 In this video, I'm going to show you how you can build a procedurally generated desert landscape from scratch using Cinema 4D and Redshift. Hope you brought some water. These days, we've got to keep one step ahead of those dang robots making that AI art, so that's why I'm going to be feeding your human brain with some procedural desert landscape building techniques, showing you how to build pretty complex sand shader materials in Redshift that should hopefully overload that dang dolly. Now, if you want to go ahead and follow along, be sure to download the project files. You'll find the link in the description below. Before we begin, I want to give a huge thank you to School of Motion for sponsoring this video. School of Motion is an online school that allows you to learn from and with artists from around the world. Yeah, for a full design, animation and 3D curriculum, so no matter what you want to learn to advance your career, School of Motion has you covered. The first 100 people to use the Opera Code iDesign 100 will get $100 off any 3D course over at School of Motion to help you get your learn on and stay one step ahead of that pesky AI robot artist. Let's go ahead and dive into the tutorial. Alright, so let's get to making our sand dunes. And when I'm creating an environment, I want to build to scale. So to get a sense of scale, I always like creating a little beeple, scaly person, which our figure object is about as tall as a six foot person. So if we zoom out and we know we want like a big expansive environment, we know we have to have that environment fill up this view right here. Okay, so there's our scaly. Now let's create the actual landscape. You might think like, oh, just create a landscape object. Well, the landscape objects great for some things like maybe filling in the background to make the environment feel a little more expansive, but you're limited as far as the options here. So instead of using a landscape, I'm going to go ahead and use a plane object and layer up a bunch of displacers because that gives you a lot more art directability to create the exact type of landscape that you want. And I'll show you why here in just a second. So our plane objects way too small. So let's go ahead, let's increase the width in height segments to maybe 8,000 by 8,000. We don't have enough width segments either. So if I hit NB, we don't have a lot of segments. So let's bring this up to the max that it can go, which is a thousand by a thousand. Unfortunately, we can't go higher than that. And now you can see we have a lot more geometry that we can use to deform. I'm going to hit N and then A to go back to garage shading without lines. And let's just push back this plane object because if our camera is going to be right here and facing this way, we're wasting a lot of geometry behind our camera. So I'm just going to move our plane object a little bit further up just like so. And say we want to compose our shot like this. You can see that our plane objects intersecting the work plane grid. I'm going to go to filter and just turn off the work plane grid. So that's not messing with us right there. And now what we're going to start to do is displace this plane object. So I'm going to select the plane object and with the plane object selected, I'm going to go to displacer and hold the shift key down. And that's going to make the displacer a child of that plane object just by holding the shift. And so I'm going to go to the shading tab of this displacer and I'm going to load up a noise shader. And if I go to the noise shader options here and see our noise is fairly small. The type of noise that I've found that creates a really nice type of sand duni effect is actually, if I go to this little arrow here, I can see all my noise is visualized. The noise type that I'm going to use is displaced Vronoi. And you can see that we need to actually increase this scale quite a bit. So let's go to 15,000. You can see that you can just see a subtle amount of displacement here. So I'm going to press the back button here and that will go to the main level of our displaced options here. I'm going to go to object and I'm going to increase the height to like 200. And you can see not quite sand dunes either. It looks like a blobby little mess. I'm going to go back to the shader tab, go back into our noise shader. And one important aspect of a noise shader is octaves. I'm sure you might have never even messed with octaves before, but what this controls is the amount of detail within a noise. So if I bring this number higher, it means it's going to create more high fidelity detail. If I lower this number, you can see that we're actually removing some detail. And at a certain point, this becomes kind of weird looking. If I zoom out, it just looks like a fractured Vronoi kind of thing. But if I bring this up to about like 1.4, we get this really nice sand duny type of effect. And depending on how low or high this number, you get these nice little ripples in here as well. So always play around with that. If I zoom in here, you can start to see like, OK, this is looking a little bit more like some sand dunes. OK, so looking pretty cool. Now, this displacer I think we're done with for now. So let's just rename this displacer dunes. And what I'm going to do is create yet another displacer to add on more detail. So just to break up the monotony, it's always great to stack multiple noises just to make a more organic type of look. So I'm going to get a second displacer here, place the second in the stack because, again, C40 works from the top down. So we'll have this displacer be applied to the plane first and then the second displacer. And I'm going to name this displacer details. And for this displacer, I'm going to load up another noise shader. And in this noise shader, I'm going to use stupu