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How to create forests with Maya MASH and Arnold — Transcript

by Sam Biddle · 7,063 words · 1,157 segments · language en · Watch on YouTube

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0:01[Music]
0:12first things first we're going to want
0:13some trees if we're going to make a
0:14forest
0:15so i've made a couple of trees for this
0:16tutorial and you can get them from my
0:18gumroad
0:19i'll put the the link in the description
0:21they're set up
0:23with arnold shaders and so on so they
0:24should be good to go if you're using
0:26them in maya
0:27if you're using them in a different app
0:28you could you know set it up yourself
0:30but anyway
0:31this is going to be for maya so
0:34basically what we want is we want to
0:36grab a tree
0:38and have it shaded in arnold like so and
0:41add a couple modifications to it and
0:43then export it as an s file so it can be
0:45loaded in as a stand in
0:46like this one on the left i'll show you
0:48how to do that um but the first thing to
0:50talk about is how it's shaded
0:51so if i open up the shading network i'll
0:54show you i've added a color jitter to
0:56the diffuse map so it's going to create
0:58some variation when it gets
1:00scattered so they're not all going to be
1:01the same color um
1:04so to set this up so it works with um
1:07stand-ins you're going to want to change
1:09the type to procedural
1:11and then just dial in some very small
1:12numbers so i've got a bit of saturation
1:13a bit of hue
1:14and so on um like i said this will be in
1:17the gumroad file if you want to use that
1:18but if you're setting this up yourself
1:20with your own trees
1:21or whatever just go ahead and use these
1:24kind of values um
1:26and and that should be good to go so
1:29remember procedural
1:31and then when we go ahead to export this
1:35um as a stand-in we'll grab all the bits
1:38of
1:38geometry go to arnold
1:42go to stand in export stand in click the
1:45little box there
1:46and then we want all these selected make
1:49sure you have all shading groups
1:50exported
1:51then export the selection come up with a
1:53dialog you want to save this as an s
1:55file okay
1:56and then once you've got this exported
1:58wherever you save it to
2:00you can load it back in by just creating
2:04arnold
2:05create stand-in which will create one of
2:07these boxes
2:08it will be a small bounding box when you
2:09start with and then when you load in the
2:10file
2:11they'll show you i've loaded in
2:14this pine tree that i've just created
2:16i've loaded in as a
2:18standing here and in order to
2:22make sure this works um in mash
2:25a couple of things um so we've got that
2:29procedural set up
2:30in the color jitter node but we also
2:32want to
2:33go down to arnold procedural settings
2:37and we want to turn off auto instancing
2:40and then that will enable the college
2:42editor to create the different
2:44variations
2:45per instance so that should work um
2:49so that's how we get our standards so
2:51that's the the first part
2:52sorted so in a new instance of maya
2:56let's create a ground plane make sure
2:57you set up your project and everything
2:59and so on um and so
3:03polymodeling drop a plane down we want
3:06it to be pretty big so i'm going to just
3:07scale this up to maybe 2 000 units
3:10so it's pretty massive probably could go
3:13a bit smaller but whatever um
3:15we'll just go this and see how we get on
3:17now the key thing is
3:18with this is just we want to create some
3:21nice variation for
3:22the trees to sit on you know some peaks
3:24and valleys and so on
3:25so i'm just going to increase the the
3:28subdivisions on this so maybe
3:31maybe 40. so we've got a little bit of
3:34information to work with
3:36and then just use the sculpting tools go
3:38to the sculpt and
3:39grab the first one and you know you can
3:43see you can
3:44put some shapes in there you've got
3:46control of the brush you hold down b
3:47grease will decrease your
3:49brush size if you double click on this
3:53icon on the left here you can control
3:56the the size of the strength using that
3:57as well um
4:00so what you want to do is just create
4:01some peaks and troughs really um
4:04this is just where you're going to get
4:05some sort of mountainous regions or
4:06whatever
4:08this will just make it feel a bit not
4:11you know obviously you don't want to
4:13have your trees just on a flat plane
4:15this will just create more natural
4:16looking shot and
4:18you can build this up a bit however you
4:21like and then once you've
4:23you know got it to a certain level just
4:25start playing around with where you
4:26think you might put your camera
4:28um you know somewhere where you can
4:31maybe pull off a camera move coming up
4:33and revealing
4:34or whatever so work into this for a bit
4:37and then
4:38once we've got a nice sort of landscape
4:42can just start scattering
4:46so this is the uh the ground plane that
4:49i've come up with
4:50as you can see there's some some sort of
