INSYDIUM LIVE! - February 2024 – Open Beta Preview, TerraformFX

Heat. Heat. Hello there. Right, let's see if we could do a take two and see whether we've got some audio going on here. So, what I'm going to do is carry on talking and if on the chat you can just confirm that this time you can actually hear us talking. Give us a thumbs up and then we can continue with this. Excellent. Sounding good. Thank goodness for that. Well, I think we've done all right. This is about the sixth or seventh Insidium piece and that was the first Gremlin that we have had. So there you go. Right, let's crack on then because I've lost time already. Welcome. Really good to have you with us on this live stream. We've got John Bosley who's moderating in the chat and helping answer any of your questions about the stuff that we are showing. Let's just do a real quick round robin of that chat whilst we are on. We've got the award for the person that's been waiting the longest for this stream to start is Michael Chalapsky who's been waiting for almost two hours in the chat. So hello Michael, Max, Michelle, Chris, Kemo, Dennis who's saying terraforming, let's go. We've got Richie, Alex, Colin, Max, loads and loads of people of you. So as usual, we really appreciate your company. And it is what makes it worthwhile doing these streams. So thanks very much indeed for that. Really great to be with you. So this is quite an exciting live stream for us today because we are going to be launching the Insidium open beta and this is going to be your chance to get involved in the beta. This means that you will get all of the new tools early before they're released. But more than that, it means that you can join us on the development journey and help us out with the development of these brilliant, cool, and exciting new tools and you get early doors. So, the advantage is you'll be up and running by the time they are released proper. So we're going to be explaining just a little bit later on exactly how you can get involved with the beta. But for now, the first features that are entering our open beta are going to be Terraform FX. And Mike and I are going to walk through some of those. There are some really cool ones. And then obviously more and more features will be added to the open beta as time goes on, including some mega new Nexus tools which we're incredibly excited about. And we've got some brand new kind of workflow enhancement tools which are pretty cool and pretty exciting as well. So that is to come further down the line. First of all, we're going to kick off with Terraform effects. So let's get cracking. I'm going to show you some of these new features and we're going to actually start with me. So, we're going to jump into my Cinema 4D here. And what I've got is a pretty basic terrain here with no material on. Actually, look, it's just a terrain and a couple of noises giving us this nice landscape. Now, what we're going to do is use the new brilliant shader that has been developed to very quickly get something that is looking realistic and very nice even just in the viewport. So, what I've got here is a standard Cinema 4D material on our terrain. Now, at this point, you can do this directly in whatever render engine you are using. You don't have to do it in Cinema 4D standard renderer at all. As long as the renderer you're using can access Cinema 4D shaders, it'll work. So, you can do it live in any of those renderers. I like doing it in the standard renderer because I get immediate viewport feedback straight away without having to have any IPRs open to get the general look and then you can move into whatever renderer you want to use. So, let me stop waffling and let's get on. If I double click in this material, I'm actually going to open it up and then dock my material editor here. And then let's just shut down that manager. So, what we have got is just the color channel active. And I'm going to put in this texture channel this fantastic new shader. So, let's go and go to our Insidium shaders, Terraform effects, and we can bring in the advanced terrain shader. There it is. And it's not quite looking right yet. Let's click on the thumbnail to get the settings. And the reason I docked my material editor is because this shader has this amazing interface that to be honest, it's a shader, but it feels like a kind of a plug-in tool in its own right, doesn't it? And so what we have is a layering system of layering up different ways of coloring this terrain. And it can be simple with amazing effects or you can get really really complex and in-depth with this. Either way works. First, what we have to do is tell it what terrain to reference. So, let's drag in our terrain. And now, straight off the bat, you will see that we've got something that's looking pretty interesting actually. So, what's going on? Well, what we have is this layering system. And by default there is a terrain layer which is driving this coloration of our terrain. And if we have a look in the add layers, there's loads of different types of layers that we can use and we'll look at some of these a little bit later. But the terrain layer has kind of been designed as a bit of a dual layer that you can use just on its own if you want to and even just on its own get some really good texturing effects. So how does it work? So let's open up the layer properties. So this is the properties for our terrain layer. And what we have is we have four kind of terrain data channels. We've got the slope of the terrain, the altitude, the curvature, and then we've got this kind of ambient occlusion. And then there are two noises. There's one called variation and one called jitter. And these are all the default settings. And what's happening is it's automatically blending these different channels and it's creating a black and white map from that blend. If I switch off enabled palette coloring, we just see the grayscale image. That's what's being generated from the blending of these layers. And then what we're able to do is map this color palette to those black and white values. So this is the black, this is the white, and this is anywhere in between. Now, we'll get on to the color palette in a minute because this in its own right is awesome. But let's just switch that off for now. So we've got our grayscale map. So what we'll do is let's just have a look at some of these individually. We'll zero these out. So with it all on zero now it's just returning a white map. Everything is white, nothing else. So let's have a look at slope. What slope does it gives us a kind of a threshold really. So at 44% it's saying anything with a slope of over 44% will be white. So look, all the steep bits are white and anything under 44% is black. And even that in its own right, look at the detail that being able to map to that slope brings out. Looks really cool. So that's slope. Let's switch that one off. Altitude is pretty self-explanatory. Whack it on full. The high parts are white and the low parts are black. If we went minus 100%, it'd be the other way around. The top bits are black and the small bits are white. So that's altitude. And again, pretty self-explanatory. Curvature gives us loads of control to make some pretty cool effects. We switch curvature on, we get this really nice kind of channeling. And again, it's a really good one for bringing detail into the terrain. And this one makes the convex parts white and the concave parts kind of the divots and whatnot black. So that is curvature. Then we've got ambient occlusion, which if you've used ambient occlusion in rendering, obviously you'll know what it is. It's pretty similar to curvature, but it does have its differences. And if we pull down the ambient occlusion has got more options. So if we make this radius really big, you'll see that look, we're getting these only the very high parts are getting the black color and we've got the trenches which are white. If we bring the radius of that ambient occlusion way down, we'll get super detailed channeling. And we can adjust how the quality of it to make it better quality should we wish and the bias. That's ambient occlusion. Let's just switch that one off. So that's our four different kind of bits of data. But then we've got extra stuff we can add on top. We have variation. Now this first variation is like a global noise which gets applied all over the terrain. And this has got a pull down with a scale. So, we can reduce the size of that global noise or we can increase it. And this is really useful for just adding variation in colors and it can be quite subtle variation. So, if you've got a big long grassy area, a huge grass meadow, it's not all just one green, but we get this nice kind of modeling and we get some different shades. So, that's variation. And then the last one is jitter. So, if we switch this on by itself, it just looks weird. It's this very fine noise that gets distributed across the entire map and it obviously doesn't look great. But when this is mixed with some of the other settings in kind of low amounts, it adds firstly it can add lots of really nice fake detail and make your mesh seem more high-res than it is, but it can also be used to kind of blend out harsh transitions between colors. So, that's what jitter is. And then when they are all mixed, we can create these pretty convincing looking terrains. So, if we add a little bit of altitude, now we've just got the altitude data, right? But if we add a bit of slope now, you'll see that we're getting some of that sloping, but the altitude black to white is getting blended on top of that. And that I mean if you were far out you could almost get kind of satellite cloud imagery with that type of look. Just with those two settings then we can start blending in maybe a bit of curvature which brings in some nice detail. And we start getting a look. Let's add a bit of variation, a little bit of jitter to add some noise. And just with a black and white map we have started to get something that looks much more higher resolution than it is. And then once we've got that, we can then enable the palette coloring to then map these realistic palette colors to that black and white map. And we get something that pretty easily and quickly looks fantastic already. Now the enable palette coloring by default is showing this one. And you can see it says countries, Spain, Spain 13. So if we click on this, it opens up this big palette chooser. And you can see that if we click on here, we've got all of these global countries from all over the place. And each one, let's go to India. Each one has got its own set of palettes. So where do these palettes come from? Well, these are realistic samples from genuine satellite imagery. So these are actually taken from areas of this country. So obviously we've got some grasslands or some farmland areas. We've got maybe some of the more mountainous or some of the more remote kind of desert type areas. And you can pick and choose whichever one you want to do for your landscape. So, if we went with a more green one, we get the green effect. Let's open that back up. Another thing that we're able to do is if you right-click on one of these, you can add it to a favorites and then you get a favorites folder. So, it's much more easy to manage. You can also, which is really cool, and this will become a bit more obvious later on, you can export this and it kind of converts it to a Cinema 4D gradient, which means you can then apply it to anything.

