Subsurface scattering in OctaneRender - CINEMA 4D Tutorial

- [Instructor] Welcome to another C4D Weekly. Last week, we covered the concept of subsurface scattering and how you can achieve it using Cinema 4D's standard renderer. This week, I'm going to show you how you can create subsurface scattering materials using OctaneRender. So if you don't know what subsurface scattering is, be sure to check out last week's video and then come back to this one. So, what I'm going to do is just kind of set up the scene here. It's very important that we have a couple lights in our scene and then an environment. Having the environment is very important for this subsurface scattering effect to work in Octane. You can see this is just a simple Octane sky with an RGB spectrum loaded up as the texture. Now let's go ahead and create a new Octane material. And let's just double click this open. And let's just go ahead and apply this to our lion object. And now let's fire up the live viewer window. And there we go. Just a plain default diffuse material, and let's just go into the diffuse channel, and just load up a texture. Let's go maybe purple, like royal purple, there we go. And then we can go into Transmission. And this is going to be very important because if we don't have Transmission Float raised up beyond zero, we're not going to have any transmission at all. Okay, so it's important that we increase that. And you're not going to see any change just yet. The one important setting that we need to change as far as rendering go to see subsurface scattering in Octane, is to go to our Octane settings. And instead of using Direct Lighting, we're going to use Pathtracing. And now you can see our lion just kind of lit up all yellow. So something's going on here. So basically this Transmission Float value controls the amount of subsurface scattering that's going through your object. So let's just leave this at one for right now. And let's go to the Medium. And what we're going to do is add a scattering medium. And this is going to help scatter all that light. You can see we don't have all that full blast of yellow coming through. You can just see it on the tips and thinner parts of our lion, here. So let's go into the scattering medium and see what's happening. So, one of the main settings inside of the scattering medium is this density. The higher the density, the thicker your object density and less light can scatter through. Now if I remove some of the density, you can see more of that yellow coming through. And basically that yellow is kind of coming from our light in our environment. If we want to change that color of the light that's scattering through our object, we can go ahead and load up an RGB spectrum into our absorptions. Right now we're scattering a lot of white. Like go in and maybe we want to scatter, maybe some blue, maybe some teal, something like that. I'll click OK. And now you can see that we're now getting kind of green because we now have that yellow light mixing with the blue and it's creating this green result. So now I can go back to my scattering medium settings. So what we can do now is maybe even load in an RGB spectrum in the scattering option here. Basically what scattering does is defines the color that actually penetrates deeper than all the other colors in this subsurface scattering effect. So we can load up an RGB spectrum here. And you can see at the default white, we're getting kind of this milky kind of look. And the phase controls how much of that light passes through to our current view. So if I bring this phase down to negative one, you can see this looks kind of milky, and if I bring the phase up to one, we're actually getting way less of that. You can see along the edges we get this nice kind of milky kind of look. But for my taste, I don't actually like this scattering, so I'm just going to clear that out, altogether, and this is what we're left with. So again we can adjust the density and only get this light passing through the thinner parts of our object. Or if we really bring down the density, you can see a ton of light passing through to our object. And again we can control the color by going into the RGP spectrum. Maybe we want more pink coming through, so we wet get that yellow and that pink. We can also go into this transmission, and maybe bring down the strength using this float value here. And there we go. So that's kind of the basics of getting up and running with subsurface scattering. And it's super easy and it renders so much faster in Octane as well. So I highly recommend that you check out third-party rendering as it's so good for look development, and removing the waiting that comes with render-intensive effects like subsurface scattering. So you don't want to wait until next week to learn something new? No problem. Here's some other ways to feed your creative brain to keep you busy. You can check out my other courses in the LinkedIn library. Visit my website eyedesyn.com for more tutorials. Subscribe to my YouTube channel and be alerted when I post a brand new tutorial. Join my Facebook page for daily MoGraph inspiration. And keep up to date on all my latest MoGraph creations on InstaGram. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you here again next week.