because it's fun to say and it looks great. And what I'm going to do is for the global scale, type in 55555. And you can see we get this nice kind of sweeping looking type of noise. And we can even make this look a little bit more sweeping because you always want to kind of figure out like what direction is the wind blowing in your scene. So if you shrink this down, you can see how it's, you know, you can get a sense of the wind direction here. And that's a little bit too much though. But we'll bring down the relative scale a little bit. And this is a little bit too much detail. So I can go back in my main level of my displacer, go to object. And let me bring this down to four. So it's super subtle. Okay. So before, after, just that little bit of noise breaks up the displace veronoi noise and makes it look a little bit more interesting. Okay. So we're going to use one more displacer here. And that is to create hills or valleys. So what I'm going to do, create a third and final displacer. I'm actually going to bring this displacer and have it be first in my stack. And I'll show you why once we're done here. But if I go ahead and rename this displacer hills, what I'm going to do is go into the shading tab here. And instead of a noise, I'm going to bring up just a color channel. And it's going to be completely white. So with our other displacers, it's using the black and white values of the noise to apply a certain percent strength of our displacer. Here we have the color white. And if I move this height up, it's going to be applying full on 100% of the displacement to every single polygon. So in the essence, if I bring this up to say 1500 and I zoom out, you can see that it just moved up all the polygons 1500 centimeters. Okay. So what I actually want to do is control the strength using fields. So if I go into my fields area here and create a spherical field, you can see that only the polygons within this spherical field is going to get this displacement. I can control the opacity here as well to control like how high this hill is. And this isn't exactly looking like a hill just yet. Because if I click on this spherical field, go the remapping tab. You can see we have this seam going on right here that doesn't look very good. And we can get rid of that by number one, going to the inner offset and bring this fairly low. And then by going to the contour mode, instead of it being linear, I can change this to curve. And you can see how that we have this nice little curve going on. And we can remove the inner offset kind of all together. Maybe just give this value of zero. We can increase the size here. And then we can just move this spherical field around and create a sand dune, kind of art direct where a sand dune is. So maybe, you know, out there somewhere, make this a little bigger. So this is looking pretty nice. So we got this hilly sand dune. So it's not just so flat everywhere. What we can do at this point is command click and drag to duplicate that spherical field, drag and drop that into our fields list. And then to add this field strength onto the other, you can kind of think of this as like blending modes in Photoshop and black and white masks. I'm going to go and change this from normal to max. And this will then basically act as a lighten blending mode. And I'll just move this on over. Actually, I selected the wrong spherical field. I'll select this spherical field right here, move this over. You can see this is a very big hill. Looks like a mountain. Looks like a half dome or something like that. But if I go to my displacer hills, go to the fields tab, I can bring down this opacity. And that's basically going to control the height of this hill over here. Okay, so really cool. And again, this is why I build landscapes using fields, using displacers and a plain object versus a landscape object. Because you can't have this type of control. Now another thing you can do if you wanted to is we can actually make valleys. So not just hills, but valleys as well. So I can command click and drag, create yet another spherical field here. This will be valley. And then we'll drag and drop this manually into our fields list here. Like so. There we go. And what we can do instead of using the max blending mode, we can go and choose subtract. And you can see that actually nothing's happening at all. Okay, so let's actually move this spherical field forward. You can see it's not subtracting. It's actually just subtracting the strength of the spherical fields underneath it. Now, why it's not actually allowing us to go negative as far as the displacement value goes is because it's being clamped. All these field values are being clamped. And you can see this little clamp icon here. If I turn that off, you can see that we are no longer clamping our values to 0 to 100 or 0 to positive numbers. We can actually go to negative strength as well or negative 100. And now I can go and adjust the opacity here as well and get a little bit of a little valley here. T for scale, scale this down. And again, this is where all the art directability comes in. But actually I like the hills versus the valley. So I'm just going to delete that valley. I just wanted to show that that's possible. And one last thing I want to show is the importance of which order you place your displacers. So if I fold this up and bring this to the bottom of the stack, you can see we have all of this jankiness going on because we're displacing with the dunes. We're displacing with the details. And then we're displacing again with the displacer hill. We're displacing already displaced geometry and that's why it's creating this jankiness. So that's why it's important the order in which any of these displacers are being applied. So you definitely want the details one last. And since this is looking more like dunes, we