INSYDIUM LIVE! - March 2023 - NeXus, TerraformFX & Taiao

And I'm Mike, and this is our very first INSYDIUM live stream. It is great to be with you. Thanks for everyone that is with us on the chat. What we'll do is we'll do a bit of a roll call of those of you on the chat in a minute.

Yep, so what we're going to do is we're going to give a quick look at some of the work that the developers have been doing on Terra, focused mainly on the workflow, the interface, making it faster, easier to use, and obviously more powerful. After we've had a quick look at the new tools, we're going to jump into Flower, and we're going to have a look at making this procedural tropical hibiscus flower. Before that, we're going to have Bob take you through the technical training. So before we get on with our technical tutorial, then let's just do a bit of a roll call in the chat. I should say at this point that John Bosley, the INSYDIUM human encyclopedia who knows everything about everything in the world, he is in the chat, he's moderating for us, and he's going to be helping answering some of your questions as well.

Delaunay.

So Bob, is there any reason why you've used hexagonal rather than regular for the emission?

That's really cool, Bob. So what we're going to do now is we're going to move on and have a look at some of the development work that's been going on behind the scenes with Terra. So as I mentioned at the top of the stream, the developers have been working on making Terra faster, easier to use, and more powerful. So let's jump in and have a look at some of that.

So here we are in Cinema 4D, and I've got a scene set up here with some plants. Now this is Terra, our procedural plant and tree generator, and what the developers have been working on is improving the workflow and the interface. So let me just show you some of the changes.

So one of the big things is the speed. The developers have been working on optimizing the plant generation, so now it's much faster to generate plants. You can see here I've got a plant, and if I go in and make some changes, it updates much quicker than it used to. That's a big improvement.

The other thing is the interface. We've made it much easier to use, so if you're new to Terra, you'll find it much more intuitive. And for those of you who are already using it, you'll find that the workflow is much smoother.

So let me show you a few things. First of all, we've got the new preset system, which makes it much easier to browse and apply presets. And we've also improved the way you can customize plants. So you've got much more control over the shape, the leaves, the branches, all of that.

And one of the things I'm really excited about is the new Flower tool. So let me show you that. We're going to make a procedural tropical hibiscus flower, and this is a great example of what you can do with Terra.

So let's start with a new plant, and I'm going to go to the flower presets. We've got a whole range of flower presets now, and I'm going to start with a basic flower shape. So let's bring that in.

Now the first thing we want to do is adjust the petals. So I'm going to go into the petal settings, and we want to make these petals a bit bigger, a bit more rounded, and we want to add some color variation. So let's do that.

So I'm going to increase the petal count, we want about five petals for a hibiscus, and I'm going to adjust the shape. You can see here I've got control over the width, the length, the curvature of the petals. So let's shape these to look like hibiscus petals.

Now the other thing about hibiscus flowers is they've got this prominent central stamen. So let's add that. I'm going to go to the stamen settings and adjust those. We want a long stamen with pollen on the end.

So there we go, that's looking much more like a hibiscus. Now let's add some color. I'm going to go to the material settings, and I'm going to set up a gradient for the petals, going from a deep red in the center to a lighter pink on the edges. That's a classic hibiscus color scheme.

And there we go, that's looking really nice. So that's a procedural tropical hibiscus flower, made entirely in Terra. And the beauty of this is that it's completely procedural, so you can go in and make changes at any time. You can adjust the number of petals, the shape, the color, all of that, and it updates in real time.

So that's a quick look at some of the development work that's been going on with Terra. As I said, the main focus has been on speed, workflow, and the interface, and I think you'll find it's a much better experience when you get your hands on it.

So that's pretty much it for today's stream. We've done a technique breakdown with Bob showing you the granular sim, and we've had a look at some of the development work with Terra. We hope you've enjoyed it, and we'll be doing more of these streams in the future.

Thanks everyone, see you next time!

