Cinema 4D Tutorial - Procedural Alien-Rock Materials (Octane)

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Get the Procedural Alien Rock Pack: newplastic.gumroad.com/l/LGTqyP
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In this C4D tutorial we're going to push Octane's node system and make some complex procedural alien rock-like materials. We'll use a single Universal material and combine tons of noise nodes in unique ways to create super unique textures as we learn how to approach detailed node layering.
As a bonus, we'll also go over how to quickly setup a procedural rock model in Cinema4D which you can change into different structures in a couple of clicks.
A little side note - as usual, I'm going fast in this tutorial and I'm fast-forwarding a lot of repetitive steps. The reason is that the point in my tutorials is not to copy each step into your project, but to observe my general approach so you understand the fundamentals of how to make this stuff. I want you to learn the approach, not to copy every detail. That's how you really learn!
00:00 Intro
00:11 New Procedural Alien Rock Material Pack
00:30 Patrons Shoutouts
01:08 Quick Scene Setup
01:54 Making Procedural Rock Models
04:25 Sculpting Rock Models
05:08 Albedo, Bump & Roughness Texturing
07:04 Displacement Texturing
10:05 Adjusting Albedo & Displacement Details
12:06 Adding Edge Details
13:55 Last Adjustments
14:49 Adjusting Material to Other Models
15:48 Changing Up the Material
19:40 Editing the Procedural Model
19:59 Outro

[@boskbass]

The power of the noise node is huge

[@NewPlastic]

HUGE

[@pavena7517]

Your channel is amazing!! Soooo helpful and informative

[@mtnbiker1678]

Awesome pace, very informative, perfectly done...dude, appreciate your hard work and dedication on this. Keep it up!

[@NewPlastic]

Happy to hear that! My pleasure

[@TheHumanAnonymous]

Awesome work man, get excited every time I see a new video from you. Keep it up!

[@NewPlastic]

That's amazing, happy to hear that!

[@cheeseduckpan_studio]

I love all of your tutorial work. Thx

[@NewPlastic]

My pleasure

[@nia995]

Purchased! Amazing quality as usual :)

[@NewPlastic]

Thank you NIA!

[@richardxs]

One of my favorite octane shader tutorials 🔥

[@NewPlastic]

Awesome dude, another one coming right after

[@EnriqShockwave]

Wow great tut! Definitely need to be more comfortable playing with all these nodes. This will be an awesome reference to follow along with!

[@NewPlastic]

I totally agree man, I think thats my main point here to show you how I approach layering up nodes and takes the most advantage I can of the node system.

[@user-gs1kz9sn3k]

Good for you, my brother

[@NewPlastic]

Good for us all!

[@PabloLucio]

Didn't watch it yet but I already know it's gonna be so useful. Love this channel, man!

[@NewPlastic]

Appreciate that brother!

[@SHIVAM.M.S]

OG New Plastic 💯🔥🔥🔥

[@NewPlastic]

Ma boy Shivan is in the house!

[@seaghan1]

Really great tut man, love how excited you are by the process of making these materials.

[@NewPlastic]

Hah thank you brother, yeah there's nothing like plugging some nodes and watching how crazy it looks in the live viewer, catches me off-guard every time!

[@seaghan1]

@@NewPlastic Feel the same way. Funny to watch someone else have the same reaction. Keep up the great work mate, you are smashing it.

[@polinache6885]

wow man this is sick

[@NewPlastic]

[@prymexxxx]

Seriously amazing stuff. Been working in Octane for about 5 years now and still learning new stuff. Love the layering technique of the noises to create steps with add nodes.

[@NewPlastic]

That's awesome, yeah thats what we do here buddy!

[@jabajabaheyhey]

Honey wake up new New Plastic video just dropped

[@NewPlastic]

What my girlfriend tells me every time I upload

[@NewPlastic]

sike i dont have a girlfriend

[@aeon7195]

Oh man, thats so amazing! I will buy the materials pack tomorrow for sure!! An idea for a future video could be teach us how to make those crazy couch, cloth, and rug (hair) procedural materials and patterns.

[@NewPlastic]

Awesome, thank you man! When you say couch/cloth you mean weaved patterns?

[@DLT8]

sicccc video brother toad!!!

[@eddierobbertse8957]

What's wrong with you KZbin! I watch C4D/Octane tutorials all the time and only now do you suggest this great channel? Love this tutorial- The results are amazing!

[@NewPlastic]

Haha well it's never too late! Thank you brother!

[@talhazulqarnain2126]

Game on Bro!! Amazing

[@NewPlastic]

Hell yeah!