can actually rename this plane from plane to dunes because it doesn't look like a plane anymore, right? So now we're ready to go ahead and start texturing this in Redshift. So I'm going to go to my render settings here, I change this to Redshift. And then what I'm going to do is grab my Redshift render view here. Let's dock it to the side and let's increase this window to about 150%. Let's hit play. You can see our dunes in all of its unlit glory. So what we're going to do is let's get some good lighting going on here. I'm going to go to Redshift, Objects, Redshift, Sun and Sky Rig. And this is going to create a type of like sunlight and sky. So I mean it's very aptly named. So what I'm going to do is just rotate this and this is going to rotate the angle of the sun. You can see as the sun rotates downwards, we're getting this like nice little sunset. You can see the sun right there. So let's go and get like a nice angle like this. Just we can see some of these details and really see that noise. And actually now that I'm looking at it, maybe that noise is a little bit too pronounced in the details. So we can bring this down to like three or even two. Make it a little more subtle. And you can see we can see the horizon in the view there. So I'm going to adjust that. And we can do that by adjusting down the horizon height, even blurring it a little bit. You can also adjust the intensity if we want. We can adjust the turbidity, which is just going to make the light scatter a little bit more. You can also do this like cool red-blue hue shift where if you go to the right, it's going to give it a little bit of orangish warm hue. If you go to the left, it's going to go blue. So let's give it a little bit of like a yellowish orangish, just to have that going for us. And now what we can do is start building our redshift sand material. So there's one little gotcha. I'm using arse26 here. And in arse26, if we go ahead and create a new redshift material here by double clicking in this material manager here, you can see that it's using by default the new redshift node material setup. We're actually just the C4D material node system. And with the C4D node system, not everything has been ported over from the old Cinema 4D material system to this one. So for the purposes of this tutorial, I'm going to be using something that isn't yet supported in the new material system. And that is the C4D shader node, which allows you access to a lot of C4D shaders like tile shader, all that type of stuff. So I can't use this new shader yet. If they have added the new C4D shader to your version of C4D, you can kind of stick with this, but for anyone using an older version of Cinema 4D, what you need to do is actually use the older Expresso based node system. And to get that loaded up, I'm going to go to this menu here, go to material, tools, and uncheck this use node materials for presets. And what this is going to do, if I double click in the material manager again, see it's going to create a redshift material again, but it's going to be the old Expresso based version here. So this is exactly what we want right here. Let's go ahead and apply this to our dunes object. And you can see it's very shiny. It's up to roughness. Let's remove some of that weight there. So I'm going to do first is add some color. Now the only color that we're getting right now is from that redshift sun and sky, because we're doing that little tint shift. Right now our material is gray as you can see. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to hit shift C to bring up the node commander. And I'm going to grab a max on noise hit enter. And for this noise, I'm going to plug this into our diffuse color. And you can see we got some very small noise. What I'm going to do is I'm going to increase the scale of this noise to about 50. So make it quite large. Then I'm going to change the type of noise to displaced turbulence. We get this really nice variation in gray values. So what we could do is we can change the color one to say this yellowish-orangey-sand color. And then change the other color to like a lighter version of that color. I can just click and drag to duplicate that. And then just up the saturation a little bit. But this is kind of limiting because it only gives you too huge. So if you want more control, what you can do instead is grab a ramp node. And what we can do is just select both of these colors, right click, go to reset the default. And we can actually plug this into the ramp and output to diffuse color. And what this allows us to do is use this gradient ramp to choose whatever amount of colors we want. So we can have like this darker sand color here. We can create another knot. And this can be more like bright orange-ish like so. And then this lighter color. We can remove that and not create a new one. And again, just make this a little bit lighter. And then we can adjust this. We can add as many knots as we want. Control the mapping of it as well. So I like this a little bit better to create color variation than using just the two color chips here because it doesn't have a lot of control, right? So that's looking fairly decent. What we can do now at this point is we can go ahead and let's add some very fine noise to make it look like we have a little bit of some grains of sand here. So I'm going to go hit Shift-C, get my Max on noise again. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to keep the noise, the just normal noise shader, but I'm going to go to the input here, go to the scale, and I'm going to make this very small like 0.01. And you can actually see what's going on. So let's see what this noise looks like without any of the other shader properties by plugging in this Max on noise directly into the output. And you can see the noise is so small, you probably can't even see it, but if I zoom in here, you can see how small that noise is. So we're going to try to make this look like grains of sand. So let's actually go to the output, twirl that down, and increase the contrast a little bit. I'll go to 0.5. So you can see what that looks like. You can adjust the brightness here and all this good stuff. And what I'm going to do is use this noise to drive a bump to make it look like we have bumpy, grainy sand as the surface of our landscape here. So what I'm going to do is I'll plug back in that material into the output. And then what I'm going to do is grab a bump node. So shift C, bump, and I'll grab the bump map here. And so I'm going to plug in the redshift noise to be used as the input for the bump map. And then we'll plug in the bump map into the redshift materials, overall bump input port. We'll just move this down here to keep this organized. You can see how this looks really nice and grainy. Now, another thing I like to do is we can utilize the same noise and this is the power of nodes to drive the reflection roughness. So I'm going to go and plug in this Maxon noise into our reflection roughness. And you can see how we get little nice specular highlights here where if you're looking at like a photo of sand, some of those grains of sand are going to be perfectly reflecting the sun right at your view. Now this is a little bit too much. We're getting a little bit too much sparkling happening here. So what we can do is we can use a ramp, just like we did with this Maxon noise to remap these colors. We can do the same thing to remap the black and white values that are controlling the reflection roughness. So what I'm going to do is command click and drag this redshift ramp, right click on the ramp, go to reset to default, and then I'll plug in this Maxon noise into the input, and then I'll put this color to the reflection roughness here. So now we got this one Maxon noise driving both things, but I can remap these colors. So if I adjust this, you can see how if I move this black gradient not to the right, we're getting less of those little sparklies, but we're still getting those sparklies. And we can adjust this as well. And so we get just a little bit of this nice specular hits of the shininess of the sand, of some of those sand grains there. So that's looking pretty nice, like something like that. And you can see we can adjust the weight here as well. You can see this is too shiny right there. So we can just bring this weight down a little bit and really adjust this. And I think actually moving this to the other way is actually going to be better for us. So we'll bring up the reflection weight really high. You can see that actually had the gradient the other way around. So whatever is white is going to be fully rough, and whatever is black is not going to be rough at all. So you can see how this gradient ramps a little bit more black. Everything's a little bit shinier, so we're just going to move this thing down. So everything's a little bit more white, which means more rough and kind of just dial in some of these little specular bits, some of the highlights. And to see exactly what's going on again, we can plug in this ramp into the surface. And so you can see where we're kind of blowing out all of that noise detail here. As of right now, maybe something like that. You can just barely see the noise and plug back in the redshift material to the output. You can see those little nice little specs of that. Well, it looked like sand, so that's looking pretty believable to me right now. So we've got our Maxon noise. We can actually rename this to Sand Noise. We can rename this to Sand Color just so we can make out what noise is doing what, because we're going to have quite a few of these Maxon noises in our Shader Graph here. So we got our nice little bump here. Let's go ahead and let's add those nice little wavy distorted wavy lines to our sand that looked really sand swept. Again, it's very important to use reference, or I wouldn't even know that sand kind of did that. And what we're going to do to create those little lines of sand is using that C4D shader. Again, this is only in the old Shader Graph Redshift material system. It's not ported over to the new one yet, which is why we're using this Expresso based shader graph. So I'm going to go to C4D, we're going to go to C4D Shader. And I'm going to double click there. And what the C4D shader does is awesome. It allows you to have access to all of the different types of C4D shader. So if I click on the C4D shader you can see here's our noise, our posterizer, ambient occlusion, Loomis Shader, and we have the surfaces as well, which I can't wait for C4D, for Maxon to port all of these over to the new node material system. But for now we have to use the old system. And if I go and grab tiles and again I'm just going to plug this directly into our output here. You can see that I'm not able to plug in the C4D shader into the surface. And that's because I need to convert the C4D shader to a Redshift material. And to do that, all I need to do is hit Shift C and just grab a Redshift texture node. So I'll just move this over here, plug this into the texture zero. And now I can use this within the Redshift shader system. You can see, voila, there's our little tiles that are looking very ugly right now coming from the C4D shader. Now to get to the options I'm just going to give us a little bit more space over here. You can see here's our squares pattern. We're going to change this to lines. And these are very ugly colors. I don't know why Maxon chose the ugliest colors to be as default colors for these tiles. But we just need to change all the tile colors to white. We can leave the grout color to black. So I'm just going to change this to white. And then I'm going to click and drag on this color