4:52dips in the ground there
4:53creates some nice little valleys and so
4:55on and what i've done is i've just stuck
4:57a camera
4:59here um and i've animated it so
5:03it's just revealing the shot a little
5:06bit
5:07and there'll just be loads of trees here
5:08in the foreground and whatever and
5:10just reveal a sort of a larger forest
5:12beyond um
5:13so i'm not going to go into the the
5:15camera animation here um
5:17you can you know just put a couple keys
5:20down and just
5:21animate it going to and fro whatever
5:25so from this sort of point
5:28we want to import our standings so the
5:32first thing you want to do is just go to
5:33arnold and create your standards
5:34create stand in and open up your
5:38attribute editor
5:40grab the path
5:45i've put mine in my library so these are
5:48the the trees
5:50grab the that's file there
5:53and i'm going to duplicate that control
5:56d
5:59hit controller i'll hit f there as well
6:01zoomed in
6:04and we're just going to load in the
6:06other tree the broad leaf
6:11and so that's the two trees
6:15so to set up the um the mash network
6:18first thing you want to do is just
6:19select one of your trees and i suggest
6:21actually at this point just quickly
6:22name them so this one's pine and the
6:25other one
6:26is broadleaf
6:29just so you know which is which now grab
6:31the first one the pine and then go over
6:33to the mash
6:34tab and just hit this mash icon here
6:37and this will create a mask network you
6:39see our tree that's disappeared it just
6:40gets hidden if i open up the outliner
6:43it's been hidden so if you hit shift h
6:45it will unhide it again
6:47and then you can see a series of
6:54instances of that pine
6:57have been put on the the origin so
7:00if we open up the mash options which is
7:02this
7:03um icon here let's just open
7:06so we get this and then we open the
7:08attribute editor as well as control a
7:10um if you click on the distribute
7:14actually we'll need the outliner as well
7:15so grab the outliner
7:19now i've just labeled my ground plane
7:22just ground
7:23this makes it easy to find and we want
7:26to change our
7:27mesh distribute to mesh
7:30so it distributes these instances on a
7:32mesh now if you
7:33middle mouse click this ground and drag
7:36it over to input mesh
7:39we get the initial instances they're now
7:42on our mesh
7:44on our ground plane that is obviously
7:47not enough
7:48so first thing we'll do is we'll
7:50increase this to
7:51maybe 50
7:56000.
7:58so that's quite a lot and it's slowing
7:59down the viewport a bit it's a bit
8:00annoying
8:01um you'd expect with standards that it
8:03would be quite quick but
8:05for some reason with mash doing this
8:07method it's a bit slower in the viewport
8:09so
8:09when you're working with it sometimes
8:10it's probably better to until you start
8:12rendering at least maybe
8:14drop in the number so we've got about
8:16five thousand that's
8:18enough that this will run smoothly
8:21and to add the other tree to that
8:24we want to actually have that something
8:27that's reminded me so
8:28mine my mash is already set up to when i
8:31create a mash it'll
8:32default to creating a mash instance so
8:34as you can see here in the
8:36in the outliner if yours hasn't if it
8:39defaults to
8:40mash repro i think is the other version
8:42uh you can change that if you go over to
8:45[Music]
8:46mash let's have a look if i go to change
8:49from modeling to
8:50fx i think yeah so be in the fx tab
8:53there's a mash thing here if you go to
8:55utilities
8:57uh it will be
9:01or you know i think is it where is it oh
9:04yeah switch mash geometry type so you
9:06want to just
9:07if yours is a repo i think this is the
9:09other type
9:10switch it over to be an instance so
9:12that's the one you want and that's the
9:13one we're using
9:15so back on to adding mash nodes
9:19um in our attribute editor we have a
9:21bunch here and you can also select them
9:23from the mash editor but
9:24this is nice and big so we'll use this
9:27um
9:29we want to create uh some variation
9:31which we'll do in a second but we want
9:32to add our
9:33our second tree first so
9:36select the broad leaf in the outliner
9:38and then select the instancer
9:40and you can see the object list here
9:43we've already got the pines so let's
9:44just add selection the broadleaf so
9:46we've got the pine and the broad leaf
9:47and then the in order for the broadleaf
9:50to be loaded
9:51we need to select the mesh again and
9:54go to id add an id node
9:57and just change the id type linear is
9:59probably fine but we'll just change it
10:01to random and
10:02count is two so we've got two instances
10:04loaded in so you only need two ids if
10:06you had more trees loaded in
10:07let's say six you would make the id
10:09count six
10:11uh so that's given us some variation
10:14um and then to really properly
10:18um add some you know shape and size
10:21variation we'll add
10:22a random node so let's click on that add
10:25random node