[@juliendunk8068]

Damn！This is FXXKING AWESOME tutorial！i love it

[@NewPlastic]

I love it too man!

[@GeetSampat]

Just when you think he's getting done with the material, Adds 5 more dirt nodes 😂😂

[@NewPlastic]

Hah it's never enough

[@miryrd]

He did it again!

[@NewPlastic]

And he won't stop!

[@oursonwelles]

B E A U T I F U L

[@NewPlastic]

[@rubenahlers2681]

so good!

[@NewPlastic]

[@departed9282]

Knew something was going on when I saw these on Gumroad yesterday, top class.

[@NewPlastic]

That's dope! Did you see them on my page or in the explore page?

[@departed9282]

@@NewPlastic I usually use Gumroad Discover and sort by "new" that's why, just luck I guess :)

[@jopfe0815]

So sick!

[@NewPlastic]

[@yannick1508]

sweet stuff AGAIN.

[@NewPlastic]

Thank you Yannick!

[@octanejesus]

you're a badass at texturing sir

[@NewPlastic]

My man

[@Jake__Boll]

dude you are a node god! gotdammm

[@NewPlastic]

Haha damn I'll take it.

[@AlexiEffects]

Although you speak a bit fast and this tutorial was specifically for this alien rock look, the way you approach material creation is very simple and to the point. I'm learning a lot from your workflows and am super thankful! Everyone learns in their own particular way and I think the way you go about it makes it pretty clear to me. thanks!

[@NewPlastic]

That actually mean a whole lot brother, thank you for saying it. My point in this tutorial style is for you to learn from the process and not copy each move. So the quicker you see me go through things the more you get the actual process.

[@somenoise637]

wow amazing video

[@NewPlastic]

Thank you brother, made it inspired by your username

[@kaanbilaloglu]

thank you!

[@NewPlastic]

My pleasure !

[@andrewjk87]

Bro you crazy dawg.

[@andrewjk87]

Thanks for the great tut though!

[@devix7474]

man, you're insane 😍

[@NewPlastic]

My psychiatrist agrees.

[@devix7474]

@@NewPlastic 😅😅

[@babysteps1]

You da real MVP

[@NewPlastic]

Appreciate you dawg

[@nairow220]

Really really amazing I want to see more and moooorrrreee

[@NewPlastic]

More of these coming next week!

[@nairow220]

@@NewPlastic your awesome

[@lucasschafer8323]

You're so good

[@NewPlastic]

Appreciate that my brother. Happy others can learn from this

[@prettygrotesk254]

YESSS LOVE FROM ITAEWON KR

[@NewPlastic]

Itaewon ! Say hi to the dude in that grocery store he definitely remembers me

[@generativen]

when i start to earn money i will buy all your products to support you dude. you are amazing!

[@oznsahin]

If you need some pack from this awesome channel i like to help you Ömer. I can send gift to you :)

[@NewPlastic]

@@oznsahin Ozan if you buy him this pack I'll give you any product from the store for free!

[@oznsahin]

@@NewPlastic Ömer, send me your email ma man

[@generativen]

@@oznsahin [e-mail] i am shocked now hahaha

[@generativen]

@@NewPlastic Ozan just made my day! thank you both x

[@leroiceyballs]

Thanks!

[@NewPlastic]

Wow you're the first the use the thank you button! Thank you so so much that's awesome

[@leroiceyballs]

@@NewPlastic NP. I take away so much from your videos.Its the least i can do.

[@IcaroDiniz]

DOPE

[@NewPlastic]

SICK

[@Alain-pb7xp]

Love it! Btw, why do u prefer to control camera imager settings from octane settings than from octane camera tag? I think I find it more workflow-friendly to do it directly from the tag, but I'd like to know your thoughts on this. Thanks for the video!

[@NewPlastic]

Unless I'm really trying to get different looks from the same scene, I prefer having universal settings for the different cameras so there's not too much mismatch between the different shots. Also then I dont have to repeat each process for each camera. But yeah sometimes I'll need different exposure in a certain angle or something like that so I'll activate the camera kernel settings

[@cgnico3978]

Yeaaaah

[@NewPlastic]

[@EZZYLAND]

liked before video started

[@NewPlastic]

Haha hopefully you didnt dislike it after watching

[@EZZYLAND]

@@NewPlastic hell no youve been my new fav channel for a WHILE ive only been doing cg for over a year and the node system is getting easier and easier to grasp with every video i watch. thank you! if i may request, could you do a video on particle sims without xparticles. :'c your videos are so well made

[@NewPlastic]

@@EZZYLAND Thats awesome to hear, for real. I have one tutorial about a melting brain using no external plugins that you can check out. Other than that, I'll probably go into it in the future but my knowledge is pretty limited in that field, I really have to feel comfortable with something before I allow myself to share it with others. But the short answer is yes!