chip to just copy that color to all these other color chips. And I'm going to change the orientation to V. So we're having this more vertical alignment. And then I'm going to bring down the global scale. And I'm going to bring it down to say like let's do one. And you can see our tiles look very big. So what's going on behind the scenes is we have to convert and bake the C4D shader into basically like an image behind the scenes and pipe it into Redshift for it to use. And because of that we need to set the parameters as far as like the resolution we're actually baking that texture for Redshift to use. So you can see that our default texture is 128 by 128 which is a super low res image. So what I'm going to do is at least bring this to about 4K which is 4096 by 4096. And you can see that that updates right away and now we're getting more of these tiny lines here. And you can see they're like alternating in colors which like looks like an old TV lines effect. Remember the TV lines. That was cool back in the early 2000s. But what that's coming from is this grout width. I'm just going to bring that to zero. And then for the bevel width I'm going to go ahead and bring this up to 100%. You can see we have these really nice lines. Now when you're updating this you might actually get a little bit of a slow down as far as Redshift updating this. And that's again because what's happening behind the scenes. It's getting baked down as a 4K image and then getting fed into Redshift. So that's happening all behind the scenes in real time. So that's why it takes a little time to kind of update all this stuff here. So what I'm going to do for one final touch is I've been told in the past that whatever your global scale is you should also change this delta number to match. And this is basically going to try to maintain amount of detail and crispness to your noise or your tile shader. So I'm just going to bring this delta down to one. And you'll notice a little bit of a difference once this updates. So just a tiny bit of a difference there. So we have our lines. What we need to do now is distort them. And the cool thing about using the old C4D shader system is we can utilize the C4D layer shader. And what that does when I just add that to my tile shader is it basically creates like a Photoshop layer system that it just automatically place my tiles in here. So I can go and add in and use blending modes for whatever type of effect that I want. So I can add another noise do some blending modes on that. But what I'm going to use in this layer shader is this effect tab. And I'm going to grab a distort tab. So again this is just like Photoshop where if you had like a distort adjustment layer or something like that. And so you're going to see and it may be different on your end. But on my end when I add this distort it's not going to show up until I go and toggle say like 16 bit and once I toggle that it's going to update and you saw that little shift there. So what's happening is my noise scale is actually pretty low. So the noise is super big and it sounds kind of contrary to how it should work but to actually make a smaller noise scale you need to up this value here. So what I'm going to do is bring up the noise scale to say 22222 because that's easy to type and with this bigger number it's actually going to make our noise smaller and again this isn't going to update for me. So we're going to do this little depth dance and once I go to 8 bit you'll see that update and you can see all that distortion. So that's a little bit too much distortion. So I can bring down the strength of that distortion down to about 2% strength. Again this is going to be a little jerky and we do the depth dance again. There it is and you can see that nice little displacement there. You can also change the noise type to say turbulence. You get a different type of noise. Again we're going to do the dance again and you can see what that looks like right there. Looking pretty good. Now if you wanted to you could start layering up a bunch of different sizes of distortion here if you wanted to just to get a little bit of variance there. So go and get another turbulence and maybe the noise for this will be you know a little bit smaller than the noise underneath and you can see that this is kind of getting cut off. So what we can also do is go to our C4D shader and click the layer tab here and you can see this show up in your attributes manager here. So I don't know why this is getting cut off here but we can change this scale to you know maybe a little bit smaller. So maybe 3,000 and let's bring the strength down to like 0.01 and then let's see what this looks like and there it is just a little slight change so just a little subtle thing but just to know that you can go and adjust this and the cool thing about using the tile shader and the distort is that this is going to be seamlessly tiled. So hopefully whenever this is ported over to the new redshift nodes, the new C4D nodes this will be much faster and you won't have these little glitches that are happening now that we're experiencing but we got some pretty nice lines happening at the moment and so let's just get back to a good position with our little scaly person in here and there are nice little lines. So what are we going to do with these lines? We're going to go ahead plug in the redshift material back into the output surface we're actually going to go ahead and we're going to use this for the bump as well so yes we can actually have two bumps and we can combine them together using a bump blender. So I'm going to hit shift C and grab yet another bump well actually I accidentally got bump blender but I need that anyways so let's go to bump let's go to bump map so there's our bump map we're going to feed this into the input we are going to then feed this into