies on now, it's so much easier to work with. But if you look at the splines themselves, it took like a lot of points off of them. I got you. Yeah, they're really got that janky. Yeah, exactly. No. So let's turn this off for now. But then there's also a bunch of guide splines. That's where we're getting all the animation from. It's a little bit difficult to see here. But essentially, I'm going to just copy this into another file so it's a little bit easier to see. I'm going to just turn off some of these secondary ones, but I'll explain to you guys what those were for to begin with. So you kind of see these just contracting in, kind of giving us like that tight turning motion. Oh, yeah, yeah. That we see here. So for these guide splines, we don't need like a ton of motion because like what we're wrapping to is super thick. So like a little motion here would mean like a pretty big motion for the other thing. Our animating these splines is just using a pose morph. So we have like two, essentially two splines, like say the spline one. Now I'll just kind of turn all these off. So we have like their original spline and where we want them, where we want it to go. And we could just kind of tween between those two positions using a pose morph. I can't wait to dive into how you did this with the pose morph because pose morphs, one of those features that when I discovered it, like it totally changed the way that I animate. and Cinema 4D, just mind blowing. I think I learned about it like four years after using Cinema 4D and I'm like, what? You can do what? Yeah, and the good thing is too is you can add easing to them. Right, yeah. Because the weird thing, yeah, like the point level animation's the only other way you can animate and for whatever reason, point level animation tracks are very weird with their easing. You can't add any which is super annoying. So yeah, I created all these guide splines, which then guides like the other largest splines that we see. You know, using it in the proxy, I could actually see how it was wrapped and how it was moved. And that's how you can properly space things out. So there's no like, you know, the no intersections, all those little gaps are big enough for the threads to go through. Like I can work with this in the scene file versus if I use like the render version, it would have been too, ha ha, hairy. Hey, that's my joke, man, come on. So I'm gonna just turn back the final hands. Yes, a lot heavier. Yeah. But this is only getting us like part way there. Right. So at the end of the day, you just got splines. Right, exactly. So what we needed to do here was clone more hair onto it. And what we're doing here, the amount of time I'm saying here. I know, are you saying here or here? Right. So what we did here was that I put this cloner into this connect just so we could attach it to these hair objects. If we're going to guides, it's all connected to this connect. Oh, interesting. OK, so you needed the connect objects. Like, if something's not working, just throw it in a connect object and see if it fixes it. It's like the Swiss Army knife. Yeah, because I was having problems like directly attaching the hair to the spline. So if throw it in a connect, that all worked. But the suite sources, there's a cloning functionality here. So when it clones and it's sweeping this, it's creating like 45 different clones for each one of these strands. Oh, wow. But it's also spacing them out as well. So that's where it's getting that thickness. Interesting. So, and that's, that's like just taking, Because is that the final look of that that strand? Yes. So let me just go into Redshift and you'll see what I mean. All right. So now we have all seen loaded. And we see all this beautiful here. But if I just drop this down to one, which essentially would just give us one shrook across our guide splines, you'll see how thin. Oh, yeah. It's just really, really thin. So that's not really doing that much for us. So to kind of give it, and also you kind of see these hair shooting out on the outside, like these strays to make it feel more natural. It's just like another layer I put on here. And I just extended to the root scale, the variation and the tip scale. Like you edit these numbers to root and tip And that's essentially like how far off from the guide spline that hair is going to be. And that's what's kind of given us like that. Low-wispy edges there. Yeah, it's all about those like little details. You know, like a tear that off. And yeah, and you know, this, I mean, it still looks good, but it just doesn't have that thickness you see. Right. And this is like a might, like a very zoomed in shot. So it's like almost too perfect, you know? Like you would, if you zoomed in close to a piece of thread or yarn, you would see all those little wispy edges and stuff like that. Right. And it's gonna feel like really pat and not as like light as this. So I put it back up to 45 and you can see how like thick it looks now and it's getting shadowing. But again, as you just mentioned, it's too perfect on the edges. Yeah, especially now. So then, you know, you add that extra hair layer. And now you just, you know, you see like a couple of trays coming off and it begins to feel more natural. But yeah, the hair is just doing so much of the heavy lifting. Like the renderer is doing a bunch of the heavy lifting. Yeah, that's crazy. I didn't even know that cloning option existed in the hair thing. Yeah, I mean, to do this with splines would have been just purely insane. Oh, sure. Because what, you're doing 45 times the amount of splines that are in your viewport right now. Yeah, it would have been insane. So, you know, it's essentially the same process. It's the guide spline, and then you have like this thicker spline, which is moved along that guide spline via a spline wrap. So like this whole cloner thing is being wrapped around like that guide spline to give it that shape, that bendiness. And then we're using this to be the guide for the hair to give it more volume like what we're seeing at render time here. And that took like a little bit of time to kind of figure out what the best practice to make that look good. Yeah, cause even with that last shot with the bamboo, it's just like you're using the matrices, you're keeping your scene light because, I feel like if you don't do that ahead of time and figure out what's the least heavy way I can make this scene, the more it lends itself to art direction and tweaking and stuff like that. Because I could only imagine if you're trying to tweak this and tweak the animation and just how painful that process would be if you're waiting for your scene to start catching up with your brain and what you want to do. Exactly. And that's why I made the proxy scene too. But yeah, this is why this scene looks like Super Duper Fall. It's just a lot of hair. Oh, great. Thank you, man. And what about the little wispy strands there? How did you create those? And I'm guessing you also did some kind of cloner magic there. The fuzz cloner magic, my friend, because the kink, the kinks with the those little floaties, the fuzz looks so good. Yeah, and again, it's just like it's all about those little details on you. Yeah, it's really subtle. It just kind of floating around. But when the camera right rotates, that's like depth to the scene, too. Yeah. It's kind of same with these bees. Like you have like these little elements that add to it. It really, really, really helps. I'll show you how the proxy. This is just so I can work with it. And how I'm doing this with the proxy. I'm just using that same thing. I use a tracer object over, but then because they were lighter, so there would be less points. And then I'm just rendering it using Redshift here. So, yeah, so Redshift, you could actually render spline directly using the tag. So that's just, yeah, it's just kind of what I'm using here. So you didn't even need hair to generate that stuff. You're using the tracer. Yeah. Gotcha. I'm using Redshift's hair renderer right in the tag. Okay. Yeah. Well, it's not even hair. It's just like, you know, Redshift, you could render a spline. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm just kind of using that as like a quick preview. And that's how I've been working until, you know, when it's final render time, I jump back into the layer, I switch them out and I hit render. That's awesome. And then there's just so much thoughtful execution of something that is like a pretty complex scene and using the proxies and stuff like that. I feel like, at least with a lot of work, I would do, it's like, I could do all this setup, but like I'm lazy and I just wanna get to the end result. And then when you figure out how much tweaking and art directing you wanna do, you're really putting yourself in a bad situation because you're just like, man, everything I want to do now to tweak it. It's like before we had Redshift or Octane, at a certain point you just move lights around like, you know what, that's good enough because I'm not waiting another three minutes to just render this scene to see what it looks like because it just gets annoying. So that's super smart to just see the way that you set everything up with the proxies and the last shot as well is really smart. Yeah, it's always good to just do the work up front and see if they had it down the road. Yeah, exactly. Now we got the B scene. Oh yeah, this one. I'm really, really proud of this one. I mean, the honeycomb looks incredible. And I'm really interested in like, because like with the yarn scene, right? Like you see a lot of that is like, it's just splines and then a lot of what you see and the end result is like the redshift hair and how you dial in the materials and stuff like that. But I'm super interested in like, what does the honeycomb look like with no textures? And here we go. So just some tubes and stuff. Exactly. Yeah, so the texture is actually doing so much of the... A lot of that work. Cause I was like, you did not model all those little honeycomb holes. Yeah, there's no way I was going to do that. Um, but yeah, I mean, this is the scene. Uh, it's just like these kind of like clusters of honeycomb and all the bees actually being generated by X particles. Oh, interesting. Okay. Oh, but I'll, I'll talk about that later. What a time being. I'm just going to disable the X particles so we can kind of talk about, uh, the honeycomb and actually let's talk about how I built the honeycomb. Yeah. that I mean, it's so it's so silly and simple. That's always