Yeah. That's really cool. So, let's just go back and go to maybe let's go to Congo and maybe this one. That's a really nice cool kind of grasslands. There's more we can do with this though. Remember this is black and this is white. But look, we can take just a selection of this and we can just select whichever bit that we want. If we pull down this arrow, we can actually start repeating this palette. So by default it just has one, but we can repeat it twice. We can repeat that as many times as you want. Let's put it back to one. We can change the bias. So we're getting more of the darker greens. If I go this way, we're getting more of the sandy colors if we go this way. So, we can get some really, really cool specific looks. You can go to the actual country that you're trying to recreate or you can just use it to find the colors that you want for your render. So, that is absolutely fantastic. So with that in mind, that is just using one of these terrain layers. But we can go much more advanced than this. We can start using multiple layers and we can start masking layers together. So let's use this same terrain setup and let's make more of a snowscape using this base terrain. So what I'll do is delete out that terrain layer. So now we've got nothing. And let's add a new one. And this new one, let's do our rocks first. So, I'm actually I think I'm just going to leave this in the default settings. I'm not even going to touch them. Let's just go into our palette and instead of picking a country, if we come all the way to the bottom, look, we've got some surfaces. And I'm going to pick rock. And then we've got all these different types of rock. And I want a really dark maybe something like that. Yeah, that's looking very nice. What I'm going to do is reduce the effects of the altitude a little bit. Increase the curvature. Take away some of that variation and jitter. So now we're starting to get something that's looking quite interesting as our base rock. Now what we can do, what I really like to do here is rename all of this. Always stay organized. So let's call this base rock. Okay. So that's that layer. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring in a new terrain layer to go on top. And this is going to be my snow. So, again, I'm going to go to my palette and we'll come down to the bottom. And there's lots of snow surfaces. And there's all these different types of snow taken from around the world. And I want one maybe this one here. So, now we have two layers. We're only seeing the top. Let's call that snow. We're only seeing the top layer because this is a layering system. And by default, if I click on layer blending, it's set to normal blend mode. So there's no blending. We're just seeing the snow. And now we can't see any of the rock. But if we were able to mask this snow, we could then reveal the rock underneath. And how do we do that? It's dead simple. We can use any of these layers as a mask layer. So, we could use a terrain layer as a mask. We could use anything. We could use a Cinema 4D field as a mask. What I'm going to do is I want to use the curvature information of our terrain. So, I'm going to bring in this curvature layer. And it's on top now in normal blend mode. So, we're only seeing this curvature layer. I'm going to switch off my palette coloring. So, it's returning a black and white image. But what I need to do is sort this out a little bit because we're not getting enough white detail because what's going to happen is when we use this as a mask, we're only going to see the snow where the mask is white. So, how do we adjust this in our curvature? We've got a mode and we've got a quality, but we haven't got any way of changing the contrast or redistributing it. Well, that's where our layer post-processing comes in. So, before we do that, look the mode. I want the snow to be in the dense of the landscape. And we'll just leave it on like that. But now what we need to do is we need to change this to add contrast. Because at the moment it looks like it's returning pretty much an entirely white map. So what we're going to do, there's lots of different ways you could add contrast. Whichever is your preferred option. You could do a brightness and contrast. You could even do a gamma correction. I always like to use curves. And that's just personal preference. Whenever I'm doing compositing, if I can use a curve, I will. So, let's do a gradation curve. And that brings us a curve like this. And if we start crushing this, you'll start seeing that we'll start getting something right to the end of the register. Look. And we're getting something like this where it is black on the flatter bits and it is white on the tall bits. So let's just bring that in. Something like that. And you can see the effect that we're going for even just with that black and white image. You can see that it's starting to look like snow has filled in some of those sections. Right. So now we have got this black and white image. But what we want to do is mask our layer with this. So let's go to our snow. And if we just drag this curvature down as a child, it automatically becomes a mask of that layer. And why am I not seeing that, Mike? Have I done something wrong? There's my rock. Ah, there we go. So now we have got our rock poking through and we have got our snow layer only happening where we have got that curvature. And because we set the curvature to be within the dents of that surface, the snow has filled those dents and we get this really nice looking pretty convincing and detailed terrain. It's not a very high quality mesh this. But the power of this shader gives us almost detail for free and makes it super realistic. And you can add as many different masks as you want. You can mask further masks. And actually, I'll show you a little bit later how we can layer up masks to reveal layers in super specific parts of your terrain. But that is one of the new features of Terraform effects which will be part of the open beta. It is the advanced terrain shader. I'll be showing you a little bit later on. Mike's going to be including some of that in his demonstration as well, demonstrating some of the other new tools. But I can't iterate enough. It's brilliant. It is so fun to use and you can get some really good results.