10:27the first thing you want to do is um do
10:30some scale so just
10:32turn on uniform scales we don't have to
10:34do each one
10:35and just increase the scale to maybe
10:38point yeah 0.6 maybe to have some
10:42larger trees and smaller trees but
10:44you'll notice that mash at the moment
10:46it's not reflecting this um it looks
10:48like there's three trees on top of trees
10:50but
10:51that's a glitch with match mash it
10:53should be fine in rendering
10:56the next thing we want to do is just
10:58create some uh
10:59angle jitter so the first thing is go to
11:02rotation y
11:03and change it all the way to 360 and
11:06you'll see that
11:06annoyingly that some of them are
11:08following the normals and they've just
11:10rotated downwards so what we're going to
11:12need to do is go back into the
11:13distribute
11:14and change the setting here
11:18calculate rotation turn that off uh so
11:21they're all pointing up now because
11:23naturally trees um they go towards the
11:26light so they may
11:27be influenced by the hill somewhat you
11:29know grow outwards or whatever but they
11:31won't
11:31won't be growing completely sideways uh
11:34and we can add that in the random nodes
11:36so if we
11:37go to rotation x and
11:40just add a little bit you can see
11:41they're starting to lean if we add a bit
11:43of rotation
11:45z just a little bit to create that um
11:49so the rotation why that that makes sure
11:53that
11:54you know there's lots of um on the
11:56y-axis rotation so you get different
11:57sides of the tree
11:59um so that's good to go
12:03for the initial setup of the mash
12:10so what you'll probably want to do now
12:11is just get your first test renders out
12:13um
12:15before we do that it's probably a good
12:16idea to um
12:18apply a texture to your ground plane
12:20anything will do
12:21really just a sort of dirt texture i've
12:23grabbed one from i think
12:25it was yeah it was hd no what was it
12:29texture haven that's the one um
12:32what one off i used it's one of the
12:33aerials it's an aerial rocks
12:36diffuse texture i've just put it on and
12:39as it's a huge you know 2000 units i've
12:42just repeated this
12:43by 15 um and when you're loading these
12:47textures in order to if you want to
12:49you know make things easy on yourself
12:50like here have this
12:52place 2d to control all of the different
12:54textures the normal map
12:57and the diffuser and so on just middle
12:59mouse click this um
13:03alt control yeah it's control
13:07middle mouse click uh the yellow dot to
13:11the the subsequent one on the diffuser
13:13just do that to each of them and you can
13:14control them with one
13:16play cd i'll put a link in the
13:17description of
13:19uh tech shave and so you know where you
13:20can get these from so
13:22just uh so that the trees have got a
13:25kind of a appropriately colored backdrop
13:29so your initial lighting you'll want uh
13:31a skydime which i've dropped on in and
13:33again
13:34hdri haven i'll put the link in the
13:36description i've just grabbed one
13:38um there's the sort of
13:41to flood this scene give us a bit of
13:43ambient light and then because you want
13:45some sun to pick up
13:46the subsurface that the trees have got
13:49put in a directional light as well
13:51and it's just pointing sort of a low
13:54sunny
13:55direction so if i go and look through
13:56the camera
13:59you see like it should should get some
14:01sort of like backlight on the trees
14:03um so let's go ahead and do a test
14:05render
14:10and it's not working probably in the
14:12wrong render layer
14:16so let's grab yeah
14:19we'll get back to the render layers in a
14:20second
14:23okay so there you go so with very few
14:26trees
14:26not enough the um directional light is
14:30sort of bleaching out the ground plane
14:32but you can see the trees are rendering
14:34um so that's fine
14:38and it's just worth noting a couple of
14:41things
14:42i've what i've done here with the
14:44directional is i've pumped up the
14:46exposure the arnold exposure to five
14:49which is quite high
14:50and i've dropped the color temperature
14:51down to 5000 make a bit warmer
14:54that's why it's bleaching out now
14:56remember
14:57what i said about um the arnold
15:00uh procedural settings auto instancing
15:03off so in case you're not getting
15:04any uh color variation so if you we just
15:07have a quick look at that
15:08render you can see this there's some
15:10sort of more yellowy trees and some more
15:12slightly more green and that's the color
15:14jetta kicking in
15:16so that's pretty good um so that's the
15:18basics of how you get
15:20the um you know a setup scattering with
15:23match it's really quite quick and easy
15:24to do
15:25so setting this up for rendering um the
15:27first thing you're going to want to do
15:29is just really crank up the nat the uh
15:31the amount
15:31so if we go to the distribute you know
15:335000 is nowhere near enough we're
15:35probably going to need closer to 100 000
15:37i would say