the base input and we're going to add this other bump which is our sand noise that really fine noise and we're going to plug this into layer 0 input ok now what's going to happen is this bump blender if we go and plug this into the bump input here let's just move everything over here so everything's nice and organized so now what we're doing is basically essentially having the ability if I twirl down layer 1 to blend these two bumps together so the sand noise and then the lines right now we're only seeing the lines because our blend weight of this layer 0 which is our sand noise is set to 0 so 0% opacity but if we crank this up to 1 you can see that what this is going to do is just show us the sand noise and it's going to overwrite the wavy lines ok so what we can do is actually use this additive mode and this is just going to add the top bump map on top of the base layer bump map or layer 0 and again this is like backwards from how Photoshop works where instead of top to bottom it's bottom to top as far as the layer system goes so what we can do is bring down the opacity of that sand layer to you know maybe 0.6 or something like that ok so we got 60% opacity on that nice sand layer and then we can still see that wavy texture underneath cool so we're not quite done yet we can start adding little bits of variation as far as where these little sand stripes are so right now the sand stripes are everywhere and if you look at reference images there's not these little sand waves all over the place so what we can do is we can just like we combine different bumps together we can combine different noises together and use blending modes just like we did with the C4D layer shader within redshift so if I want to combine a noise and have it like set to multiply or something on top of our lines here what I can do is grab a color layer node you can see we have all these different layers so again you can think of this as like photoshop layers only again it's reverse so bottom to top versus top to bottom and for our base layer we are just going to plug in that C4D shader which we can also rename to wavy lines ok just to keep things straight here and then what we need to do is then output this to the input and what you're going to see is that this is just going to totally overwrite the lines again because we have this layer set to black it's writing over the layer before it so again just to see what's going on let's plug this into the output here so you're just going to see black at this point so what we can do is actually pump in a noise to this color chip here instead of it just being black so let's go shift C noise this into layer color 1 now what we can do at this point is set this blending mode from normal to multiply and if I make this noise bigger to say let's do 50 and then adjust the contrast you can see we're actually going to be masking out some of those wavy lines so if I go and plug back in the color I'll put color here you can see that oh right here it's smooth and right here is the line so we can add a little bit of variation to our sand and where those lines are so let's choose a little bit more of an organic type of noise maybe stuple again and then we can just like adjust the brightness stuff like this the scale maybe the scale on the X again just to get a sense of which way is the wind flowing and stuff like that the low clip, high clip so it all depends on how much of those lines you want to kind of show up now another interesting thing you could do is you can go ahead and use some Fresnel now Fresnel is working based on the angle of your polygons and how they're facing the camera so let me go and let's get a Fresnel and let's plug this into the layer 2 color and here's the Fresnel and you can see that we just have these two colors here on an IOR so what I like to do is plug in this Fresnel shader into a ramp to just be able to better control those black and white values coming from our Fresnel we also need to turn on that layer 2 just to show up so now we can see this ramp and the Fresnel and you can see depending on the angle that our camera is facing those colors are changing so if you're just kind of doing a push move this Fresnel effect is going to work really nice but if you're kind of angled up and zooming in and stuff like that it's actually going to change where your lines are showing up pretty weirdly but just to show you that this is another thing you can do to try to mask out where those lines are showing up by using the multiply mode and you can even adjust this mask opacity here as well we have an option there I'm just going to go and delete that because I'm not going to use the Fresnel I'm going to use just my Max On Noise here you can see our layer 2 is still enabled here and just kind of writing everything over so I'm just going to turn that off for now and what I'm going to do at this point is add a little bit of noise break up to the lines so they don't look so perfect I want to make them look a little bit organic so what I'm going to do for that is just command click into the layer 2 color so there's our layer 2 here and this Max On Noise is the same as the noise here so I'm going to change this from Stupel to FBM and I'm going to make this noise super small .6 scale or something like that so pretty small and then what I'm going to do is change the blending mode to overlay and you can see how this is going to break up those lines and this is breaking up a little bit too much so I'm going to bring down that mask opacity to say .5 maybe we can increase the scale to say 1 and maybe bring down the scale in the X to like .5 and you can see how this like nicely breaks up the sand lines there let's go back to our other noise here and maybe back up on the contrast so it's a little bit more smooth because that's where those lines kind of fade in and