Yeah. So, before we move on and Mike, you demonstrate some of these new features, what we're going to do is tell you exactly how you can get involved with the open beta. And it's kind of a reciprocal process this open beta really, Mike, because obviously we hope that you get the benefit of joining it because you get to play with these new tools and get ahead of the curve, which is awesome and so you're up to speed when they get released. It helps us out massively because it means we're working together in the development process. So we can iron out any bugs that might be there. We can get workflow to be better and everything to be optimized so by the time this comes to release it's absolutely perfect. So, we hands up benefit hugely from this as well. But we're also going to reward if you're part of the beta team and you help us out and you're really active and you know you might spot some really weird bugs that have been missed that then get fixed. You might help us out with suggested changes. Anybody really active in this beta community will be rewarded as well with some pretty cool stuff. So, it's a very exciting thing to be involved in. So, how do you do it? How do you get involved? I know that's what you're screaming at me to say. It's dead simple. This is done via your customer account on the Insidium website. So, look, let's just bring up an image of that. If you go to your customer account, log in, it'll look something like this. This is mine. And you can see that it looks the same as it always had done, but there is a new bit here. And if I just dolly in a bit, you can see that it says, 'Are you ready to explore the cutting edge? Register for beta testing.' So if you click in there, you register all of the details that are required. Then you'll be on the register and then what will happen is we'll be choosing it is a limited number of beta testers. We'll be choosing a limited number from that registered group and we'll move forward and it's going to be a really cool kind of online forum where we can all kind of hang out, discuss stuff, tools, to report any issues, all that kind of stuff will be available to you if you're in this beta group. So yeah, get involved. It's live. You can go on to our website, you can register your interest and it would be great to have you.