[@carl2072]

Thanks for taking the time to share your knowledge. Curious why your sphere from the beginning has a black backdrop? Relatively new to Octane? Mine is in a bright environment!

[@carl2072]

Changes default environment colour to black, sorted!

[@ShapedStudios]

Great tutorial man! Really inspiring! However, I'm not getting nearly as much detail and depth from the bump layer as you do?! Even with a hard light I notice that my bump is really small, did you change any bump settings off camera or what do you think it's because of?

[@ShapedStudios]

Nevermind, I realized now that then scale of my scene in Cinema 4D was way to big and that made the bump too small to notice.

[@NewPlastic]

Yup good to know, when I read the first reply that would've been my first answer. It's always really important to know what scale you're working in!

[@andonnitsolingkas7898]

@@NewPlastic Can I ask what the size of the scene has to be and how to change this? Looks like the materials I bought are indeed a bit too flat unlike you showed in the video. Thanks in advance, I'm still pretty new to C4D and Octane :)

[@harrybrownell]

Love this! How would I achieve this with R25? I'm not seeing the volume mesh tab..

[@NewPlastic]

Not sure about 25 since I haven't got around to check it out. Once I do, I'll let you know!

[@ciacatric]

Your tuts are awesome! Thanks for providing such quality content! I saw that you are running 2x 2080s, and they are not reaching degrees over 65!? I have also two and they are around 80-90 while rendering… are you using watercooling? Huge Case? Etc. Pleeeease share your cooling wisdom as im burning here in hell haha

[@NewPlastic]

That's a great question! my cards definitely reach 80 degrees, sometimes slightly more, when heavy rendering. I use a full tower Thermaltake View 71 case, it's ok but not enough on its own to cool down cards. This video is confusing because, for some weird reason, at the time when I shot the video the MSI Afterburner app was limiting the cards to very very low power draw. So while they were keeping much cooler, they were also functioning at half the power. Took me a while to figure out why my cards weren't functioning as well as they used to. But yeah, 80 is normal without any extra cooling. 80 is also not terrible because the cards are meant to take that type of heat. The good thing about lowering temps is that then you can overclock the cards. But now for example I'm planning on upgrading to 2 * 3090's and I know for a fact I would need an efficient way to cool down the cards. Thinking of either a custom loop, or just AIOs.

[@ciacatric]

@@NewPlastic thanks for the in depth answer! would be awesome if you let us followers know once you have updated your rig, to see what way you have chosen :)

[@DavidAlef-rg4zs]

💥🏅

[@NewPlastic]

[@metekutlu90]

Thank you for this amazing tutorial. I'm going to buy your pack! However, I'm totally stuck at the displacement node. When I add the noises, they do nothing. The noise seems to take effect only if I use a bake texture node before the displacement. However, it seems to change the projection. When I add the previous texture projection node, it does not give the same result neither. Any ideas, please ?? (on C4D R23/R24 Intel Mac)

[@NewPlastic]

Hey, make sure you use Vertex Displacement type instead of Texture Displacement in the displacement node (at the top of the node)

[@metekutlu90]

@@NewPlastic Yes, it is on vertex displacement. Just tried it on Octane X Standalone and it works! It seems that octane noise doesn't work properly with displacement on Octane C4D Mac. It would be great to have a workaround in C4D though. Thanks anyways. Congrats again for your work!

[@NewPlastic]

@@metekutlu90 Hmm yeah it seems like it might be some sort of a bug with Octane X? I looked it up and theres one post about it in the OTOY forums but not sure if it's totally that. Did you manage to work it out?

[@metekutlu90]

​@@NewPlastic The same node setup works on Octane X, but not in C4D plugin. I never managed to make the Octane noise work with vertex displacement in C4D Mac.. No, I couldn't find a workaround.. :/

[@vietnamrubber]

Great tutorial. Any reason you only use the octane noises instead of the c4d noises? thanks!

[@NewPlastic]

Great question, I'll use Octane noises whenever I can because they're truly procedural. C4D noises in Octane have to get baked, or used as an OSL, which will always be less stable than native Octane noises that are designed to be used with the engine. I'll only use C4D noises if there's a specific look I'm going for that Octane noises can't achieve.