my favorite part. But it looks so because I saw those references that you use, then they look so nice and organic and real. Yeah. And you know, that's always the challenge. Like, how do you create something that feels organic? And I'll just like, I'll use this one for an example as an example. So the first thing I did is literally just on all the table, this extrude, It just, I just drew this shape. The basic form of whatever that little piece of honeycomb would look like. And I extruded it and got a nice like extrude. Just kind of zoom in here so you get a, an angle of it. And then I put it, created a volume out of it and then meshed it. So then it felt like a little bit more organic. Yeah. And it had more polygons that I could work with, especially because I'm using this placement in the texture. And then I took that and I used a bender former dude That gives me that rap And that's it. That's it man man volume modeling volume builder is Such a godsend it is what I did. I just like created a couple of variations using that same setup Yeah, I just drew that spline put an extrude put in a volume builder and then and just rotated it. And that's kind of how I got like, I made five, just to have some variations, different scales, different shapes. I love how volume modeling makes building stuff like this accessible, because you wouldn't really have been able to do something like this otherwise without it, without some pretty intense sculpting and some knowledge of how to manipulate polygons and do some bit of modeling. but I just love that little bit of displacement on there too. That's what you'd be left with in R19. Right, yeah, exactly. Well, there we go, there's your honeycomb. You do an extrude, it looks like this, but you throw it on and it just makes it feel more So good, yeah. Organic, it gives you more polygons to work with. And then mind these being heavy because they are gonna be displaced. Well, displacement maps are going to be applied. So if it was heavy, it was good because it will just give me more polygons to work with. And now there's that remesh that they added recently too that really adds, like makes working with these volume models even more efficient. Because if you did want to lighten it, you could easily do that. And it's crazy like how much, and you mentioned this before, how much you do sketching out your concept before you ever jump into Cinema 4D because I feel like if I'm thinking of a honeycomb and I wanna do a bee scene with a honeycomb hive or something like that, I think of like, your like almost cartoonish hive or like just the little, like the beekeeping little dresser drawer with stuff in it. Like I would have never have known that this kind of honeycomb actually exists with these really cool tubes. It's like a cathedral of bees and honey. And that's why like breath is so important. Like just doing some visual research, you can kind of find really interesting visual things for a thing that you might traditionally think looks a certain way. Yeah, I just assumed when you made it like this that it was totally like some abstract honeycomb thing, but it's like, nope, this is based on reality. Right. And it just looks really dope. But it's interesting too, because Honeycomb could take any shape, which is cool. Right. It kind of gives you a big playground to play with. But yeah, that's the crux of it. And then I took that, and I actually took each one of the models and kind of created these little clusters. And then I put it into a fracture object. I mean, we'll get into the animation after. But these are all being animated with more graph, pretty much, with a nice camera move. But yeah, it comes out of comp. Comp was definitely played a big role in this one. Yeah, this is like that hair scene where what you see in the viewport, or even all of the shots so far, it's like you see something in the viewport, and you're like, how do you get that from that? Yeah. And parts of it too was just like having an idea of, you know, where you could push it and calm. But even like, you know, this, I mean, this still, you know, it looks like wax. It looks like that B wax. But you know, again, it's just like compared to this, it's just like, you know, you could totally, yeah, you could take it and you could, you could push it. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a quick kind of side by side. I can't wait to dive into the materials on this and the comp and all that stuff. Suisse, we got the the bees and then we go to the birds which we're kind of joking beforehand. I was like was that this little thing where you got the birds and the bee shots together too but you said that that was totally coincidental right? I only realized it when you mentioned it. Any thought before that? So funny. I guess let's talk about the feather face now. Yeah. Yeah, I want to see how you built those feathers. Because you said like those weren't models like you made those from scratch. Exactly. Nice. You know what's funny? And this is something a lot of people probably don't know. Cinema 4D. And I only discovered this when I was making this project. Cinema 4D has a feather object. That's insane. Yeah. Like it's. Yeah, it's right there. It's right, where is it? It's where the hair is, right? The feather. And you could, it has like a whole rig where you can really kind of dial in the different settings, like even like where the gaps are, you could dial that in, how big those gaps are. So when I saw that, I was like, wow, that's crazy. And you could edit the profile. I mean, it's so cool. That is awesome. Play around with it. You can get some really cool looking feathers. It can control like how the profile, yeah, like how the feather actually sweeps on the outside here. Wow, that's so much control there. I'm assuming you used a reference to try to dial in in. Did you want to get like a specific bird? Like it almost looks like it's a, you know, you're at this purplish blue, like a peacock feather or something. Yeah, I didn't get a reference for the actual feather itself, but for the color, I think I saw an image, but I can't remember which one. But I wanted to do something in the cooler side. Yeah. So that's why I did that. So that's, you know, how I created the feathers. And it's all, you know, it's all splines. So I rendered rendered that with like the red shift here render. Yes. Yes. Yes. And for was there any because this looks pretty dense, like as far as like detail on the splines, did you also have any kind of proxy workflows for this? No, because I could instance. Okay. Yeah, Redshift just renders hair, which is nice. Like you put a hair material on like hair and it renders, you don't even have to put a tag on it or anything. Oh, awesome. Yeah. So I just made like a hair material for for that and yeah that's how we got our feathers so that's the first thing and this scene isn't too heavy because all these are instants for the most part but all the feathers are like mapped on to these rings exactly I'll just kind of disable this so you can see oh cool yeah so that's a lot of splines yeah so I I think a lot of these, yeah, so these are just like a cloner of lines with a step effector that just made them like bigger as it came down. And then like a random effector to just kind of give it like some random rotation so it didn't feel like too, too uniform. It's like that first shot with the wood planks. Exactly. You always want to kind of give it some, you know, variations so it feels more natural. So I hit the top feathers. Yeah, so those top feathers cloned on to the splines, which are also in a cloner. And so these are kind of acting as like a guide so I could kind of art direct, you know, where those feathers are going. Because if you're like, how would I line this up manually to look like this? And that's what I was thinking. Like how would it be attached to a bird? And it would be like Rose kind of ascending upwards. So it kind of recreated that same concept, but in CG. And I created two layers just to have like a little bit more control of the animation. So why you see like it's going from red to white is because removing like a more graph effect to here. And that's essentially controlling how it comes up and comes down. Yeah, it's being built off of a clone. But to get the nuance animation here was definitely like a little bit tricky. Yeah, I can't wait to get it because all I mean all the animation in all of these shots are so subtle and natural and graceful and just really beautiful. But that's crazy. Yeah, I had no idea that there was the hair just or not the hair but the just the feather object that just boom right in there. that does a lot of the work for you and then just, you know, cloning all that stuff along a spline, just super, super simple. Yeah. As I always say, it's like the execution seems simple, but like the path to get to the simplicity is always tricky. Well, I mean, and if we go to that last shot, which is, I mean, not to say let's say it derogatorily, but like, it's the simplest of all, where again, you bought those very expensive cube models. That was the one key. But, you know, it's, I really think that that final shot where it's literally like this, you know, New Mexico kind of architecture scene with the, you know, cubish design, it's just like such a testament to how important and on top of that, you have like a couple cacti in there. But like it's everything in that shot is relying on the, you know, your your design fundamentals, your composition skills, your lighting, your colors, you know, because if you just look at like if if you open up that shot, and you look at the C4D file, like it's literally just a bunch cubes, you know. Yeah. Yeah. This this scene was really more about just creating something aesthetically pleasing. It's not like the most technical scene. I mean, it's pretty simple for the most part. Right. But there's I don't know, there's like a, even though it's 3D, there's like a graphic nature to it with like a lot of bold solid colors and then like harsh lighting. Yeah. That almost gives it like a cool kind of graphic sense, which I also like and I kind of like the pink. And you got the, you know, like your camera that you're using is it, it looks like almost isometric and that's why I think gives it that like really cool design, geometrical, kind of aesthetic to the whole thing. Yeah, and it's not actually just like a normal, it's a normal camera. Oh really? What's that vocal? I think it's the 326 Stan. Oh wow. So I mean, I mean, it just looks like you just