15:38the one the render that i've done with
15:39this before was about that i think
15:41it's 10 100 which will be slow on the
15:44viewport so
15:45make sure when you're doing um
15:48uh a render of this um
15:52when you're doing animation sorry you uh
15:54you'll want to sort of either hide these
15:55you can hide the
15:57the instance uh just select the instance
16:00so
16:00ctrl h to hide it then you can do all
16:02your animation really quickly but
16:05when it's visible it will slow down your
16:06viewport a lot
16:09so it's just a quick test render with
16:11this
16:17see there's a lot more trees there's
16:19still a few patches that aren't covered
16:21but i don't think that's that's not too
16:23bad it's probably just about enough
16:25uh depending on how you laid out your
16:27scene and depending on the scale of
16:29trees as well because you could
16:30potentially scale up the trees
16:32so it comes down to the shot you're
16:34you're making really but if you're
16:35following along then
16:37i would just say that the trees i'm
16:38using um
16:41i've left them as the default size but
16:43again you can
16:45you can play around with the scale see
16:47what works
16:49so the way that the fog is set up is
16:51exactly the same as how we've set up the
16:53trees basically so
16:56the way to set it up here is let's hide
16:59our
17:00horrendously slowed trees let's hide
17:04these
17:05so you want the the clouds to sort of
17:06sit on a plane amongst
17:08these trees so let's create another
17:10ground plane
17:12and scale up same size so
17:162000 units just drop it on top of our
17:20ground plane maybe move it up a little
17:23bit see
17:23it's easy to select now you want this to
17:26be not renderable
17:27so open up the attributes go to arnold
17:29and turn off
17:30all of the render raw attributes so it's
17:33not renderable
17:35and give it a name like cloud scatter
17:39so now we're going to use the same
17:41method so we're going to create another
17:42mash but we'll need some class of
17:43scatter
17:44now i'm going to use some vdb clouds
17:46that i've made uh in houdini um i'll
17:48make these available on my gun road as
17:50well
17:50and the link will be in the description
17:52uh so the way to load these you just
17:54go to arnold volume
18:00and get a little volume square and
18:03just load one of the tree the the
18:08clouds i've got four of them in this
18:10little collection
18:14so cloud a hit f on the keyboard getting
18:18closer you can see it sort of under this
18:20shape i'm gonna duplicate that and i'll
18:22just go ahead and i'll
18:23load the other clouds
18:26i'm gonna move them off to the side like
18:27i did with the uh the trees so just move
18:30them over
18:31so not in the way of the shot whoops not
18:34that
18:34let's deselect them so our clouds i
18:38think we're probably gonna want to scale
18:39this up a little bit so because they're
18:42quite small i probably scale them up by
18:4310 maybe maybe a bit less maybe
18:47five and we'll add a scale of variation
18:50in the mesh anyway so select the first
18:51one
18:53and go back to the mesh tab
18:56hit the mesh button once again it's
18:58hidden it just like to keep them on here
19:00that's how i know where it is
19:02volume um
19:05and then we're going to want to do the
19:07same thing so you see that the second
19:08match here mesh
19:09probably a good idea to name these but
19:11whatever
19:12let's uh grab the second mesh change the
19:16top to mesh again get the outliner up
19:21and let's bring the
19:24cloud scatter middle mouse click and
19:25drag
19:28and we've got the cloud scatter now that
19:30should
19:31yeah we can see there's a couple little
19:32clouds there so
19:34same method as before to add the other
19:35clouds so go to outliner
19:37grab the clouds first so just grab all
19:39the volumes grab the instance sir
19:41click add selection and we've got all
19:43the volumes now there's four of them
19:45this time
19:45so if we go to mash you want to go to
19:48id add another id node let's click id
19:52didn't go to it and we've got four you
19:56see it's done at four
19:57now so just click random again let's do
19:59the same
20:00what we've done the trees add some
20:01variation so back to the home
20:03press random add a random node and then
20:06we're going to just do
20:07you know 180 degrees random wire
20:10rotation
20:12actually it's not enough to see so let's
20:14just pump up the amount we've got
20:18say five thousand
20:22yeah that's fine
20:27so in the random would turn on the
20:28uniform scale we'll scale them up quite
20:31a big you know we want a lot of big
20:32clouds here
20:36because we're going to make them quite
20:38wispy shading wise and also position
20:40wise
20:41we want some variation on the y-axis
20:43because our ground our
20:44scatter plane's flat but we don't want
20:46the clouds to be perfectly flat on a
20:47singular blank one to be
20:49very yeah there are a lot of variations
20:51so maybe you can crank this up to 100
