OTOY Forums

Hello My fellow artists,
So,
I am trying to achieve this texture ( below link) in octane but in vain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqSWuQoiqQE&t=

Scene Description : There are this bunch on neuron cells and camera is passing through it to reveal products which are placed just above the stems, while the camera reaches a particular object the blue neuron turns to orange and glows. The orange neuron should glow and cast lights on the other object(s).

My reference is below, trying to achieve close to this. So think instead of the guy on the neuro stem i have a product.
https://www.adsoftheworld.com/media/print/asics_neurons

I am okay with either of the textures as long as it looks like a neuron. My entire scene is octane material based.

Also how do i get the animated glowing lines passing by inside the neurons (glowy)?

Help me out with the textures and animating the textures.
Thanks in Advance.

You'll get a better response if you post what you've got so far.

The example tutorial you linked should give you the basic concept of using edge falloff to make a reasonable Scanning Electron Microscope type shader. It's generally the same idea, regardless of what renderer you're using. I highly recommend you get used to working in Octane's Node Editor instead of the default C4D Material Editor.

In Octane, you'll use the Falloff node instead of C4D's Fresnel property, but it's functionally the same thing. You'll probably pipe that into a Gradient node to tweak the colors and from there into a Texture Emission node, then into the Emission input of the Material.

Add a little noise to the bump and displacement channels, either procedurally or with bitmaps, and Bob's Your Uncle.

You can animate the colors lots of different ways, from manually keyframing colors, to using Mix Material or Blend Material or Mix Texture nodes, to managing it all in post with careful layers and masks.

As for the glows traveling down each axon, again, there are many ways to do it. In this tutorial, he's using a spherical gradient in either object or wold space. Unless your neurons are similarly spherical and symmetrical, though, I'm guessing you're going to want to do it in UV space, so be sure to build your neurons nice and clean, lining up the geometry consistently along U or V to save you some headaches. Or you could do it by animating invisible toroidal light sources down each axon, if your UVs are just too chaotic to deal with.

Anyway, there are endless approaches. As I said at the beginning, share what you've got, no matter how basic. In fact that's always what I recommend; start as simple as possible so that you understand what's really going on, then once you have a good handle on that, apply what you've learned to the more complex, real project. I hope that helps you get started.

Just come across this, would you be willing to share the .C4D file or .ORBX for this please ?

Despot wrote:Just come across this, would you be willing to share the .C4D file or .ORBX for this please ?

Sure thing. It's super quick and easy to set up, so here is a reconstruction. This version was done in Octane 2019, so it is using Vertex Displacement instead of the old Texture displacement. This eliminates the need for the Baking node as well as the separate connection to the Bump channel.