position the angles in a way that looks really awesome. Yeah, it just did like, yeah, it's all just a 90 degrees. But yeah, I mean, it's not too much to the scene. It's, you know, this the sunset, the animation is really coming from the lighting, but the logo is animating in the shot as well, which is Compton Nuke. So the scene couldn't be too distracting. But You know, we still got some movement from the lighting itself. So. And as far as like the steps, like all this stuff looks pretty self-explanatory for modeling, like I think, you know, you didn't need to do any crazy bulls or anything like that. Did you use bulls or did you actually do the? Yeah, I just saw these things. They just kind of pulled out bull things out and. And for the stairs, yeah, the stairs all the time is just a cloner with like a step effect to. Yeah. Yeah. Easy peasy. Exactly. Nothing. Nothing much to this scene. Now, when you came to this end where you just like, holy cow, the setup for the the strands and the feathers and just everything, you're just like, I'm just going to give myself a nice light, easy to execute scene that I can just really show my design skills here versus like, you know, technical. Yeah, I mean, part of it was that. Yeah. It was like, just like, I'm exhausted. I just need one more shot. Let's buy some cubes and some cacti. Yeah. But also, you know, still wanted to keep like the visual integrity. And this was like, just again, like, if you make smart design decisions, you could still make something beautiful that doesn't feel like super duper insane. And I think like the scene was the right balance too, because it was the scene that we would see the graphic logo and that would transition us. So it couldn't also be too distracting where, you know, we couldn't read any of the type. So. And I think that's where, you know, the simplicity of a scene is, it's something that I struggle with because I feel like, you know, the more stuff you can put in the more you can kind of maybe cover up for your own shortcomings in certain areas like, you know, color theory or understanding of how colors work and lighting even. But like this scene, you really have to be confident in your abilities and your design sensibilities to have something like this and pull it off so beautifully because like, yeah, if you tell a bunch of 3D The artist like, yeah, just put a bunch of cubes in a scene and light it really nice and make it look beautiful. That's not an easy task, you know, because you're really relying on your lighting skills and your composition skills and design sensibilities and taste to really drive all of that. And I think that's, you know, you have all of the things, like technical ability and that eye for design that actually looks really cool where it's all flattened out and kind of 2D-ish. Yeah, that was pretty sweet. Where to put the sun was a big thing because you see how much the scene changes depending on the way the lighting hits. The design is completely different. Your eye is going so many different places depending on where that light is. Exactly. So that was definitely something how to consider like what's like a really good place for that light to set to make it feel nice and dynamic.",
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+      "text": " And that's a beauty emograph. It's like you could you could kind of build these complicating looking things that are actually really simple and pretty easy to, you know, navigate and control, which is nice. And that's, again, like how I like to always approach this kind of stuff. So Sakane, I'm so excited to get into the nitty gritty and starting geeking out about like what you did inside of Cinema 4D to like execute all of these awesome shots here. And I think one of the main questions I always love asking artists is like how much of this work was modeled by you, how much of it was like sourced models and sourced materials and textures and stuff like that because like these rock textures look beautiful. You know, there's some plant models in there as well, which I'm assuming you probably didn't model yourself, but But how much of this was assets that you found and sourced and how much of it was made from scratch? Yeah, actually, surprisingly, I felt like I modeled many of the things in a lot of these shots minus the forest one. I obviously didn't model all these plants. No one got time for that. But yeah, you know, most of it is I've done myself. Reason being like when you want something and I'll just kind of go through this shot by shots so we can, you know, die suck you'd see him. But if you want to get something that's bespoke and unique, more than likely you have to make it yourself or modify a model to kind of suit your needs. So for this one, I mean, the room is actually made up of like really simple sweep nib shapes. But the plants themselves, they like mega scan models moving on to the next one. These stones, I just modeled myself just using a sphere and the sculpture sculpt tools in cinema 40. Really, really simple to get like that organic shape. Yeah, I modeled nothing in here. Well, the bamboo maybe because it's like a like a tube or something. Yeah, it's so much of that is like, you know, material. It's like it's a cylinder and a really awesome material, you know, exactly. Yeah. So for this scene, pretty much everything was pre-made models. Yeah, this everything in here is bespoke and created by me. Same of this scene besides the bees. I had to grab a bee model. Fevers I made in Cinema 40. Interesting. All right. This scene. Yeah, it's modeled besides the cocktail. But yeah. Yeah, you didn't buy cubes online from like TurboSquad. Those are your custom cubes. Dude, this was 100 bucks a cube, bro. Yeah, I love like, you know, with the advent of mega scans and all this kind of stuff, it's so easy to get all these models and just kind of populate your scenes with them and give whatever kind of vibe you want. Like the addition of the cactus in this end shot, it's like, oh, we could be in New Mexico or something like that with that kind of vibe. Now, as far as me, we'll just go shot by shot, you know, how you kind of built up each individual thing. So you've got some project files first to dig around in. Yeah, let's start with this one. Yeah, let's do it. And the first thing about this one was just trying to figure out like how to create this organic shape. It's really just built out of a lot of like simple shapes. So we would kind of like start with this exterior layer. So this is just here to kind of keep the light out. So Let's go ahead and disable that too. This one. So we can see this whole shape. It just made up of these sweep noobs, and that's all within a cloner. So if I disable that cloner and this fracture, you would see it's all built up of just irregular sweep noobs. So you got a bunch of like hand like custom adjusted swept splines in there this Like it's only really made up of one Type of oh, yeah, it's just one and how we're getting all that variation that we're seeing Like when I enable the mo graph. Yeah, this so this is all being kind of generated and by MoGraph, which is nice. It's all procedural for the most part. And then we just have this, see if we can get a nice angle here, I thought. It's such a small seat to navigate because there's so many things. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing too, is building to scale with all this stuff. Like I assume you probably didn't adjust the scale of those plant models or anything like that. I feel like that's such a lost thing. Like I didn't learn about that until I started really diving into Redshift and Octane and these physically based renders, like everything is physically based. So it's gotta be the correct real world scale in here. But yeah, it's kind of annoying to navigate around when you're dealing with dinky objects. Yeah, exactly. So usually I put down a cube and like this cube is just a little shorter than a human. So that's kind of, yeah, like if you put like for, you know, Fred that used to be the default. Yeah, always put the little stick figure dude in there. Exactly. He would come up around here. So kind of I got you. This was like my human height base. So actually physically put a human in there. So yeah, and just like conceptually trying to figure out how to do the scene. Again, I always like to do things the easiest way possible. So what I did is I created this one shape and I had it cloned. But you can see it here like we have a fracture object. And the reason the reason that is is because like when I actually had to see like if he went back to the animation itself Like you could see there's like plants attached to the movement. Oh Wow, I did I didn't notice that until just now it really helps integrate everything in there. Wow, right? So then to get those plants to move with the environment I needed to make that clonor editable and like make the plant like a child of, like I had to put the plant in that queue. So it moved. Physically in that hierarchy. Exactly. Yeah. So it kind of moved with demograph, but I'll kind of show you what's happening here. So if I re-enabled this, now we're seeing like we're getting this nice kind of organic looking environment. And all that's really happening here, if we jump into the effectors. This is like a random effector just to get a little bit of random motion in here, random motion. But then it's really just a step effector that's giving a lot of the organic nature. And I'll jump into that and explain what's happening here. So what we're doing is altering the scale, but not knowing why it acts as just the x and the z. But we're doing this using this pattern here. So that's kind of like, instead of it just being like linear and just scaling everything down, it's scaling like certain parts like here, but then not this area. So it's kind of giving us like that really kind of organic shape. And that's really like the crux of what is kind of giving us that look. Again, if I just turn this on and off until the random effector. The step effectors such a great way to be able to control that effect of the strength, cause you would think like, oh, use a falloff or something like that. But there's so many low hidden features within all these old effectors that we've been using for years, you know what I mean? It's almost like you forget about the step effector and these different effectors. Exactly. But we are using some falloff to kind of give us that animation. Oh, okay. There's like a huge cube falloff. So five friends. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the scene itself is really tall. It's actually something really cool in the step effector. I think you can actually animate that spline and offset it. Oh, yes. I believe. Yes. Which is like another thing where it's like, oh, wow, I didn't like I always forget that that little fact that you can just set up this procedural animation like undulated. I see a lot of people with the wavy kind of animations. and that's all procedural, like no keyframes whatsoever. You just control it by that spline graph. And we'll get into the animation a little bit later, but mostly like just how you built this. It's crazy because you, like when I looked at this, I was like, this can't be just one single like piece of geometry, like there's gotta be a bunch of different layered stuff like that. And it's just incredible how much organic randomness and variety you can get with just a single object using MoGraph. You know? Yeah, 100%. And that's a beauty of MoGraph. It's like you could kind of build these complicating looking things that are actually really simple and pretty easy to, you know, navigate and control, which is nice. That's, again, like how I like to always approach this kind of stuff. And then, you know, I wanted to put like some trees and stuff in the air just to kind of add to that like natural vibe since everything was made out of wood to just compliment the aesthetic. Yeah, I feel like I wish I worked in this space. Yeah, like I just set up my stand-up desk and just plopped right where your logo is. Yeah, I mean, that's the feeling I wanted to carry across like this kind of like futuristic, cool working space. And again, just like that random effectors. You know, it's like kind of given those like little imperfections, like with the random, without the random, it just feels too, too uniform. So yeah, it's just like those little subtle touches you want to add to just make it feel like a little bit more dynamic. It was that, and you know, just choosing some really nice wood textures. Um, a lot of these are just pulled online and it just piped the correct maps into the correct areas. Do you use COO textures or sites like that? Yeah, I think I probably pulled some of these from Polygon. Yeah, I mean, those asset sites are just incredible. And the detail and the bump maps and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. It's really, really great. Like you go a long way with just like a good bump map, a good roughness, and a good diffuse, especially for this type of stuff. So the texturing here wasn't bad at all. It was really just coming up with the technique to create this type of space and make it make it feel like it was alive. I think that was a pretty important part of it. Yes, it's such a welcoming space. It's like you're you're just fed down this area. You got the really warm lighting and stuff like that. Just it sets the mood of your real so well with this nice warm, comfortable. It's like everything's undulating. It's like it wants the room wants to hug you and bring you along this journey through your real. Let's check out the rock shot where we're going from like a Zen room to some like Zen floating like magic crystals. So how is that? You said that you modeled all of this stuff using some sculpting, right? Precisely. Yeah. So, you know, I didn't want to go on download stones. I just thought, you know, stupidly. Right. like, if I had to show you an example like it, it's so easy to kind of just do this type of stuff, you just, you know, give it enough polygons. And immediately, like if you just shrink it down and move it out, you'll already start to get someone that shape. Right. It's just like a matter of like adding some of those imperfections. So if I go into like these brushes and they add like a grab and I made this bigger, like, you know, I could make this way, way bigger. Just kind of, you know, move it around, just add like some little imperfections here and there to make it feel like more organic. And yeah, that's pretty much the technique I used to, I mean, there's nothing like this is the stone. It's, you're right, it's nothing, but it's, it's great. Like I don't consider myself a great model or anything like that. And I feel like there's so many people out there that don't even realize the sculpting tools are not just for like sculpting highly detailed faces and characters and highly detailed meshes. Like you can literally use these brush tools just to add that little bit of imperfection, little organic kind of feel to these rocks. And I think, you know, it's the little things that really sell it, you know, and I know we've talked before and you have such a great eye for detail and just adding just that subtle little like the variations just that totally changes everything and makes everything look that much more realistic. That was the key too to just create like a few varying type systems like some flat some a little bit thicker you know just so it all doesn't feel super duper uniform. Right yeah everything feels really really natural and like you just picked up these rocks and you know just combined them all together you know it just looks so natural and the variety is great. As far as uh we'll get into the the animating this a little bit better in the next couple sections here but it looks like we got a lot of MoGraph here as well but like you hand placed a lot of these objects too so you know it's always this little dance between like, can I achieve this with a cloner and doing some randomness or am I just going to get what I want by just literally placing things, you know? Yeah, for this stuff, you know, because like it's so unique in this book, I had to actually hand place these just, you know, because I had like a certain shape and design I had in mind. So just to get that, you know, and it was kind of cool to set it up in a way where you think, could this actually balance? Oh, I don't know. Is it? You know, like do some real world tests, like give me some rocks. Let's see. Right. But also make it, you know, like how a certain level of tension, like this big one is like balancing on this super, super small one here. Yeah. I'm afraid this woman. So I mean, you could easily test this. Just turn on dynamics, you know, watch it fall apart and let it fall. If I was like, well, my calculations were off. Yeah. But I mean, you also have floating rocks. So, you know, I don't know how realistic we want to get there, you know, defying gravity. Awesome. So a little bit of sculpting action here. And I think it's really important to show how useful the sculpting tools are in just general MoGraphy kind of purposes, you know? Now, as far as the next shot, this is like I want to live in this shot and just like do some Zen meditation. And one thing I want to point out is that I know, I don't know if you, a lot of people know this, but you primarily use Redshift to render. And when we were talking about this before recording, I was like, you know, that's incredible that you got such a good looking nature shot in Redshift because I feel like nature shots and something like this is the domain of octane and everyone talks about octane scatter and how it's so perfect for this kind of thing. So I guess I would just wanna see like, how you achieve such amazing realism with Redshift, kind of tricks and tips do you have for doing something like this? And then how do you just like build up the scene? Like, as far as I know, Redshift doesn't really have a scatter, like Octane's scatter kind of deal. So I assume you relied a lot on just like MoGraph, like C40 MoGraph stuff to kind of populate everything up easily. Yeah, I don't need a scasa when I have the Matrix object. What are you talking about? Yeah, I mean, you know, like the Matrix object is a super duper light object to work with, especially the viewport. And recently, I think, Reg... Well, I guess recently at the time that I made this, Regshift that enabled being able to instance objects on a matrix object and seeing that, I'm like, oh, this is perfect because I can work with it within the scene and at render time, it kind of pop plates everything. So if I turn off all these matrix objects, you will see that it's just like a ground play in with displacement, that's the base. And then as you enable some of these matrix objects, you kind of see like, it's just like a layering different elements. And that's what makes the scene feel really good. If you have like, like the same plants all the time, and maybe I'll just kind of zoom in here. So yeah, I mean, the first thing we have here, some, you know, some grass, as you start to build up the, you know, forestry, that's how it begins to look more realistic. Because now on top of the grass, we have some larger shrubs. Like if I hop into this redshift object here, we see the objects that are being kind of cloned on here. And these are all stored in this area here. These are the different plant assets that we're kind of cloning on. And then. Not too familiar with, because this is the, is this redshift instance system? Exactly. So this is all instance. You see how as soon as I hit this, like as soon as I hit it, And it's like hundreds of plants. It's just, boom, it begins to render. You just have to literally have all the models that you want to, all the plant models that you want to clone and have that just, you just have that in a hierarchy somewhere that's hidden, I guess. And then you just clone these matrices all over the place. Because you can see on the left, like there's just all these little tiny cubes and those are the matrices. And within the, I guess that's a, is that a Redshift object tag? I'll just do a quick example to kind of showcase how it looks. I feel like I'm totally unfamiliar with using the Redshift instance stuff. Cause you said, is it a fairly new feature? Sometime last year, maybe a year before. Okay. Okay. At this point, it's been also a little bit like a little while ish. Gotcha. This is the thing about using like a matrix, you know, you could, you could like, you know, you can really crack it up in the scene. Right. Yeah. Like this is in, you know, in the scene. You could probably drop a little on those zero here and hopefully it doesn't explode. Well, it's like a million, you know, it's like a million different things in here. You can always just turn that off as well. And, you know, that works. But let's, no, no, let's do like, what is this, 10,000? Maybe a hundred thousand. Why not a million? Let's do it. Yeah, like a million and like