20:54maybe a bit less 50 depending on what
20:57looks good
20:58and actually the only way to judge that
20:59is to render it so once we've got this
21:01initial
21:02um layout of clouds
21:06we'll want to just give it a shader so
21:09let's open up the hypershade
21:11go to shaders and
21:14standard volume and we'll just call this
21:18cloud
21:21just minimize this to the side
21:27now if we grab the outliner and just
21:30drop this onto our
21:32volumes should label these as well by
21:34being lazy
21:35right so assign these to the cloud and
21:39because it's we want it to be wispy
21:40cloud this is uh there's a good amount
21:42of density i made these clouds in the
21:44houdini so there's a bit density break
21:46up in there but we want it to be really
21:47wispy so probably
21:480.02 is a good starting point for the
21:52the density and
21:56let's go ahead and go to our render
21:59camera and just see what's going on
22:04still probably too dense actually
22:09so let's open up i'm going to leave this
22:12open rendering in the ipr and just open
22:14up the
22:15um the cloud shader again
22:18and drop that to 0.01
22:24i'll take it oh it's not click the play
22:26button to update it
22:30still too much i'd say point point zero
22:33zero one
22:35yeah that's kind of what i had in mind
22:38more
22:39so what i'll do now is i'll unhide the
22:42the trees
22:42and render it on top of the trees just
22:44to see what that looks like and then
22:45we'll go into rendering so it's going to
22:47unhide the tree and sensor
22:49this might take a minute to render now
22:51because there's a lot of instances being
22:53loaded
22:55so let's just render these and see what
22:56happens
22:59yeah it's kind of it's nearly there
23:01really um
23:03probably want to drop the the density
23:04just a little bit more so it's so dense
23:06you can't see
23:08through to the the ground there but
23:09depending on the look you want maybe
23:11that's
23:11fine um i want to be a bit more wispy
23:14than that
23:15so i'm gonna go back into the shader
23:18and i'm gonna go even lower so point
23:22zero zero zero five oh is that yeah
23:28one other thing that can work is uh if
23:30you go down to
23:32transparency you can increase the
23:33transparency weight
23:35so i might crank that up
23:39yeah something like that play around
23:41with the shadow and
23:42see if you get where you like uh it's
23:44just about creating sort of a foggy
23:45environment
23:46you know atmosphere you can also try
23:48using the the um
23:50environment atmosphere and environment
23:52fog settings in the renderer but
23:54using these um vdbs you can you know
23:57control things a bit more so
23:59so something like that it looks okay
24:02um so coming to render this
24:06it's going to be quite a long render
24:07i've done this i've rendered this scene
24:09obviously already so it was a quite a
24:11long render and i've got a 16 core
24:13machine so
24:14depending on how strong your machine is
24:16you'll want to do a few things to speed
24:19it up so the first thing is
24:20is that um when i rendered it i rendered
24:23it with sort of draft samples and that
24:25was one thing
24:26um so if you go to render i
24:30actually left these all default now to
24:32get a cleaner render you'll want to
24:33crank this up a bit but
24:35you know it's already
24:38slow and that's because of the
24:40subsurface so there's a few things i'd
24:42suggest one is
24:43the subsurface on the trees if you
24:46don't if well if you depending on your
24:49lighting setup and what you want to get
24:50because you get this nice sort of back
24:51scatter effect with the
24:53the subsurface you could potentially
24:55turn that off that would speed things up
24:56a lot
24:58so that's one way to get a much faster
25:00render uh
25:01or you could do what i've done which is
25:04sort of draft samples um and then
25:07denoise
25:08in post now i've done a bit of a hacky
25:11denoise so i've
25:12rendered out the comp and then gone into
25:14davinci resolve
25:16and denoised in there using the the the
25:18denoiser there
25:20one other thing you can do in maya which
25:21would probably give you a cleaner result
25:23is
25:24um you've got the arnold uh
25:28d-noise aovs if we go to the aivs
25:32open up denoiser if you click output
25:35denoising aovs it will add those
25:39you can use those to denoise it in post
25:41i won't go into it in this tutorial this
25:42this out there you know the
25:43information's out there probably on the
25:45arnold docks but that's one way to get
25:47cleaner results so
25:48either either dial back
25:52the subsurface or
25:55you know do a draft version with
25:58denoising rv so it's two ways to get a
26:00sort of a better quicker render because
26:01if you're rendering this on like a
26:03quad-core machine um
26:05this will probably take a few days i
26:06think on on my machine it's an uh
26:08ryzen machine it took about 28 hours to
26:11get 100 frames which is
26:13it's not too bad but it is quite long if
