Do you struggle to add life to your natural scenes?
Are your nature scenes leafing a lot to be desired? You're not barking up the wrong tree, you just need to (Red)shift your perspectives a bit. We're sharing an exclusive tip from our Holdframe Workshop so you can bring your worlds to life.
This is an exclusive look at one of the lessons learned in the "Opening Sequence" Holdframe Workshop, featuring the amazing Sekani Solomon. While the Workshop focuses on developing a killer demo reel, Sekani takes time to explore the intricacies of building a realistic virtual world, and we couldn't keep those kinds of secrets any longer. This is just a sneak peek at some of the amazing lessons Sekani has in store, so sharpen those pencils and grab a fresh piece of loose leaf (college-ruled). It's time to enter Sekani's world.
How to Get Amazing Nature Renders in Redshift
The Curious Craft of Demo Reels
Every designer needs a show stopping demo reel. This can become the toughest assignment you will face as a working artist, and you’ll face it several times over the arc of your career. There's no client to please except yourself, which means you're facing your harshest critic. How do you approach your reel so you can do your best and show off to the world?
If you want to get noticed, you need to tell people who you are, what you do, and why you’re the best one for the job! Sekani Solomon has spent his career in search of constant improvement, and that includes the work he shows off to potential clients. In this Holdframe Workshop, we dive deep into his career and explore the inner workings of his reel, how he made the branding, intro, and outro, as well as how the entire montage came together.
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Tutorial Full Transcript Below 👇:
Sekani Solomon (00:16): You know, like the matrix objects is a super duper light object to work with, especially the viewport. And, uh, recently I think rich, well, I guess recently at the time that I made this, uh, bread shifts that enabled, like being able to instance objects, auto matrix object, and seeing that I'm like, oh, this is perfect because you know, I could work with it within the scene. I not run the time. It kind of ball plates, um, everything. So like, if I turn off all these matrix objects, it will see that it's just like a ground plan with displacement. That's the base. And then as you enable some of these matrix objects, we kind of see like, it's just like a layering different elements. And that's what makes the scene feel really good if you have like, like the same plants all the time, and maybe I'll just kinda zoom in here.
Sekani Solomon (01:06): So yeah. I mean the first thing we have here, some, you know, some grass as you start to build up to, to, you know, to forestry, but that's how it begins to look more realistic because now on top of the grass, you have like some larger shrubs. Like if I hop into this Medshift object here, we see like the objects that are being kind of clued on here. And these are all stored, like in this area here. So like the different plant assets that are kind of cloning on. So this is all, this is all of like, as soon as I hit this, like as soon as I hit it, you know, I just like hundreds of plants. It's just boom. It, because Renda, I'll just do a quick example to kind of showcase how it looks.
EJ Hassenfratz (01:45): I feel like I'm totally unfamiliar with using the Redshift instance stuff. Cause you said, is it a fairly new
Sekani Solomon (01:51): Feature sometime last year I'm able to eat before at this point it's been also a little bit like a little while ish, but this is the thing about using like a matrix, you know, you could, you could like, you know, you can really crack it up and to see like, this is, you know, in the scene you could probably truffle and those your hand, hopefully it doesn't explode. Well, I was off like a million, you know, it was like a million different things in here. You can always just turn that off as well. And you know, that works. Um, but let's, let's do like, what is this 10,000, maybe a hundred thousand?
EJ Hassenfratz (02:30): Why not a million? Let's do it
Sekani Solomon (02:34): Like a million. I liked that let's go high and let's drop the scale of these so we can actually kind of just, you know, wow. Right. Actually see. Yeah, yeah. Even with the scale low, there's still so many of them, if you could drop these even lower,
EJ Hassenfratz (02:51): What does a million of these look like when they're really tiny? I mean, it's basically like, you know, little flakes of
Sekani Solomon (02:57): Snow. Oh yeah. I just realized I was putting this into the wrong place. That's why it didn't.
EJ Hassenfratz (03:02): Oh, there you go.
Sekani Solomon (03:04): There you go. So what's an object we could put inhale. Let's use our 21 new thing. I don't know
EJ Hassenfratz (03:14): The new asset browser.
Sekani Solomon (03:15): Yeah. Okay. There we go. Close. That is going to make it editable. Boom. There's a person shrink it down. And then key is let's just create a Redshift tag on it's super simple going to make sure it's on the matrix objects. There's already the particles tab. All they gotta do. Yeah. Like this is a smart tag. So what's this on an op once it's on an object that can close a create particles, that Popsicle Tabo comes up automatically.
EJ Hassenfratz (03:56): I gotcha. I feel like I've never why I've never seen that is because I've never placed that tag on a matrix object.
Sekani Solomon (04:04): Well, if you do something like an X popsicles, EMS or something like that, and there's a field here for custom objects, we can literally throw anything in here and then boom. I hit Rhonda. Let's see what happens.
EJ Hassenfratz (04:17): And now will they be shrunk down to the size of that? The matrix, the matrices then? Yeah. Gotcha. Cause they'll, they'll, they'll adapt to that size I guess,
Sekani Solomon (04:27): But oh man. Terrible lined down. I think I just need to,
EJ Hassenfratz (04:32): But I mean, that's a million of these objects. That's incredible. I mean, this is, this is like your octane scatter for those of you out there that might not realize that, you know, something like this as possible within
Sekani Solomon (04:47): Exactly. And it's nice too. Cause you could just also to scale, you know, in the target self and yeah. I mean like this is so, so fast. Well let me just put the that's incredible under sampling on. So,
EJ Hassenfratz (05:02): So the under sampling I feel like is another one of those things that probably people don't know too much about as far as like speeding up your renders. So basically that's just, downresing in the Redshift render view. So it just get a snappier feedback,
Sekani Solomon (05:19): Correct? Yeah. So it just like makes everything look a lot better. And then all you need to do is just create a sun sky Reagan,
EJ Hassenfratz (05:28): Boom, boom. You got a new, you got the 20, 21 real already on its way. That's the first shot. If you never want to get a job again, just start with or really weird jobs start with
Sekani Solomon (05:44): Exactly. If you NFT sells for a hundred bucks,
EJ Hassenfratz (05:50): I feel
Sekani Solomon (05:51): Like it myself.
EJ Hassenfratz (05:52): I think it would low effort NFTs. It's a time as you can win the jackpot with
Sekani Solomon (05:58): These. Exactly. That's essentially, um, you know, dot technique.
EJ Hassenfratz (06:02): So you use this for yeah. So just you walk through all the matrix objects that you didn't name by the way. So great job there. I'm going to ding you there.
Sekani Solomon (06:14): This was matrix tree. I don't know. I just knew it was like a different type of shrubbery. I think in this first one we have like three different blades of grass. Maybe let me see if I could find specifically which asset that is and then find it within the scene so he could get an idea of how that looks like.
EJ Hassenfratz (06:32): Yeah. It's so cool in a way that the, you know, this Redshift scatter system works is that it totally keeps your viewport light as well. You know
Sekani Solomon (06:43): Exactly. It's great. So this mean exactly. Like everything's already enabled here. It's just like those matrix objects floating there, but yeah. I just have like the assets hidden underneath the scene. So yeah. You know, it's like a couple of those, those grass, uh, models in my, the key thing to make it look good. It's just like getting that balance of getting the speculum. So you get like a little shyness on those.