Loads of particles. These are our static particles, but now we need to confine this emission to just those snowy areas. So all we need to do is go to our emitter and in the Object tab, look below the Object Link field. We can put a selection in, and all we need to do is put our vertex map in — remember the snow vertex map, that one. So let's just drag that in, and now we have got our residual particles sitting on those areas where the snow was. And obviously when we get to render time again, these ones — you instance the same geometry at render time and you get a totally linked, coherent scene. But you're only simulating a really, really small part of that.

And you'll get through it. Optimize, optimize, optimize — always as much as you can.

Yep, so here we are in my Cinema, and what we're going to do is go up to the Insydium menu, Taio. And for the users who already use Taio, you might know straight away we have a couple of new options — Taio Leaf and a Taio Flower. The flower was previously in Taio Plant and we've taken it out and rebuilt it to give it a lot more power. And we'll have a look at these in a moment. First thing we want to do is add a new plant, and we're going to look at the new workflow options we've had, because what we wanted to do after the first version is streamline the process, make it easier to use, navigate all the options, and just give it more power. So let's add a trunk, and from that we'll add a branch. With the branch selected, we're just going to add a couple of options — we're going to increase the angle, and we'll increase the length. I'm just going to jump into global settings and have a few more resolutions just so it's got more detail. And we'll go back to Plant Layers now. For the users, you might know straight away there's missing options — Filling, Gravity, Turbulence — they've all been taken out of the main tab to make this a lot more efficient to use, because we only need various options in here just to get the initial shape. Everything else has now been moved into the modifiers. So if we look in Modifiers, you can see that we have a new modifier stack. With that selected, we're going to drop in a Furling modifier. And with the Furling selected, you can see we have all the options previously in Furling with the addition of Variations. So we'll add some Furling, we'll bring this down, we'll adjust the bias so it's further down the branch. And with the Variations, we can add a little bit of variation to each of these. Now in version one we had one Furling option — it did angle and it did bias, and that was it. Now as they're modifiers, you can add as many as you want. So let's drop in another one. Now you can see it's not been affected — we need to change the blend mode, so we'll set this to Add. That's just adding it on top of the previous Furling modifier. So let's add some Furling on the end, and if we adjust the bias, you'll see that now we're just affecting the ends of the branch. So you can see straight away you can get a lot more control over the look of the branching. And what you can do with the modifiers — if we look in the stack, you can see we have Furling, Turbulence, Twist, and Gravity, like we just had. We also have new Aim, Profile, and Displacement. So let's drop in a Turbulence, and we can leave that as it is. As you can see, that's giving us quite a nice look straight away. But one of the additional benefits of these is we have Fields, so each modifier can be controlled on its own with a field. And what we'll do is we'll drop in a Spherical Field, and let's just increase the strength of this and the scale. And we'll make this one affect all of the modifiers simply by dragging and dropping the field into the field list. So now with our field, we can art direct exactly where we want these modifiers to be affecting the branches.

You can definitely use it for animation. For example, let's have a look at dropping this into a Random Field. And we'll put the view settings on, and let's just increase the scale of that noise. Let's bring that up like so. And in the field, if we change the animation speed and push play, you can see the field is affecting all of these branches. So it's not controlling all of them at the moment, but there you go — you can use the fields to animate the branches. You can use the fields to art direct the branches where they are and exactly how they're looking. Let's just set that back to a sphere. So yeah, if you want them only on certain branches, you can have that control. And obviously it's fields, so you can add more control parts over here, have it control different modifiers out of the stack. And like I said, you can have as many as you want — there's no limit to the modifiers that you can put into this stack. So you have full fine control over how you build your plants with the new modifiers. So that's one of the big additions that we've added to the Taio Plant — major workflow increases. And the next thing we want to look at is the Taio Leaf. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn this off.