26:14you compare that to what a gpu renderer
26:16can do
26:17so that's enough waffle about rendering
26:20let's set up um how we're going to
26:23render this in layers
26:24let's take a look
26:28so let's create two layers one
26:32just label the trees and the other one
26:36and actually call this trees underscore
26:39beauty
26:40and in this you want to just create a
26:42collection which is geo
26:45um and you collect all of your
26:48geo so the trees the ground
26:51and the trees scatter and you can see
26:54already set up here
26:56is a set so if you with this selected if
26:59you go to create
27:01set it will create a set here and in the
27:04set
27:04you've got some extra attributes which
27:06we'll use so you go to
27:08arnold in the set and you've got arnold
27:10overrides
27:12you can click add and you get a whole
27:16list of them
27:17and the one i add is ai matte just type
27:20in a
27:20i capital m press enter it's not visible
27:24because i've already added it but it'll
27:25be visible
27:26add that and there's a glitch in my as
27:28usual it's not showing it here
27:30normally it shows it in the attributes
27:31but it should be shown in the extra
27:32attributes as well
27:34so we'll use that in the other in the
27:36fog layer
27:37just so that's ready that's set up
27:41and then selecting the geo group if we
27:44change our layer so we're looking at
27:46this one layer there's nothing but then
27:47if we add
27:48geo it's here um
27:52and i can't see our instance uh the
27:56instance has not been added to
27:57our set so i'll add that
28:01should take a second there you go so
28:04if we just do a quick test render we
28:05should just get the trees without
28:08the fog so let's have a look
28:13see trees without fog that's fine
28:16and then let's just quickly go over the
28:18aovs i've added for this it's quite
28:20simple i've just put
28:21a depth and crypto so this is just so i
28:25can
28:25meddle around with the colors of the
28:27trees in post and
28:29the depth just so we could create a bit
28:30of you know either depth of field or
28:33some
28:33extra fog in comp uh there's a few more
28:36you could add but
28:36let's keep it simple these two and like
28:38i said denoising arvs
28:40um is a good idea i'm not gonna do it
28:43because i've already
28:44done my crappy cheap way of doing it
28:47um so that's that lavender layer and you
28:50want to turn off by the way
28:51this icon here you turn it off for the
28:53master legs we don't want to render the
28:54master layer
28:55and then the fog layer we want to create
28:58a
28:59another collection uh it's quite fun
29:02and you'll want to add your fog
29:05and the mash instance so the second one
29:08with the fog on it so oh and also you
29:10want to add
29:11well you want to add actually so you add
29:13these ones like this
29:15but there's no ground plane so we need
29:16that and we need the trees to be
29:18like a hold out on that for the fog so
29:21to do that
29:22go back to our our set
29:25and you'll see we've got that ai map
29:27that we created here
29:28now if we right click on this and create
29:31absolute override for visible air it
29:32will go orange
29:34and that will add this so it's added it
29:36you can see it now turn it on
29:38so now
29:41the all the geometry we've added
29:44will be a mapped but one thing you must
29:47do
29:47for this to work with um arnold
29:50standings
29:51is go to one of them so the broadleaf
29:53for example
29:55it will not work as a map until you go
29:58to standing overrides
29:59and turn on override mat so make sure
30:02make sure you do that
30:03with each of the trees or as many trees
30:07as you've done they have to have that
30:08turned on
30:08and then now that everything's enabled
30:12in this layer and you've got that
30:14mat if we render this we'll get the fog
30:18on the trees and the trees will be a
30:20black holdout
30:22so you can see you've got that masked so
30:24then when we come to comping it
30:26just put it on the top um and it should
30:29work nicely
30:31so that's just about it for rendering
30:35and with these two render layers set up
30:37uh
30:39it's going to render a lot quicker than
30:40rendering them as one render layer
30:42basically
30:43so the only find the final thing is just
30:46to go over a couple of the arnold
30:47settings so like i said
30:48leaving this as a draft so
30:52if you want a nicer render crank up
30:53those settings there
30:55um i think i increased the rate at the
30:57diffuse bounces to two
30:59that probably slowed down so again think
31:01about that if you want it to be faster
31:04i've said it to be a 1080p render again
31:07maybe a bit slower could drop the res um
31:11make sure you set up your camera so i've
31:13got my render cam set up there
31:15frame range setup and then you want
31:17there's a number of things you want for
31:19your exr settings you want it to be a
31:21zips
31:22compression half precision turn off
31:25tiled
31:26because that speeds up in new confusion