that. Let's go high. Let's drop the scale of these so we could actually kind of just, you know, wow. Right. Actually, see, yeah. Yeah. That's even with the scale low. There's still so many of them. We could drop these even lower. What does a million of these look like when they're really tiny? I mean, it's basically like, you know, little flakes of snow. Oh, yeah. I just realized I was putting this into the wrong place. That's why I didn't. Oh, there you go. All right, there you go. So what's the object we could put in here? Let's use our 21. New thing. I don't know. The new asset browser. Yeah. Yeah, the placement tools are incredible. Like I feel like for this kind of shot, if you had it and built it using it, it would probably been pretty nice, putting those, the like rock stairway and stuff like that. Yeah, even placing those rocks in the last shot and make sure that they're like actually resting on the stones. It's it's so nice. Okay. There we go. Close that. It's going to make it editable. Boom. There's a person drink it down. And then Kia's. Let's just create a red shift tag. And it's super simple. going to make sure it's on the matrix objects. There's already the particles tab. OK. All you got to do. Yeah, like this is a smart tag. So once it's on an object that can close or create particles, that particle table comes up automatically. I got you. I feel like I've never, why I've never seen that is because I've never placed that tag on a matrix object. Exactly. Or if you do it on like an X particles image or something like that. And there's a feel here for custom objects. We can literally throw anything in here. And then boom. I hit render and see what happens. Crush your fingers. We don't make something crash here. And now will they be shrunk down to the size of that the matrix, the matrices then? Yeah. Gotcha. Because they'll they'll they'll adapt to that size, I guess. But oh, man. They're all lying down. I think I just need to. But I mean, that's a million of these objects. That's incredible. I mean, this is this is like your octane scatter for those of you out there that might not realize that, you know, something like this is possible within Redshift. Exactly. And it's nice too, because you could just alter the scale, you know, in the target itself. Oh, there you go. Now, can you like say you want to because you can place a bunch of different objects in there. Is there any way to control the randomness between the two different figures in there? Could you easily randomize with, would you use MoGraph for that? Yeah, that's a good question. So usually what I would do, if I want a lot of control, I would just make another matrix. Just make another matrix and totally be able to control that count. Yeah, it's another one of those things where it's like, how do I wanna do the random route just go through all these seeds and hope that I find a good random seed that works for me, or do I just have full control by making two separate matrix systems or cloner systems and getting exactly what I want, you know, full art directability. And yeah, I mean, like this is so... That's so fast. Yeah. Let me just put the... That's incredible. The under sampling all on. So... So the under sampling, I feel like, is another one of those things that probably people don't don't know too much about as far as like speeding up your render. So basically that's just downresing in the Redshift render view. So it just get a snappier feedback. Correct. Yeah. So it just like makes everything look a lot better. And then all you need to do is just create a sun sky rig and boom. Boom. You got a new, you got the 2021 reel already on its way. That's the first shot. I mean, this is so strange. If you never want to get a job again, just start with it. Or really weird jobs, start with this. Exactly. This is a new NFT, sells for 100 bucks. 100,000, 100,000 bucks. Mint it, mint it. Exactly. This front is a depth of field for chits and giggles. I mean, let's do it. Why stop? Right. You are really going to mint this after this. I feel like it myself. I think it would. No effort NFTs. It's a thing. Sometimes you can win the jackpot with these. Exactly. That's essentially that technique. So you use this for, yeah. So you walk through all the matrix objects that you didn't name, by the way. So great job there. Close. I'm going to ding you there. Ha ha ha. The matrix was matrix tree. But then I just knew it was like a different type of shrubbery. So you have how many different types of shrubbery do you have in there? Because I mean, this is, like you said, that's kind of the key to making this look so natural and realistic is, you know, you're not just using one clump of grass and calling it a day. Exactly. I think in this first one, we have like three different blades of grass. Maybe let me see if I could find specifically which asset that is and then find it within the scene so we get an idea of how that looks like. Yeah, it's so cool the way that the, you know, this Redshift scatter system works is that it totally keeps your viewport light as well. Exactly, it's great. So this, I mean, like, exactly, like everything's already enabled here. It's just like those matrix objects floating there. But yeah, I just have like the assets hidden underneath the scene. Oh, so you didn't even turn them off, they're just hidden away? Because that's always the tricky thing too, is like, well, I don't want this showing up in my scene, but if I hide the visibility on it, it's not gonna actually show up in the matrix, right? Because if you turn off the visibility. Exactly, you're not gonna see it. So that's a clever trick. You know, I always forget that too, it's just like, oh, just have the assets in your scene, just move them off camera. So yeah, you know, it's like a couple of those grass models and like the key thing to make it look good is just like getting that balance of getting the specular. So you get like a little shininess on this. Yeah. Yeah, I wanna, when we get into the material section, I can't wait, this is one of the, one of the rock shot, this shot, and the feathers. Like I wanna see, like everything, the hair, all that stuff with the thread. There's so many things I wanna pick your brain about materials-wise, but with all of these, so you built up all this stuff, as far as how you kinda art directed everything after it was cloned, did you go in Did you do any of the tricks of hiding matrix objects and using the MoGraph selection tags or anything like that? Or how did you kind of art direct, like this fern goes here or there's less ferns here? I want to have a patch here that's a certain kind of grass, like the lower grass, because it looks like there's like grass and then like a bigger vegetation. And then it looks like there's very natural, like little bald spots, little gaps in there? Yeah, to be honest, I didn't really need to do much art directing in that sense. It was more so the number of certain types of elements. Like obviously, grass is going to be everywhere. But like ferns, you just have like a lower number of ferns or like a lower number of these. And that's kind of how I approached it. The bamboo, I think, had that's where the art direction came in because, you know, it had to kind of fit within the composition and, you know, just make sure It looked good. But also the lighting for this scene was also like a little bit tricky. Because there was a certain level of lighting I liked for the logo, and then another lighting that I liked for the environment. So I had to do the project include and exclude. Oh, yeah. The little tricks there, yeah. Yeah. Like light linking, I still kind of use all the time. And then the spotlight, that's just to generate the God rays. Yeah, yeah, which is doing a lot there too. I love how easy it is to do light leaking in redshift versus octane. Like I hope, I hope they, you know, merge that whole system together. And that's kind of what I don't know the many reasons you use redshift. But as far as like me, I think I learned octane. That was my first third party renderer. And, you know, it's pretty easy to get used to. I think the thing about octane is like it's so easy to end up with a beautiful render just because you can't really fudge it much. It's totally unbiased and everything like that. But Redshift, you kind of have to work to get there. But as far as how the light system works and stuff like that, it's kind of like the samples as well. Like everything feels a lot more like works with my brain more because I was, you know, I'm coming from physical render that's built in, you know. And with the newest version of Redshift 2, like they made it. That's right, yeah. Like pretty simple with this new basic tab where you could just literally set what you want and it renders, but obviously if you want all the control to dial in those settings. You can really get your hands dirty with the sample settings. Yeah, and then the rocks and everything, it just kind of like manually placed it around the scene. And just to make sure it felt vibrant. But yeah, I mean, also this is a thing about like scene creation too. Let me just actually jump back here. Like I always only like to build what the camera is seeing. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. The background background is just like a texture. You know, and you just need to put like enough bamboo for it to get proper depth because the scene has like power locks. So is that one single piece of geometry for the ground that you just kind of deleted polygons wherever it didn't make sense to have them? Yeah, so there's like two areas. There's like this front area that has the grass and all the shrubbery. And then there's like a back plane that just holes all the bamboo. Just the trees, that's smart. Yeah, and this is all instance. it's all pretty, pretty light. There's just a lot. And the reason, like, this used to be a cloner, but I made it editable so I could actually move some of the pieces of bamboo around to add there in the scene a little bit. But the background, I think, is just a cloner because I didn't need to add that. Those placement tools, like, I haven't messed around with enough of them to figure out, like, because I think you can clone stuff, and then once you clone it, you can move it around. So it's like, that's such a huge thing. If that's like a totally new workflow that would prevent someone from having to like, oh, I just want to move a few things around. Like, oh, I got to break all this down and have all of these objects in my object manager. So it's really incredible as far as like scenes like this, how the software is kind of changing and involving. I'm using the place tool right now and it's just like snapping to the surface. Yeah, it's incredible. And you can scale it up, scale it down, all with a single click, you know? Yeah, it really takes a lot of time. That's pretty nice. I wonder how helpful that would have been for getting that art direction in those bamboo forests. And if you would have not had to have broken everything up like you did, it's just so crazy how your workflow can totally change within a matter of months with an update, you know? Yeah. So before you do those updates, man, But they always come out after you finish the project. Exactly. I mean, it's very important. I think it's really cool to show that you're only building out the parts of the scene that you need, because I know when I tried to do this stuff in the past, you would just get a landscape object, make it as big as you need it, and clone rocks and grass and everything on all of it. And that's just needless detail that you're not getting in your camera view and you're just really slowing down your scene. So, yeah, exactly. You only want to put like what is visible, you know, you just want to be always as efficient as possible. And of course it helps that you like, of course you're building towards the camera and it helps that you're just kind of like pushing in, you know, doing a little dolly in, but that's the part of, that's the beautiful part of designing to the camera. Exactly. So usually have like the camera move in mind. And it's just like this first parallax here. Oh, so you OK, this is a little bit of a orbit. Yeah, gotcha. And then push in. That's beautiful. Sweet. So a little bit of Redshift Matrix Scatter. I don't know what they what they officially call that Redshift. That's a good question. But yeah, it's I mean, Redshift has a lot of options because you could use X particles as well. But Matrix for me is just like the best way to go about it. And you have all the details with the falling leaves and stuff like that, which we'll get into when we get into animation, but there's just so much to dive into this specific scene. So that wasn't the matrix. That's just straight up cloner. That's cloner. Yeah. Cloner with some MoGraph. Real simple. Awesome. No X particles for that. Just that's a great kind of movement that you can can just get with MoGraph and no particle systems. Oh yeah, just a good old plane effector. Yeah, we can jump into that stuff later. I think now the next shot is the thread, right? This one is definitely, definitely a challenge. We saw the boards and stuff like that and your mood boards that influenced this shot, but like I wanna know how, like the challenges, the wins, the discoveries you made while building up this shot, because it seems, you know, it seems simple enough, but I'm interested in what actually happened. And the first process was like how to make like one of these strands put into it in like an efficient way that would render an reasonable amount of time. I'll just kind of like orbit the scene here as clearly. That is a lot of like just splines on splines on splines. It looks like. Exactly. And these are just guide splines. So on top of this, there's like hair that is cloned like 50, 50 times. I should go back a bit and see how we created one of these strands. So, you know, it'll take a little while to load, but let's just turn everything off and kind of build it up from scratch. All right. Let's go from the bottom bottom. First thing we have is like this spline. We don't have like, you know, too many points because you want to just keep everything efficient. Then we put that into a cloner. We move up here, we'll see that and I'll just enable this random effector. So when I put it into that cloner, we're just, you know, getting some clones. And then when we enable this twist, now we have all like those cloned strings beginning to wrap itself around each other. And the cool thing about this twist, I'll just enable this for a second. Yeah, so, you know, the cool thing about this twist is like the further you move it from the center axis is the more like twisty. Looks like a telephone cord now. Right, exactly. Remember those? Remember when phones had cords? Yeah, on the phone and you would just be like, Yeah, you just, yeah, just play around with it. But because we're also like randomizing the position, both in like the yx and z, that's why we can like this natural look, you know, we also this, it kind of makes the pattern feel different. So like you could get a ton of different possibilities there. So then we're taking this strand and then we're cloning that a few times. You see if I could find the way. So cloning a cloned spline. Exactly. And then we're going to enable this random. So now we have this group of different strands. And then what I would do, I would make a guide spline. And then I would spline wrap that entire setup to that spline. Spline wrapping is spline. Wow. Spline wrap inception. Yeah, I was going to say that's going to make Christopher Nolan proud. Yeah. You know, we can move this around, but it gets pretty heavy. Yeah. Because, you know, it's like, it's a lot of points. But everything's so procedural, though, that's so clever. Like the offset, like, because that's the key is that offset that you can do by just adjusting that ram effector. You know, that if you would have just clone that and made it like a matrix clone or a radio clone or something like that, you would kind of lose that a little bit as far as the flexibility there. Yeah, and you know, it came to a point where I did kind of have to bake it, to make it a little bit more efficient. Like it was only when I got to a point where I was happy with how this looked. You know, if we jump back into the original scene, and these are like the difference hair strands, like, you know, if we go back here, it's like strand one, strand two, strand three, It kind of divided them into like different sections. And I mean, just looking at it. It looks like it's a hairy situation, you would say. It is a hairy situation. From the last scene that we just saw, I took that entire thing and I just baked it down into one spline. Okay. So all those clone splines, before you did the spline wrap, you baked all that down. So you baked this down, essentially. Yeah, just so it's a little bit lighter to work with. But still, you know, it's like, there's a lot of points. Oh, wow. And can you adjust, like, can you, when everything's down to a single spline like that, can you still adjust like the adaptive and all that stuff if you wanted to make it light for a hot second or? Yeah, exactly. Okay, so that's like, that's huge too. So this is the thing, because this was so heavy, actually never worked with the splines like this. Actually created a proxy, which is here. And I toggled it with layers. So I'm just gonna do that now to show you. It's so clever, okay. So anytime something's too heavy, I make a proxy for it and it's probably just taking a little. So are these just like, are these the splines that are being used by the spline wrap? Yeah, exactly. So I'm going to turn off the proxies. You see, like when you have the proxies on now, it's so much easier to work with. But if you look at the splines themselves, it took like a lot of points off of them. I got you. Yeah, they're really got that janky. Yeah, exactly. No. So let's turn this off for now. But then there's also a bunch of guide splines. That's where we're getting all the animation from. It's a little bit difficult to see here. But essentially, I'm going to just copy this into another file so it's a little bit easier to see. I'm going to just turn off some of these secondary ones, but I'll explain to you guys what those were for to begin with. So you kind of see these just contracting in, kind of giving us like that tight turning motion. Oh, yeah, yeah. That we see here. So for these guide splines, we don't need like a ton of motion because like what we're wrapping to is super thick. So like a little motion here would mean like a pretty big motion for the other thing. Our animating these splines is just using a pose morph. So we have like two, essentially two splines, like say the spline one. Now I'll just kind of turn all these off. So we have like their original spline and where we want them, where we want it to go. And we could just kind of tween between those two positions using a pose morph. I can't wait to dive into how you did this with the pose morph because pose morphs, one of those features that when I discovered it, like it totally changed the way that I animate. and Cinema 4D, just mind blowing. I think I learned about it like four years after using Cinema 4D and I'm like, what? You can do what? Yeah, and the good thing is too is you can add easing to them. Right, yeah. Because the weird thing, yeah, like the point level animation's the only other way you can animate and for whatever reason, point level animation tracks are very weird with their easing. You can't add any which is super annoying. So yeah, I created all these guide splines, which then guides like the other largest splines that we see. You know, using it in the proxy, I could actually see how it was wrapped and how it was moved. And that's how you can properly space things out. So there's no like, you know, the no intersections, all those little gaps are big enough for the threads to go through. Like I can work with this in the scene file versus if I use like the render version, it would have been too, ha ha, hairy. Hey, that's my joke, man, come on. So I'm gonna just turn back the final hands. Yes, a lot heavier. Yeah. But this is only getting us like part way there. Right. So at the end of the day, you just got splines. Right, exactly. So what we needed to do here was clone more hair onto it. And what we're doing here, the amount of time I'm saying here. I know, are you saying here or here? Right. So what we did here was that I put this cloner into this connect just so we could attach it to these hair objects. If we're going to guides, it's all connected to this connect. Oh, interesting. OK, so you needed the connect objects. Like, if something's not working, just throw it in a connect object and see if it fixes it. It's like the Swiss Army knife. Yeah, because I was having problems like directly attaching the hair to the spline. So if throw it in a connect, that all worked. But the suite sources, there's a cloning functionality