We are now doing Leaf. So Taio Leaf is a whole new procedural leaf tool for generating leaves, obviously, and the leaves can then be added to the plant. So if we have a quick look at the plant and add a leaf — we're going to the leaf, you had the previous leaf with some basic options, but now in the Geometry tab we have different modes: Basic, Custom, and Emitter. And if you just select Custom, you can simply drag and drop your new leaf into here and it will be procedurally built on the new plant. So we'll go back to our leaf, and I've already put some materials in here just so we can separate the parts. We go to the Main tab and we'll look at our geometry, and I'm going to quickly add a bit more geometry to this — so we're going to 20 and 40, and let's get rid of these lines. So I'm going to add a quick shape — we'll just create a very basic leaf shape, something like this looks fine. And then we'll have a look at the veins. So if we go into the Veins tab, you can see we have all these options for adding veins. So we'll enable it, and that creates this vein down the main stem of the leaf. And this profile gives us the control over that, so let's drag down this taper, it out across the end of the leaf. Now we also have a Petiole Offset, so if we increase this, you'll see that it pushes the leaf and the stem off from the branch, which is what happens naturally — if you have this petiole that grows from the branch into the leaf, and that just gives you much more realism to have an attachment to the branch rather than just this floating leaf. Okay, so with that said, we have a vein count. So let's increase the vein count — we'll put 20 in there. You can see it creates these procedural branching veins, and we have an angle option. So let's increase the angle like so, which is looking good. Happy with that. And we'll just drop the radius because they're a bit large at the moment, so we'll just put down to one. So there's the veins, and with this vein system we have various structures — this is Pinnate, we have Palmate which creates like a fan type of structure where you can see in sort of tropical plants, which looks good, and we also have Parallel which is what you get in grass blades or a single stem only. Now we'll put it back to Pinnate, and I'll quickly go back to Geometry — these veins are fully procedural to the shape that you have here, so if you adjust the shape, they adapt naturally to however the shape of the leaf is. Okay, so we've got it back to how it was. And then we can just jump into the modifiers — like every part, we now have the modifier stack. So with this one, let's add a Fold. Now if you remember from previously, Fold in Taio just did a hard angle like so, which worked for distance but not for close-ups. So what we have now is this Fold Shape, and the Fold Shape is — if you imagine this middle part to the end is the middle part to the end of half of the leaf — so what we can do is create these really natural curves. And it's a spline, so you can do whatever you like in here to really fine-tune how that works. But we can also take this and adjust where it is on the leaf. So with the bias, you can see you can procedurally move where that fold is happening. So let's drop it down towards the end like that, which looks good. Okay, I'm happy with that. Let's add in a couple of Furling layers. So we put one Furling layer, and that will be the main curve, the gravity, like so. We'll adjust the bias so we get that really nice gravity fill. And then we'll add one more, and this one we'll just use to adjust the tip of the leaf so it's got a bit of life to it.

It's all in here, really easy to access and to manage as well, because you can get quite lost. So let's just drop in a Turbulence modifier as well just to give it some wave motion. So that looks good. So say we're happy with that — that's our single leaf, we can use that on our plant, and that looks really good. And when you're rendering these, you can add some thickness to the leaf, but when you get translucency and the sun coming through, you can really see these veins and they make it look much more realistic. So we'll go back to the Main tab now. We have two modes in here: Standard Leaf, which is a single mode here, or Lobing. And we'll drop in the Lobing mode, and you can see that adds a new Lobing tab. And what Lobing is, is how various natural plants work. So we have these parallel branching for the Pinnate mode, and with that let's add a leaf on the end and increase the stem length. So you can see you can get these really cool natural plants. And we have variations for angles and twisting, and size variations and biasing, so you can really control all the individual leaves. The other mode we have in here is Palmate, which like the veins creates a fan. So with that I can drop this angle down, we'll lower the stem length because we don't need it that large, and also we can adjust the stem profile just so it blends in better. And then with the size bias, we can control the size around the fan. So if we add a point in the middle of our spline, that's effectively the center leaf, and the two end ones are the two end leaves. So if we select these, drag them down, you can see we can control the scale of those. So you can see really quickly and really easily you can build these really nice detailed leaf systems, all part of the new Taio that we're working on.