31:29auto crop
31:29in case you're using nuke and merge air
31:32v's
31:33so that you get them all in a single exr
31:36so that's your basic render settings
31:38done
31:38we've got the avs the only thing that's
31:40left to do is to go to
31:42the rendering tab and go to render
31:46render sequence click the the box there
31:48it will come up with this
31:50make sure the camera is selected all
31:52render layers enabled so we've got
31:54just these two render sequence and then
31:59depending on how powerful your system is
32:01um in a day you might have a result or
32:03if you've got a threadripper maybe a lot
32:05quicker
32:07okay so this is the fusion comp that
32:09i've set up
32:10so if you're doing this in nuke a lot of
32:12this is applicable and
32:13vice versa we're just going to do in
32:14fusion um
32:16i'll quickly go over what i've done and
32:17then we'll build a basic comp
32:20with the renders so what i've gone ahead
32:22with here is i've got the
32:24the tree beauty which is this one and
32:27actually i mistakenly rendered this
32:29with tiling turned on in the exhaust
32:31setting so it's actually a bit slower
32:32than it should be
32:33um if you've done what i did which in
32:35the previous part was just turn it off
32:37it should be faster
32:39so we've got the fog and the trees now
32:42first thing
32:42you need to do in fusion don't need to
32:43do this in nuke is color management so
32:46you want to put a gamma on to bring it
32:48to the right color space so
32:49the gamma is set to srgb um
32:53and that just corrects the color space
32:55now the reason i've put an alpha divide
32:57node before both of those to bring it to
33:00correct color space is if you don't have
33:01a divide and multiply
33:03whenever you do any color manipulation
33:05so you can see i've got color correct
33:06here and i've got the gamma changing the
33:08color space
33:09if you have no primal and unpremol which
33:12is what these are then
33:14your edges your alpha edges will get
33:16ruined
33:17so if i turn them off you'll see control
33:20p
33:20turns off see uh
33:24probably help if i show the end result
33:28so let's turn these yeah like
33:33so make sure you have those when you're
33:35doing color corrections to both
33:37your layers and then you see on the left
33:39here i've got um a lumi
33:41keyer here this is picking up the depth
33:43so it's set to
33:44channel depth and because it's come from
33:47arnold
33:48some for some reason fusion thinks that
33:51the
33:52depth is inverted so you have to choose
33:55the near plane is actually the fire
33:57plane and the far plane is actually the
33:59near plane so just bear that in mind and
34:01then you just want to pipe that into
34:03the channel blue lines in channel
34:05balloons you switch all of the channels
34:07to alpha foreground which gives you this
34:09mask
34:10then if you pipe that into a bitmap
34:14then you get the mask and you get bit
34:17more control of this if you
34:19now that that's piped in you can you
34:21know control the
34:22strength of the alpha or whatever so
34:24this is
34:26nice for adding an extra bit of fog so
34:27if i show you that
34:30it's just a bit of environmental kind of
34:32fog that you would normally get
34:34on a large scale scene and then once
34:37that
34:39color correct fog is added i've added
34:40the real fog that we've rendered on top
34:42so there's the the fog that i rendered
34:45um
34:46this version i did it was quite really
34:48weak on the shader
34:50um so it doesn't show up that much and
34:52then the first thing to do to take the
34:54edge off
34:54this is quite a noisy render so i've put
34:57a little bit
34:59tiny blur on there i think it's .05 blur
35:02you want to do that on cg rangers just
35:04take the edge off sometimes
35:05and then to put a background here
35:10what i've done is i've taken
35:13a hdri this is again from hdr haven so
35:17just pick one that
35:18fits your scene and i've exported
35:22the camera from the scene as an alembic
35:26um and then built a
35:30a little 3d scene here
35:33and that's enabled me to project the
35:36background so that when the camera pans
35:38up
35:39um this sort of moves with it you could
35:42do it in my render out separately but
35:43this is just another way of doing it so
35:46i'm not going to go into a huge amount
35:47of detail in this tutorial about this
35:49with
35:50the main point this is forests but
35:52that's just something you can do if
35:53you're interested in
35:54getting this set up let me know in the
35:56comments and then the rest
35:58uh there's an expo glow
36:02which some of these nodes are from the
36:05fusion reactor plug-in
36:06um but most of them you know just color
36:08corrects and color curves
36:09like this one chroma fuse that's
36:11chromatic aberration so if we zoom in
36:13you can see it's just created some edge
36:16blur
36:16um with chromatic aberration there and
36:18so on and then film grain
36:20on top just to break it up a bit make it
36:21look more organic
