From the course: OctaneRender for Cinema 4D Essential Training

Hair and particles

From the course: OctaneRender for Cinema 4D Essential Training

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Hair and particles

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- [Narrator] So let's continue to explore the Octane ObjectTag and just in case you're wondering, we've got one on the geometry here that's just adding some subdivision to it. So let's move on, and we've got, you can see, a polygon selection, and what I've done with that is create some hair and it's being linked to that polygon selection. If I enable the hair now, you can see Octane will update and start to render it, which is great. However, if you're using splines or you don't have the hair objects, then you won't be able to see anything. So you'd see something like this. Nothing. Now, what do we need to do to fix that? Well of course, it's the Octane ObjectTag. So let's just come over to our tags, selecting our spline, and we'll add the Octane ObjectTag and in the hair tab we'll just choose Render As Hair. And now immediately you see the live viewer update, and we can start to adjust the Root Thickness and the Tip Thickness and dial-in the look of our hair. Of course, it's more flexible to use the hair object but this is just another way of rendering hair if you're using splines. Then you can add Octane materials, so we've got this glossy... So we can start to get a nice looking hair, we just come in, change the Diffuse. And I actually quite liked it the way it was, so I'm just gonna revert back. And if I just show you in the material as well, also using a slight sheen on here, and that just gives it a bit more of a glow. So that's rendering hair, and it's very simple to do. You just add the Octane ObjectTag, and enable it, really, and then you can dial-in your thickness settings. So let's move on and look at particles. So I've got this scene and I've used X-Particles for Cinema 4D, a third-party plugin, and if you're not familiar with that and you need some additional training, then please check out my course on learning the essentials of X-Particles 4. Now, I've got the live viewer running, and we can see in the viewport I've got all these particles and they look lovely but there's nothing happening in the live viewer. So one thing we need to remember as well, when we're rendering hair and particles and things like that, if you don't have a light in your scene you won't see anything, so we do have that, you need to have some kind of light source unless you're emitting an emissive material; that's digressing. So what we can do is just choose our emitter and we'll add an Octane ObjectTag. And there's new tab now, called Particle Rendering, which wasn't there previously. So we can enable spheres or voxels, let's just use spheres, and we'll get these ginormous spheres rendering in the live viewer. But what we can do to that is actually use our own particles sources. So I'm just going to use this pick-with thing, and just pick three objects that we have here. And now you can see that's-- Yeah, we're seeing the shape and form of those particles. But if we come into our camera that we've got set up, this could be our final shot for example, yeah, we can see a few but it's all a bit weird and we're not getting a true representation of the color that's over here. So how do we resolve that? Well, we can open up our Octane Material and in the Diffuse we'll just choose an instance color. And inside the instance color, you wanna change the source to Particle. Now, if we just slide this over, and we'll drop in the emitter. We're just looking at the particle color. And this is what's been defined, if you go over to the xpEmitter in the Display tab, this is what we're looking at, this gradient. And of course, you can see now we've got these lovely-colored particles and if we just come out of this camera now you can see it's a good representation of what we have in the viewport. So the Octane ObjectTag is super useful. We can now use it for rendering hair and particles.

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