I mean I was working with a 1080 Ti for a long time, and the only thing you're really constrained by is how much VRAM that card has, which doesn't have as much. So you can't simulate as huge scenes, but the scene that we set up in today's stream of this granular solve, you would absolutely be able to simulate that on a 1080 Ti. It wouldn't be as quick, but you'd be able to do it without any problems at all.

Okay, so that's the Plant and then Leaf, and some of the insights into what we've been working on. Let's now add a flower. So we're going to turn off the Leaf, go to Insydium Taio and add a Taio Flower. Now the Flower object you can see is already pre-built — it comes in with all these options and layers already made for you, just so you've got a starting point with the flower. I'm just going to change my UI so we can see the Hibiscus that we're going to build, and let's get started at having a go at building this. So looking at this flower, we don't need the sepals. Now the sepals are these leaves on the bottom which grow out from the receptacle, and they would be — when you're doing a flower that's budding, you'd use the sepals as the bud. But we don't need those, so we can take those out. For now we'll hide our stamen and we'll focus on the petals. So with the petals, we only need five — obviously the Hibiscus has five petals, so we change the count to five. And one more thing before I do work on the petals is I'll change the radius of the receptacle and pistil. So we'll set those to one width, and I'll just set the height of the pistil to 0.5 and do the receptacle, set that to one as well. Okay, so that's good. Now we can focus on these petals. So we'll go to the Petal layer, and we'll go back to the Geometry tab, and we want more geometry because we want to get it quite detailed, as this would be a hero flower. So let's go to 20 in the width and again 40 in the length, so we've got lots of resolution to play with. Where you can increase the width, drop the length slightly, make the width slightly larger. Now there's a bit of intersection here, and we'll come back to that and we'll fix it. So that's set up now. If we go into the Modifiers, there's already some preset ones in there. Well, we're going to remove those because we want to work on them from scratch, so take those out. And I'm going to set the orientation to about 60 percent so that we've got that initial flowing up from the receptacle. As you can see, they come up and then they fall down. So what we want to do is we want to fold the base of these petals around the receptacle. We'll go into the modifiers and we'll add a Fold. So with that, we'll do our trick of setting the curve, and we'll just aim this tangent down here, and we'll increase the curve. So you can see we can get that really nice folding. That's good, but we don't want it on the top of the petals, so with the bias we'll just drop this down so it's just the base that's folding around the receptacles. Okay, that looks good. And now we just want to add some Furling. So we'll add a Furling layer and drop this down, and drop the bias right down. You can see quite easily we're already getting that really nice profile. One last modifier — we'll just get some Turbulence in there. Now I can drag the vertical scaling down, which has been added to the Insydium lists, and that will work all the way back to R19, which is nice.