[@vietnamrubber]

@@NewPlastic makes sense, good to know what keeps octane more stable, I'm sure this will save headaches down the line. I was asking because the c4d noises have the animation and looping animation capability which octane noises don't have (AFAIK). Not as important when dealing with rocks but was just thinking about doing procedural textures like this within octane that have some kind of looping animated texture. Thanks again!

[@NewPlastic]

@@vietnamrubber Nah totally, the animation and unique looks and settings fo the C4D noises are great and I use them when I need them. One thing to note is that looping doesn't work inside the octane node system, even in C4D noises. I was disappointed to realize it - there's a workaround, it's kinda dirty but it works if you really need it. But yeah, honestly animating the noise will be super cool even for these alien rocks - they're alien! They can do wtvr! Yeah, stability is a huge issue with Octane. Even with Octane noises, I get crashes often, especially when layering them in the displacement, and ESPECIALLY when animating them in the displacement. I have a certain threshold when showing things in my tutorials, if I see a technique causes too much crashing I won't use it in a tutorial. What is too much crashing? Well, I guess we all have our own personal limits lol

[@vietnamrubber]

Didn't realize the looping doesn't work in octane. Guess it's impossible to add that feature without rewriting all the code from the ground up too. Is the workaround to render out a jpg sequence and use that instead? Or disable the C4D shaders OSL thing and UV unwrap to manage the seams? Too dirty for me. Defeats the purpose of iterative "procedurality" anyways. Lol it's frustrating when these brainstorms run into technical hurdles like this. Really satisfying if you can figure them out though.

[@AlexanderYossifov]

I'm using Arnold (beginner). How similar are these two rendered?... and how to do these materials with Arnold?

[@NewPlastic]

They're fairly similar, Arnold has a more robust node-mixing setup if I remember correctly so it'll be actually a cleaner process to do this, but I haven't touched Arnold in almost 2 years so I cant tell you. But in general, the process would be extremely similar.

[@GD15555]

If I buy it how do I move textures from octane cinema material to octane 3ds max material ?

[@ranko91287]

Hi. I cant bring this to work in Cinema 2023 and the current octane Version. Noises are not possible to render in the displacement channel. If I try, nothing happens. If I bake the noise before plugging into the displacement node, it distorts the noise in a really weird way...anyone else having this issue???

[@NewPlastic]

You have to make sure the Displacement is set to Vertex type and not Texture type. Otherwise procedural nodes won't work there.

[@brandonblair6529]

Fuck I need to get better with materials that shit looks so dope. how do you not get lost within on the nodes? Any process tips or things to keep in mind, I tend to forget what each node is doing in the context of the whole material an its own pipe line. Cheers

[@NewPlastic]

I hear you, I definitely use the Solo Node option to make sure I know which node does what, and I also keep aligning nodes and grouping them closer to each other / or further away from each other, to clean up the system and have a more organized structure. That helps a lot.

[@GD15555]

does it work with 3ds max? Please make it for max too

[@user-pi5rd4xs9b]

Hey! Are there any specifics on how to use these materials with a Vektron?

[@NewPlastic]

I'm actually not sure, I know that displacement needs polygon information to work and I'm pretty sure Vectron doesn't have an actual mesh right? But try it!

[@user-pi5rd4xs9b]

@@NewPlastic good!

[@talhazulqarnain2126]

The Rock Looks Like a Bunny, all we need more is fur 😭

[@NewPlastic]

Hah fur got burnt off in galactic radiation

[@JohnKappaAU]

So much solo crash anxiety. Every second time I solo a node … boom C4D dies. Have you found a fix for this? Great vid btw. Seems like rocks are the current thing.

[@NewPlastic]

Rocks were always a thing! And solo crash anxiety is FUCKIN REAL. Probably the thing that causes crashes the most, I 99.9% of the time instinctively save before soloing and unsoloing anything. I dunno why, perhaps there's a peak in VRAM use or I dunno. But yeah, my fix is, save, then solo. If it crashes, I just quickly go back to where I was. Octane is infamous for being unstable in that sense but it's one of the tradeoffs I guess

[@ReastArtZ]

Wow so it's true... The internet is full of noise

[@NewPlastic]

And it's beautiful !

[@deathdedesign]

0.75 speed only. thanks KZbin.

[@NewPlastic]

Haha definitely the way to watch this

[@stasieknie6081]

Whats ur Gpu ?

[@NewPlastic]

I have two 2080ti's

[@MrHannessie]

Your content is super. I just cant follow it, you are going way to fast.

[@apollogt5506]

i just...fell off the planet

[@NewPlastic]

Hope you saw some of these alien rocks over there