out there so that's looking pretty good let's actually see what this looks like as a bump so I'm going to plug in the output color so I just wanted to show the black and white values we were using to drive this bump and this is looking pretty nice and the cool thing about using a bump blender is you can independently adjust the height scale on each individual layer there so if you're not seeing the lines quite enough you can bump up the scale there say you're not seeing the sand noise quite enough you can bump up the scale here as well or if you're seeing too much of it can always go lower and maybe half that okay so you have a lot more control here using the bump blender and using different noises to drive bumps so I'm saying that's looking pretty good maybe we can play around with the seed on some of this noise and that's going to control where those little wavy lines are showing up now before we wrap up the whole redshift material section I wanted to show you one other way that you could add little distortion to your sand waves versus using the distort shaders inside of the C4D shader because who knows if they'll be around for much longer so I wanted to show you an alternative to that and one thing you can do to add distortion is grabbing a max on noise and here's our wavy line texture remember we are pumping that into this redshift texture here let's just go ahead and let's just feed this into the surface so we can just see the redshift texture here so there's our lines and then what we can do with this max on noise is actually plug this into the rotation of this redshift texture and what that's going to do is it's going to use this noise shader to rotate or basically just distort our lines so what's cool about this is remember we're using this kind of baked down 4k image and tiling it across our surface here we can use another layer of distortion on top of that to get like really big distortion that isn't tiled all over the place but what we can do here is we can go ahead and adjust the scale of this noise if we wanted to and you can see how we're getting that really cool distortion that again is a little bit bigger and again adds to the nice organic nature of the distortion on our lines there now to control the strength of this distortion effect coming from the max on noise we'll actually need to go ahead and get a color mix node and basically what this is going to allow us to do is if I plug this max on noise into input 1 and go and reconnect this output color to that rotate basically what this is going to do is if I use this mix amount it's going to basically fade away the max on noise and fade away the distortion effect so you can almost think of this slider as a distortion strength effect so if I up this you can see how we're slowly removing that distortion because basically using this input 2 in the mix amount we're just fading away that effect all together so if you want just a little bit of some of that distortion coming from this max on noise you can totally do that so I just wanted to show you this other way to be able to add distortion to your lines effect and that looks really nice now I can put on some of the finishing touches here and one of the decisions you can make is if you want to have your landscape look a little bit more windswept and maybe pull back on some of the displacement details and how you can do that just move this off to the right here a little bit is adding a smoothing deformer to our displacer stack here so I'm going to go and add a smoothing deformer right there and we're going to apply this last in the stack and you can see how this smooths everything out so we're smoothing out some of those details if we want to bring back some of those details we can just up the stiffness value here to bring back a little bit of that detail but depending on how smooth you want your desert landscape you can kind of smooth everything out to make it look a little bit more windswept now one last finishing touch we can put on this is to make it look like this figure is not just like intersecting the sand but it's like in it and there's some sand maybe dusted up on the side of this character by the legs there and how we can do that is by using something called a collision deformer and what this will allow us to do is deform based on a collider object so I'm going to go and I'm going to place this right before the smoothing here I'm actually going to turn the smoothing off so it's not calculating right now and I'm actually going to pause my redshift render view here because sometimes this could be a little crashy so let me just show you what's going to go on here so our collision deformer all you need to do is define the object you want to have imprinted deform the other object you can see we're not seeing anything just yet but if we go to the advanced and increase the size here like five or something like that you can see a little bit of something happening there let's increase this even more so you can see a little bit of stuff happening there and I'm going to turn the smooth back on to smooth out those deformed polygons there and that should smooth everything out so it looks like this character is like in the sand and we got a little bit of an indent where this character is so we're going to have a lot more control over this as well the first thing we need to keep in mind is that this collision deformer is like trying to take into account this entire plane object with all the polygon so to limit it's kind of search radius we're going to limit the effect of this collision deformer to just this figure object itself and you can see how it just limited the effect of the radius in which this figure object kind of taking up space and deforming around where this object is so this should speed things up just a little bit and at this point we can go