36:23and i've created another bitmap here
36:25taking
36:26the whole scene taking the luminance of
36:29the scene so here it is
36:30and merging that on top which has done
36:34nothing
36:35sometimes this looks quite interesting
36:37if you just
36:39oh that's why i've forgotten it there
36:40was a there was actually a lens dirt
36:42added
36:43here so it was going to merge in lenster
36:46in the highlights but uh that's
36:47forgotten then i've got rays which again
36:51they're not really doing much that
36:53they're just sort of
36:54spilling over the background so you
36:56they've um they're generated separately
36:59from the highlights and then i'm merging
37:01them back on top and it's sort of
37:02spilling over some of the edges there
37:05and then a hot spot on top of that it's
37:07just uh
37:10again fill in the background with a bit
37:12of extra exposure and then i've just a
37:14couple more color corrects
37:16and merged in a background which is
37:20actually
37:20a it's a
37:24gradient which is kind of a sunny color
37:26gradient
37:28so that's all there is to it it's not a
37:29hugely complex comp and then i'm saving
37:31them out as a tga
37:33i've got another tutorial about how i'm
37:34doing this infusion
37:36um the steps i've been taking um and
37:39again how to like encode this so i've
37:41encoded it as an mov
37:44so yeah what i would say is
37:47if we're going to set this up i'm using
37:50i'm using some of i've got a plug in
37:53here from the reactor which is
37:55letting me use nuke shortcuts so if i
37:58hit r
37:59it's loading in the render so if we go
38:03to
38:05forrester one tree beauty if you're not
38:08using the nuke
38:09um shortcuts then you can just hit tab
38:12i think although that might also be a
38:14new shortcut so if it's not that it's
38:17i'm just so used to using nuke so um
38:21and then you can load in a loader
38:25and then again fog
38:29so that's the the two layers
38:37and they're not loading because they're
38:39being slow so we'll add a couple more
38:41there we go so let's add the alpha
38:44divide
38:46on the tree
38:49and then the gamma
38:57hit srgb
39:00and then alpha
39:04multiply
39:09and that's sorted out the edges and then
39:10we'll just copy that over
39:12control c v
39:15that's for the other part and then we'll
39:18do the luma key
39:21with the depth
39:26change from luminance to depth and then
39:28like i said it's reversed so the near
39:30plane is the far plane
39:31so grab far away and then the near plane
39:35here um
39:38and then create channel buildings
39:48change that to alpha foreground
39:52change each one to that
39:56i want
40:01okay so it's that and then we just want
40:04to create
40:05the bitmap pipe that into the bitmap
40:11and now we can dial in
40:15our fog so if i create color correct now
40:24use these uh the blue ones are for masks
40:29then we can drop the contrast a little
40:31bit
40:33maybe create a bit blue
40:38we've simulated a easy day
40:44that's cool and then create a merge mode
40:52think the yellow ones background green
40:54ones are foreground
40:55always forget if you pipe them in the
40:56wrong way around you can just hit ctrl t
40:58and swap them
40:59so that's the first part of the the comp
41:02um and then like i said if you go
41:03through your color corrections
41:05and so on create a blur if you want to
41:08make things like if you don't have
41:09reactor i mean it's free so you can just
41:11go ahead and
41:12download it and get some of these notes
41:14but you know things like um
41:16the chroma fuse you know kind of uh to
41:19create
41:20graphic aberration if you just hit uh if
41:23you create a transform node
41:26type that in and you
41:30scale the shot up by point zero
41:34five maybe point one let's make it
41:37point zero one so it's quite obvious and
41:39then just change it so it's only
41:42affecting the
41:43[Music]
41:45red channel with the the settings tab
41:47and just
41:48hit the red um
41:51or alternatively green whatever you
41:55just having the red is probably enough
41:56and then just change that to 0.05
41:59because it's a little bit too much
42:01that's one easy way to just create
42:03chromatic aberration i mean it doesn't
42:04look quite as good as what the node is i
42:05think the node has got a couple more
42:06nodes
42:07inside but it's basic way to do it um
42:11so yes that's that's the basic way to
42:12get this all comped
42:14and like i said if you're interested in
42:16getting the camera
42:18set up uh let me know in the comments um
42:20because you may not necessarily need
42:21that if you're if you're doing a still
42:22render or
42:23if you've done a slightly different
42:24camera angle so um
42:27so yeah that's pretty much it how you
42:29get uh
42:31a forest made in maya and arnold mash
42:35and comping it together in fusion so i
42:37hope that was helpful
42:39and any questions or any requests on
42:42further topics let me know in the
42:45comments below

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