here. So when it clones and it's sweeping this, it's creating like 45 different clones for each one of these strands. Oh, wow. But it's also spacing them out as well. So that's where it's getting that thickness. Interesting. So, and that's, that's like just taking, Because is that the final look of that that strand? Yes. So let me just go into Redshift and you'll see what I mean. All right. So now we have all seen loaded. And we see all this beautiful here. But if I just drop this down to one, which essentially would just give us one shrook across our guide splines, you'll see how thin. Oh, yeah. It's just really, really thin. So that's not really doing that much for us. So to kind of give it, and also you kind of see these hair shooting out on the outside, like these strays to make it feel more natural. It's just like another layer I put on here. And I just extended to the root scale, the variation and the tip scale. Like you edit these numbers to root and tip And that's essentially like how far off from the guide spline that hair is going to be. And that's what's kind of given us like that. Low-wispy edges there. Yeah, it's all about those like little details. You know, like a tear that off. And yeah, and you know, this, I mean, it still looks good, but it just doesn't have that thickness you see. Right. And this is like a might, like a very zoomed in shot. So it's like almost too perfect, you know? Like you would, if you zoomed in close to a piece of thread or yarn, you would see all those little wispy edges and stuff like that. Right. And it's gonna feel like really pat and not as like light as this. So I put it back up to 45 and you can see how like thick it looks now and it's getting shadowing. But again, as you just mentioned, it's too perfect on the edges. Yeah, especially now. So then, you know, you add that extra hair layer. And now you just, you know, you see like a couple of trays coming off and it begins to feel more natural. But yeah, the hair is just doing so much of the heavy lifting. Like the renderer is doing a bunch of the heavy lifting. Yeah, that's crazy. I didn't even know that cloning option existed in the hair thing. Yeah, I mean, to do this with splines would have been just purely insane. Oh, sure. Because what, you're doing 45 times the amount of splines that are in your viewport right now. Yeah, it would have been insane. So, you know, it's essentially the same process. It's the guide spline, and then you have like this thicker spline, which is moved along that guide spline via a spline wrap. So like this whole cloner thing is being wrapped around like that guide spline to give it that shape, that bendiness. And then we're using this to be the guide for the hair to give it more volume like what we're seeing at render time here. And that took like a little bit of time to kind of figure out what the best practice to make that look good. Yeah, cause even with that last shot with the bamboo, it's just like you're using the matrices, you're keeping your scene light because, I feel like if you don't do that ahead of time and figure out what's the least heavy way I can make this scene, the more it lends itself to art direction and tweaking and stuff like that. Because I could only imagine if you're trying to tweak this and tweak the animation and just how painful that process would be if you're waiting for your scene to start catching up with your brain and what you want to do. Exactly. And that's why I made the proxy scene too. But yeah, this is why this scene looks like Super Duper Fall. It's just a lot of hair. Oh, great. Thank you, man. And what about the little wispy strands there? How did you create those? And I'm guessing you also did some kind of cloner magic there. The fuzz cloner magic, my friend, because the kink, the kinks with the those little floaties, the fuzz looks so good. Yeah, and again, it's just like it's all about those little details on you. Yeah, it's really subtle. It just kind of floating around. But when the camera right rotates, that's like depth to the scene, too. Yeah. It's kind of same with these bees. Like you have like these little elements that add to it. It really, really, really helps. I'll show you how the proxy. This is just so I can work with it. And how I'm doing this with the proxy. I'm just using that same thing. I use a tracer object over, but then because they were lighter, so there would be less points. And then I'm just rendering it using Redshift here. So, yeah, so Redshift, you could actually render spline directly using the tag. So that's just, yeah, it's just kind of what I'm using here. So you didn't even need hair to generate that stuff. You're using the tracer. Yeah. Gotcha. I'm using Redshift's hair renderer right in the tag. Okay. Yeah. Well, it's not even hair. It's just like, you know, Redshift, you could render a spline. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm just kind of using that as like a quick preview. And that's how I've been working until, you know, when it's final render time, I jump back into the layer, I switch them out and I hit render. That's awesome. And then there's just so much thoughtful execution of something that is like a pretty complex scene and using the proxies and stuff like that. I feel like, at least with a lot of work, I would do, it's like, I could do all this setup, but like I'm lazy and I just wanna get to the end result. And then when you figure out how much tweaking and art directing you wanna do, you're really putting yourself in a bad situation because you're just like, man, everything I want to do now to tweak it. It's like before we had Redshift or Octane, at a certain point you just move lights around like, you know what, that's good enough because I'm not waiting another three minutes to just render this scene to see what it looks like because it just gets annoying. So that's super smart to just see the way that you set everything up with the proxies and the last shot as well is really smart. Yeah, it's always good to just do the work up front and see if they had it down the road. Yeah, exactly. Now we got the B scene. Oh yeah, this one. I'm really, really proud of this one. I mean, the honeycomb looks incredible. And I'm really interested in like, because like with the yarn scene, right? Like you see a lot of that is like, it's just splines and then a lot of what you see and the end result is like the redshift hair and how you dial in the materials and stuff like that. But I'm super interested in like, what does the honeycomb look like with no textures? And here we go. So just some tubes and stuff. Exactly. Yeah, so the texture is actually doing so much of the... A lot of that work. Cause I was like, you did not model all those little honeycomb holes. Yeah, there's no way I was going to do that. Um, but yeah, I mean, this is the scene. Uh, it's just like these kind of like clusters of honeycomb and all the bees actually being generated by X particles. Oh, interesting. Okay. Oh, but I'll, I'll talk about that later. What a time being. I'm just going to disable the X particles so we can kind of talk about, uh, the honeycomb and actually let's talk about how I built the honeycomb. Yeah. that I mean, it's so it's so silly and simple. That's always my favorite part. But it looks so because I saw those references that you use, then they look so nice and organic and real. Yeah. And you know, that's always the challenge. Like, how do you create something that feels organic? And I'll just like, I'll use this one for an example as an example. So the first thing I did is literally just on all the table, this extrude, It just, I just drew this shape. The basic form of whatever that little piece of honeycomb would look like. And I extruded it and got a nice like extrude. Just kind of zoom in here so you get a, an angle of it. And then I put it, created a volume out of it and then meshed it. So then it felt like a little bit more organic. Yeah. And it had more polygons that I could work with, especially because I'm using this placement in the texture. And then I took that and I used a bender former dude That gives me that rap And that's it. That's it man man volume modeling volume builder is Such a godsend it is what I did. I just like created a couple of variations using that same setup Yeah, I just drew that spline put an extrude put in a volume builder and then and just rotated it. And that's kind of how I got like, I made five, just to have some variations, different scales, different shapes. I love how volume modeling makes building stuff like this accessible, because you wouldn't really have been able to do something like this otherwise without it, without some pretty intense sculpting and some knowledge of how to manipulate polygons and do some bit of modeling. but I just love that little bit of displacement on there too. That's what you'd be left with in R19. Right, yeah, exactly. Well, there we go, there's your honeycomb. You do an extrude, it looks like this, but you throw it on and it just makes it feel more So good, yeah. Organic, it gives you more polygons to work with. And then mind these being heavy because they are gonna be displaced. Well, displacement maps are going to be applied. So if it was heavy, it was good because it will just give me more polygons to work with. And now there's that remesh that they added recently too that really adds, like makes working with these volume models even more efficient. Because if you did want to lighten it, you could easily do that. And it's crazy like how much, and you mentioned this before, how much you do sketching out your concept before you ever jump into Cinema 4D because I feel like if I'm thinking of a honeycomb and I wanna do a bee scene with a honeycomb hive or something like that, I think of like, your like almost cartoonish hive or like just the little, like the beekeeping little dresser drawer with stuff in it. Like I would have never have known that this kind of honeycomb actually exists with these really cool tubes. It's like a cathedral of bees and honey. And that's why like breath is so important. Like just doing some visual research, you can kind of find really interesting visual things for a thing that you might traditionally think looks a certain way. Yeah, I just assumed when you made it like this that it was totally like some abstract honeycomb thing, but it's like, nope, this is based on reality. Right. And it just looks really dope. But it's interesting too, because Honeycomb could take any shape, which is cool. Right. It kind of gives you a big playground to play with. But yeah, that's the crux of it. And then I took that, and I actually took each one of the models and kind of created these little clusters. And then I put it into a fracture object. I mean, we'll get into the animation after. But these are all being animated with more graph, pretty much, with a nice camera move. But yeah, it comes out of comp. Comp was definitely played a big role in this one. Yeah, this is like that hair scene where what you see in the viewport, or even all of the shots so far, it's like you see something in the viewport, and you're like, how do you get that from that? Yeah. And parts of it too was just like having an idea of, you know, where you could push it and calm. But even like, you know, this, I mean, this still, you know, it looks like wax. It looks like that B wax. But you know, again, it's just like compared to this, it's just like, you know, you could totally, yeah, you could take it and you could, you could push it. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a quick kind of side by side. I can't wait to dive into the materials on this and the comp and all that stuff. Suisse, we got the the bees and then we go to the birds which we're kind of joking beforehand. I was like was that this little thing where you got the birds and the bee shots together too but you said that that was totally coincidental right? I only realized it when you mentioned it. Any thought before that? So funny. I guess let's talk about the feather face now. Yeah. Yeah, I want to see how you built those feathers. Because you said like those weren't models like you made those from scratch. Exactly. Nice. You know what's funny? And this is something a lot of people probably don't know. Cinema 4D. And I only discovered this when I was making this project. Cinema 4D has a feather object. That's insane. Yeah. Like it's. Yeah, it's right there. It's right, where is it? It's where the hair is, right? The feather. And you could, it has like a whole rig where you can really kind of dial in the different settings, like even like where the gaps are, you could dial that in, how big those gaps are. So when I saw that, I was like, wow, that's crazy. And you could edit the profile. I mean, it's so cool. That is awesome. Play around with it. You can get some really cool looking feathers. It can control like how the profile, yeah, like how the feather actually sweeps on the outside here. Wow, that's so much control there. I'm assuming you used a reference to try to dial in in. Did you want to get like a specific bird? Like it almost looks like it's a, you know, you're at this purplish blue, like a peacock feather or something. Yeah, I didn't get a reference for the actual feather itself, but for the color, I think I saw an image, but I can't remember which one. But I wanted to do something in the cooler side. Yeah. So that's why I did that. So that's, you know, how I created the feathers. And it's all, you know, it's all splines. So I rendered rendered that with like the red shift here render. Yes. Yes. Yes. And for was there any because this looks pretty dense, like as far as like detail on the splines, did you also have any kind of proxy workflows for this? No, because I could instance. Okay. Yeah, Redshift just renders hair, which is nice. Like you put a hair material on like hair and it renders, you don't even have to put a tag on it or anything. Oh, awesome. Yeah. So I just made like a hair material for for that and yeah that's how we got our feathers so that's the first thing and this scene isn't too heavy because all these are instants for the most part but all the feathers are like mapped on to these rings exactly I'll just kind of disable this so you can see oh cool yeah so that's a lot of splines yeah so I I think a lot of these, yeah, so these are just like a cloner of lines with a step effector that just made them like bigger as it came down. And then like a random effector to just kind of give it like some random rotation so it didn't feel like too, too uniform. It's like that first shot with the wood planks. Exactly. You always want to kind of give it some, you know, variations so it feels more natural. So I hit the top feathers. Yeah, so those top feathers cloned on to the splines, which are also in a cloner. And so these are kind of acting as like a guide so I could kind of art direct, you know, where those feathers are going. Because if you're like, how would I line this up manually to look like this? And that's what I was thinking. Like how would it be attached to a bird? And it would be like Rose kind of ascending upwards. So it kind of recreated that same concept, but in CG. And I created two layers just to have like a little bit more control of the animation. So why you see like it's going from red to white is because removing like a more graph effect to here. And that's essentially controlling how it comes up and comes down. Yeah, it's being built off of a clone. But to get the nuance animation here was definitely like a little bit tricky. Yeah, I can't wait to get it because all I mean all the animation in all of these shots are so subtle and natural and graceful and just really beautiful. But that's crazy. Yeah, I had no idea that there was the hair just or not the hair but the just the feather object that just boom right in there. that does a lot of the work for you and then just, you know, cloning all that stuff along a spline, just super, super simple. Yeah. As I always say, it's like the execution seems simple, but like the path to get to the simplicity is always tricky. Well, I mean, and if we go to that last shot, which is, I mean, not to say let's say it derogatorily, but like, it's the simplest of all, where again, you bought those very expensive cube models. That was the one key. But, you know, it's, I really think that that final shot where it's literally like this, you know, New Mexico kind of architecture scene with the, you know, cubish design, it's just like such a testament to how important and on top of that, you have like a couple cacti in there. But like it's everything in that shot is relying on the, you know, your your design fundamentals, your composition skills, your lighting, your colors, you know, because if you just look at like if if you open up that shot, and you look at the C4D file, like it's literally just a bunch cubes, you know. Yeah. Yeah. This this scene was really more about just creating something aesthetically pleasing. It's not like the most technical scene. I mean, it's pretty simple for the most part. Right. But there's I don't know, there's like a, even though it's 3D, there's like a graphic nature to it with like a lot of bold solid colors and then like harsh lighting. Yeah. That almost gives it like a cool kind of graphic sense, which I also like and I kind of like the pink. And you got the, you know, like your camera that you're using is it, it looks like almost isometric and that's why I think gives it that like really cool design, geometrical, kind of aesthetic to the whole thing. Yeah, and it's not actually just like a normal, it's a normal camera. Oh really? What's that vocal? I think it's the 326 Stan. Oh wow. So I mean, I mean, it just looks like you just position the angles in a way that looks really awesome. Yeah, it just did like, yeah, it's all just a 90 degrees. But yeah, I mean, it's not too much to the scene. It's, you know, this the sunset, the animation is really coming from the lighting, but the logo is animating in the shot as well, which is Compton Nuke. So the scene couldn't be too distracting. But You know, we still got some movement from the lighting itself. So. And as far as like the steps, like all this stuff looks pretty self-explanatory for modeling, like I think, you know, you didn't need to do any crazy bulls or anything like that. Did you use bulls or did you actually do the? Yeah, I just saw these things. They just kind of pulled out bull things out and. And for the stairs, yeah, the stairs all the time is just a cloner with like a step effect to. Yeah. Yeah. Easy peasy. Exactly. Nothing. Nothing much to this scene. Now, when you came to this end where you just like, holy cow, the setup for the the strands and the feathers and just everything, you're just like, I'm just going to give myself a nice light, easy to execute scene that I can just really show my design skills here versus like, you know, technical. Yeah, I mean, part of it was that. Yeah. It was like, just like, I'm exhausted. I just need one more shot. Let's buy some cubes and some cacti. Yeah. But also, you know, still wanted to keep like the visual integrity. And this was like, just again, like, if you make smart design decisions, you could still make something beautiful that doesn't feel like super duper insane. And I think like the scene was the right balance too, because it was the scene that we would see the graphic logo and that would transition us. So it couldn't also be too distracting where, you know, we couldn't read any of the type. So. And I think that's where, you know, the simplicity of a scene is, it's something that I struggle with because I feel like, you know, the more stuff you can put in the more you can kind of maybe cover up for your own shortcomings in certain areas like, you know, color theory or understanding of how colors work and lighting even. But like this scene, you really have to be confident in your abilities and your design sensibilities to have something like this and pull it off so beautifully because like, yeah, if you tell a bunch of 3D The artist like, yeah, just put a bunch of cubes in a scene and light it really nice and make it look beautiful. That's not an easy task, you know, because you're really relying on your lighting skills and your composition skills and design sensibilities and taste to really drive all of that. And I think that's, you know, you have all of the things, like technical ability and that eye for design that actually looks really cool where it's all flattened out and kind of 2D-ish. Yeah, that was pretty sweet. Where to put the sun was a big thing because you see how much the scene changes depending on the way the lighting hits. The design is completely different. Your eye is going so many different places depending on where that light is. Exactly. So that was definitely something how to consider like what's like a really good place for that light to set to make it feel nice and dynamic."
+    }
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