From the course: OctaneRender for Cinema 4D Essential Training

Understanding the Octane node editor

From the course: OctaneRender for Cinema 4D Essential Training

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Understanding the Octane node editor

- [Instructor] In the previous movie, I mentioned Octane's powerful node based material system, and our goal is to become familiar and comfortable with using nodes. So how do we access the node editor? Well we can come over to our material and we've got the jelly bean here. If we double click to reveal the material editor, we can see we got this node editor button here. Clicking on that opens up the node editor window. Let's just close these down and we'll come over to the basic tab in the attributes manager. With our material selected, you can see we've got this node editor button as well. We can come over to the live viewer, in Materials, and just choose the Octane Node Editor. So there it is, we've got the window opened up, and we need to sort of understand this new interface. Let's just close it down, because I want to show you the live viewer side by side and not have to move the window around. So I'll just switch to a different layout. Now we have our nodes on the right and the live viewer, which I'm gonna start up on the left. I've worked on this material a little bit more since the previous version, and in the previous version we were using the mograph color shader. So to quickly see where that was, I can just click here and if I click and drag, a wire comes out and I can connect it to the defuse channel just like so, and that swaps what we had as an input previously. So this is with the mograph color shader, and I'm using a new instance color node, changing the source type to particle, dropping in the cloner as the source, and making sure the mode's on display color. Which means I have access to the mograph colors. So I'm putting that into a color correction node and then what I'll do with this is connect that to the diffuse. You can see how quickly we can just swap materials over and just to test the idea, even if we are just coming over and saying compare, store the render buffer, and then just dropping in the color shader. We see quickly where we were and what we've got to do. Now I can put the color correction in. If I choose to turn this off or bypass it I can actually right click on a node and a whole host of options are available to me. Including the option to disable this node. So if I disable that, that's what we're looking like with just the instance color. Now I can pipe that into the color correction node and if I enable it now, we get the result here in the live viewer. I could also just test out the color shader and put that into the texture, just like so. So very fast and very flexible to work in this way. So far we have been just getting familiar with picking the edge here and just dragging out a new wire and connecting it up to different channels. We've also right clicked on here and had a look at what we can do. A really cool one that I like using is the ability to detach the node. Which means instead of just deleting it, we can just detach it and say the wire just flows through as if it wasn't there. So anything connected to this is also detached as well, but what we can do to attach it once again is if we click and drag, and that means we can move around this node. If we hold down Alt, and we're hovering over the wire, you can see these green lines appear, and now that means once we let go, that will connect everything up once again and we can just reconnect our float texture as well into the brightness. So all these nodes feed into the material and if we look at the material, we've got those channels that we had in the material editor, and we can adjust the parameters of that right here in the node editor. Now we can also navigate this in a similar way to autographic views. You can use the one key to move, or you can hold down Alt and middle mouse button to move. You can hold down Alt and right click to zoom in and out, and you can hold own two and left click to zoom in and out. So there's a number of ways of navigating the node editor here, and it makes moving around it quite fast and flexible. You can also frame everything like so, and it'll just frame everything to the bounds of the view that we have here. If we select a few nodes here, we can frame the selected nodes, get a closer look at those. Let's just zoom out. We can choose to frame all, then zoom out a bit more. So that's navigating the node editor. How do we actually get nodes into this? Well we already know that we can right click in places and reveal the menu. If you right click in a blank area, you can create new nodes from this list here. That's the same as coming over to the Create menu and you get a mirror of what's going on there. Now all on the left you'll have noticed that we have nodes as well. And they're color coded so if we look at the Create menu, we have the material nodes in red, texture in blue. We have some generators. These are the green ones. The mappings are down here. Got some ways of filtering those as well. So you can just click onto these buttons and you can filter off those. Turn them back on again. So you can just choose the ones that you like to use commonly. You can also search as well. So if I wanted to add in an RGB spectrum, I just start to type in RGB spectrum. I can click that and I can drag it into the node graph like so. I can right click and delete it, and if I clear out the search field, I get all the nodes available back to me again. So we've merely scratched the surface of working with nodes, but hopefully you can see that it's super fast and flexible to use once you get the hang of it, and in the next movie, we'll look at another example where we'll actually build a material using nodes.

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