Right, so let's move on and Mike, we're going to jump into your Cinema 4D now and you're going to demonstrate some of the new tools in Terraform and this isn't just the terrain shader and rendering but some actual kind of generator and operator and new functions.

And you're working on a pretty low poly resolution terrain there, aren't you?

I really like the water effects because what you've got there in a quick fake is the look of transparent water with refraction, and you can see the rocks — and actually they don't exist. That is just a rendering trick because it's generated that data. Amazing.

Yeah, in conjunction with the terrain. What's great about the distribute is that you can so quickly scatter this stuff, but it feels like regular geometry scattering without the overhead. This doesn't replace scattering — for a close-up shot you'd want proper geometry — but for a drone shot or background, this is amazing and really not intense on the processor. Very cool indeed. Like that a lot. Right, thanks for that, Mike. I'm going to jump back into my cinema and show you a couple more things in our advanced terrain shader — some masking functions where we can get some pretty decent effects quickly. Here I've got a basic scene with just one noise and a default advanced terrain shader in the color channel. It's not even high resolution — a thousand by a thousand — but it gives us a lot of nice detail, especially from a drone, aeroplane, or satellite perspective. As you come closer, the resolution decreases and you can start to see how the shader is mapped to the terrain. By default, the resolution is set to auto, using the same resolution as your terrain.

You can increase it — let me put this up to maybe 1,500. Now you can get closer before it breaks up. For super production levels, you can go up to the default maximum of 4,000 by 4,000, or even 8,000 in settings. The caveat is more processing and render time. But you can bake the advanced terrain shader at those resolutions without adjusting the base map, bringing in loads of detail. Very cool. Let me put this terrain back down for fast viewport performance. We're going to create a layered system that resembles the moorlands of Yorkshire. If you've ever flown over the UK, you may have seen this kind of terrain. First, we'll do our base rock layer.

I'm going to leave everything in defaults and just change our palette. Let's pick a dark rock for our base. Now we want another layer — the mand grass, which in the UK has a brownie mulchy color. I'll add another terrain layer and change the color to something brown and grassy. There's our mand grass. Now we need to mask this — we don't want grass on steep rock faces. I'll bring in a terrain operator and use a slope map. I love the look of a slope map on its own. We need to invert it using gradation curves so the steep bits are black and won't receive grass. Now we've got the mand grass and rock poking through. But we want farmland in the lower parts — in the Yorkshire Dales, anywhere flat enough to farm is farmed. I'll use a layer called agricultural structures. It creates a basic grid colored like fields from above. In the UK, they stick fields in wherever they can amongst the crags. I'll change from grid to random and increase the count. We need to mask this using altitude, reversed with gradation curves. You can mask masks — we need slope too, because steep bits lower down would have farmer field texture. I'll copy the altitude operator and change it to slope. Now from above we have the hint of agriculture. Let's try the grid — that looks good. We can add irregularity to break them up. Because this is procedural, we can make infinite adjustments. I am a huge fan. I can't stop playing with it — adding little lakes and rivers procedurally is so much easier now.

And remember, I'm demonstrating my workflow, and we've not been using this for long. I like to do it in standard because I get such fast updating and viewport performance. But remember, all I'm doing is affecting the color channel of my texture. In another render engine, you'd have a node for color data, a node for reflectance, a node for normals. This shader can be referenced in any of those nodes, so you can layer them up and make it as detailed as you like.

And yeah, the possibilities are almost almost endless.

Right, that is going to be it for this demonstration. This has just been some of the brand new features within Terraform effects, going into our open beta. There's loads more we haven't gone into. These will be part of the open beta and then the release build. There will be documentation and manuals. Go to the Insydium website, log into your customer account, and click register for beta testing. We'd really appreciate your help. Get involved and feel free to share your work on social media. Thanks to everyone on the chat — John Bosley has been answering questions. Please do get involved, and we hope this acts as a collaboration. Terraform is the first — Nexus, GPU particle stuff, and workflow tools are coming later. That's it from me. That's it from Mike. Say goodbye, Mike.

And we'll see you next time. See you.

Come on. Come on.