to the object tab and change the fall off from none to distance and what we can do at this point is we can do something cool I can add two points here by a controller command clicking and dragging and if I move this one point you can see how we got this little lip now which is pretty cool let's make this maybe 150 for the distance so that's looking pretty good but it's very subtle so what we can do is just increase the strength of this effect and you can really get a sense for that little lip that is occurring right now as well you can go back into the advanced maybe bring down the size to 10 so it's a little bit closer to our character that's a little bit too much you can see how you can utilize objects in your scene to create this nice little imprint of the sand kind of going over it and if we rotate this character have it facing downwards a little bit laying down in the sand making sand angels or something like that you can see how this updates this is looking really really nice so that is looking nice let's go and let's see what this looks like when we update this redshift render view here that is our poor dead scaly person laying in the sand and again we can do a lot of things to smooth out the polygons around here we can always throw this in a subdivision surface we can even use a redshift object tag to go ahead and subdivide this at render time as well you can see that just kind of screwed something up there in a bunch of ways you can introduce more smooth geometry into this scene but hopefully this gets your brain jog in seeing an oasis of creativity somewhere out there in the sand dunes speaking of which I kind of poo pooed the landscape object let me actually just turn these off and we can actually at this point start introducing some landscape objects to kind of fill in the background here so we can go make these pretty big and so now we're just increasing you know how vast this landscape is by making all these further in the distance sand dunes and we'll just command click and drag duplicate the material on there and then we'll need to probably up the width and height segments just to smooth everything out but you can see how you can get the best of both worlds get a nice little landscape object mingle it in with your perfectly art directed sand dunes scene and just fill in the details with some quick landscape objects like so now don't forget because this setup is completely procedural you can actually just simply go into your displacer dunes go to the shading tab and then just adjust the seed and this will change the random seed of your noise and you can easily just kind of cycle through different landscapes so if I just kind of cycle through here you can see all the different landscapes that we are getting by just changing a single seed so super cool all you got to do is then update where your character is make sure he's laying on the ground and all that good stuff but there's just so much control let's go and just maybe play around with a lot do some of the color controls here just to finish all of this off of those photographic controls do a little cycle through what dance here because no one quite knows what what they like until they see it just like an annoying client maybe that's looking pretty good he's the contrast there now once you're done making all your edits and all that stuff one good thing to do is to big down your geometry and all your displacements and all that stuff so you don't have this constantly calculating in your scene and really slowing down your viewport so to do that and to bake everything down I'm going to right click on this do an object here and go to current state to object and that's going to take a little bit of time but what that allows me to do is allows me to turn off all of my generator objects all of my deformers and I'm left with just this single bake down piece of geometry that is super super light in my scene now another thing you could do is we can delete that and I can turn all these back on and let's just say I wanted to still have the ability to add a different object or have something else affect this collision to former I can go ahead and turn that off and I can just bake in all the other effects so I can go in here right click current state to object then at this point turn everything off command click and drag that collision deformer there and then I can still have the ability to go ahead and edit all this stuff again I'll probably need to add another smoothing on this as well but this bakes down all of those displacers so again it's going to speed up your scene a little bit more and I can move this figure around a little bit more easily and quicker without having to worry about all those displacements constantly calculating in your scene so always be sure to bake down when you're done don't keep things live all the time like I do because it really will slow down your scene quite a bit you can see that even with the collision and the smoothing my scene is pretty slow so turn those off until you absolutely need them and you can see how much faster my scene is rocking and rolling alright so there you go how you can procedurally generate a desert landscape using cinema 4d and redshift now remember I have the link to the project in the description below so if you want to pick apart what I did see some of my post effect action and stuff like that check out that project file now if you like this video be sure to like it and if you like what I'm doing here on my channel please subscribe it really helps my viewer count and it really helps my fragile ego if you have any questions about anything I covered in this tutorial leave it in the comment section below and I just wanted to say thank you so much for watching always appreciate your support hope to see you again real soon in another tutorial bye everybody