Oh great, you can have it whatever size you like, which is really good. All right, let's get some Turbulence in there, and I'll just drop the scale slightly. Okay, so I'm happy with those except for the intersection. So what we'll do — go to Orientation and just simply increase the strength of the twist until they're away from each other. Okay, I'm just going to drop in some materials as I'm working on this. So we'll go to the materials, drag in a Petal Flower. Okay, looking good, except that it's now pulled away from the actual pistil. So we'll just go to the Main tab — we have our radius, which is the radius away from the center. Drop that down a few notches, something like that looks good. Okay, I'm happy with that. And I'll drop a quick material onto the pistil as well. We're working just to make it look good in this one. I want to switch the view. Okay, so now it's time to start working on the stamen. Now stamen — for anyone who remembers, in the current version of Taio, is just the stamen. You have one option: the count and the way it distributes. Now you can have multiple stamen. Not only that, you can have stamen on stamen, so you have way more control. So with that, let's go in and have a look at how to do it. So set this to one, and we're going to turn off the Fit to Pistil because that's just giving us an angle based on the normal of the pistil, and we don't want that. So turn that off, and it's coming straight out. Go to the Geometry tab, and we're going to increase the size — something like, let's go to three. Okay, looks good. Now we don't need all these knots, so I'm going to delete these two knots out of the profile, like that. And we'll bring the end up. Now we need a lot more geometry, so let's just add more geo into the length and the height and width segments. Okay, so I'm going to add a little point in here just so I can create a slightly bulbous end, like that. That looks good, happy with that. Let's drop our material on there. Okay, so that's the main stem coming out, and we're just going to give it a bit of a wave. So we'll add in a Turbulence, increase strength and lower the scale. Okay, that's good, happy with that. Actually let's lower that scale a bit more. Cool, there you go — that looks quite close to that. So the next thing I'm going to do is we're going to focus on these five stamen at the tip. So we'll go in here, and with the stamen selected in the layers, simply select Stamen again from the Add Parts, and you can see it creates it as a child. If we look around, you can see we have little stamen and they're parented to the main one that we've added. So we can get a bit more control — let's increase the size, and we'll give them a material so we can see what we're doing. Back to the geometry, and again we're going to add more geo to add more detail.

It's just a gradient in the Color channel.

Yeah, okay, so that's a very simple one, but getting that 2D V — that's the key to getting it mapped correctly once it goes onto the petal. Yes, but you can also adjust that inside of the materials — you have all the mapping here. If you're bringing in a live texture from a photograph or something and you need to assign it that way, that's fully possible. There's also a normal map in here just for some detail. Okay, back to these little tip guys. So we're going to go to the Main tab and we're going to change the distribution of these new stamen to Radial. And what we want to do is we want five, so we're going to do a count of five and a ring count of five. And what that's done is created this ring of five stamen. Now we can position those with the Distribution slider — bring them all the way out to the top. And whoops, I'm just going to make this slightly wider, like so. And let's give them a little bit of length, scale them up a bit so we can really see them. They can add a bit of variation as well just so they're not all exactly the same. Okay, so that looks good. And we can go back to the Main tab and we have an angle slider as well, so we can angle those up. And then with our modifiers, we'll just add a Furling layer just to give them a nice natural curve. Okay, so there's one last layer of stamen to add to that, and that is the pollen ones. So select our main stamen stem, add another stamen layer. We'll increase their size. Let's just put a material on them. And we'll go back to the Geometry — again, we'll give them a bit more detail, size variation. And we'll go to the Main tab and we're going to change this mode to Spiral, which is the Fibonacci helix. And we'll increase the count. And then we'll simply adjust their position — so I'm going to move this point and add another one so they're slightly off the tip. Add a point here, and we'll bring this one down — this is the one that's going to drag them up the length of the main stamen. Something like this looks good. We'll put some angle on there. And with the angle we have a bias spline as well, so we can drop some of the lower ones. And then we will scale the lower ones down as well. Now I think they're a bit too large at the tip, so we can drop this down like that. That's good, happy with that. Might move them slightly down a bit. Okay, that's good. Now there's one last thing I want to do, and that is make them a bit more scraggly looking. So we'll go to our modifiers and we'll add a Displacer. So with that, we'll add a noise, which makes them go really crazy, but we can just drop the strength and you can see really easily we've got this really nice little gnarly detail in there. So there you go — with fairly minimal ease we've built this really cool procedural Hibiscus flower with some of the new tools we're working on inside of Taio. So back to Bob.

Oh yeah.

Yeah. So let's just get rid of this normal map for now, set that to zero, and we'll go to the Flower Petal and we'll turn off the Turbulence. Then we can add a Displacement layer. A Displacement layer takes in any shader or any texture, so you can create a noise on there which is similar to the Turbulence layer, except you've got all that control. So you can adjust the movement and create it in any direction you want. So you've got all that control — I'm using the wrong thing here — Relative Scale, like that. So then you can do exactly what he was asking there.

Thank you.