Saul Espinosa

Patreon Tutorial #57 - Randomization Nodes and Altus CLI - Part 2

Part 2 of tutorial #57 covers the awesome new randomization shaders added to Redshift 2025.2. Some of you might already be familiar with the Jitter node which can be leveraged for a lot of interesting variations, but now we have the Random Color Switch, and Random Material Switch shaders.

These new shaders are very fun to play with and have similar functions to the shader switch shader, except they allow us to select any random shader inputs or random full material inputs. They even inc...

Patreon Tutorial #57 - New Randomization Nodes and Altus CLI - Part 1

Hey guys, in this month's tutorial I will go over the new Redshift Randomization nodes and the Altus command-line denoiser. In part 1 I will be discussing in depth how the Altus denoiser works, and how we can leverage the robust command-line version of the denoiser with Deadline.

Altus has a lot of extra features that are only available in the command-line tool that can improve the denoiser quality, in particular, temporal denoising can improve the output when animations are involved. I...

Patreon Tutorial #57 - New Randomization Nodes & Altus-CLI *Available Dec. 4th*

Hey guys! This month's tutorial will cover a few new additions to Redshift 2025.2 and the Altus-CLI tool with Deadline to follow up on last month's Deadline tutorial. A lot of Redshift users are unaware of the Altus-CLI utility. This is the stand-alone command-line denoiser that is included with Redshift and can be run directly to process your noisy render output. I show you how it works, and how we can leverage it in Deadline to quickly narrow down some settings to enable optimal denoising f...

Black Friday / Cyber Monday 2024 Sales for CG Artists

Hey guys! It is that time of the year again when software deals start to show up. CG Channel has started posting a list of sales on their website for artists to check out. Feel free to add any not listed there in the comments below. This is a great time to pick up any key software you might have been waiting to purchase. Enjoy!

Modo - End of Life - Free License

Hey guys, as some of you may have heard. Modo is now end-of-life and will no longer be updated. Foundry has decided to release the program as a gift to the 3d community. You can download Modo 17 or an earlier version for free, and you can use a new end-of-life license which is valid for 10 years for free.

It is unfortunate that Modo is no longer being developed, I remember using it many years ago when it was first released, it had a lot of promise and was a fun-to-use modeling applicati...

Patreon Tutorial #56 - Houdini & Cinema 4D Deadline Setup - Part 2

Hey guys! This is part 2 of my Deadline tutorial series. In the second part, I will be going over the process of installing our Deadline plug-ins for both Cinema 4D and Houdini. I will also show you how you can modify the Deadline plug-ins to add support for newer versions of your DCCs that are not officially supported by the Deadline release using some text editing. This is an important thing to know due to how few Deadline updates are released throughout the year, many times there will be n...

Patreon Tutorial #56 - Houdini & Cinema 4D Deadline Setup - Part 1

Hey everyone, in part one of this tutorial, I will cover the base Deadline Repository and Client installation process. How do you source the installer files from AWS? The initial installation settings and options that you need to be aware of based on your particular system, this stage can confuse many people and if not set correctly will result in a non-functioning Deadline install. Most people at this point give up or get confused because Deadline doesn't connect correctly with the client an...

Patreon Tutorial #56 - Houdini & Cinema 4D Deadline Setup *Available November 4th*

Hey guys! This month's tutorial is going to cover something technical that I have seen requested over the years. As many of you may be aware from watching some of my tutorials, I tend to render out my batch renders using Deadline. This amazing render manager can manage all sorts of different DCCs and Tools, and best of all, it is entirely FREE! This makes it a very enticing option for users looking to automate some of their workflow or improve their batch rendering management.

Many peop...

Free Toon Shading Texture Assets

Hey guys, hosted on Renderman's website is an awesome package of free Public Domain assets for toon shading. This includes tons of brush patterns we can use for tone mapping and paper background texture patterns. While these were originally made for Renderman's toon shading, we can also leverage these same texture assets in Redshift with the custom mode on the tone map pattern shader or for backgrounds. This a great share by the artist 2024-10-23 17:01:58 +0000 UTC View Post

Rebelle 7 Super Sale - $14.99 Perpetual License

Hey guys! I got an email today about the Rebelle sale, and I had to share it with you guys. It is my favorite digital painting app, and they are having a massive sale. $14.99 for the pro edition perpetual license.

I used it to make some custom tone map patterns for my toon shader examples. They have some nice traditional media tools like watercolors, oils, etc.. Rebelle is a great app. I highly recommend it. https:...

Patreon Tutorial #55 - Product Shading & Rendering - Boolean Clipper Technique - Part 2

Hey guys, in part 2 of Patreon Tutorial #55 I will be picking up directly where we left off in part 1. I will be continuing to develop our shaders for our metals and move on to the painted metal surface and plastics. I will also continue to show how I leverage the shader ball to quickly pre-visualize our surface shading before examining it on the more complex machine geometry itself.

In particular coating on certain surfaces has an interesting effect that occurs that is not accounted fo...

Patreon Tutorial #55 - Product Shading & Rendering - Procedural Shading - Part 1

Hey guys! Here is the first part of Patreon Tutorial #55 - Product Shading & Rendering tutorial. In Part 1 I will be covering different procedural shading techniques. In particular, I will be going over metallic materials and the thought process behind the shading and layering of imperfections.

Metals and the Metalness workflow require a few important considerations, in particular how the reflection color and albedo are converted into a Complex IOR. There is a great resource page to...

Standard Shader Ball Asset For Redshift - Houdini | Maya | Cinema 4D

EDIT - 10/03/2024 - Added A new ZIP file with scenes converted for Redshift in Maya, Houdini, and Cinema 4D. These are all set up to use the Redshift Standard Surface.

Hey guys! I wanted to share the new "standard shader ball" USD asset which is part of the USD initiative. It is meant to be used in your tools to best represent shaders for USD/MatX across tools. I thought this would be great to share with you all. It is a very nicely made shader ball with some important de...

Patreon Tutorial #55 - Product Shading & Rendering - Boolean Clipper Shading Technique *Available Oct. 4th*

Hey guys! Patreon Tutorial #55 will be covering procedural sharing techniques and in particular, rendering certain metals and industrial materials. It will also cover a new Distance Shader Interior Color Control technique. These new parameters will be added to the Distance Shader and expand what we can use the shader for. I will be going over how these parameters work and how we can use them to make a boolean clipping effect.

This is an interesting technique that can be leveraged by peo...

Patreon Tutorial #54 - New Caustics and Custom Toon Tone Tonemapping - Part 2

Hey everyone, here in part 2 of this months Patreon tutorial #54, I go over some new additional Toon Shading features that were recently added. These new features further expand our already flexible toon shading capabilities even further.

I go over the new Contour tonemapping, which lets your contours change color and respond to lights for some interesting effects. I also go over the new Contour shader preset modes like the new Fountain Pen Mode, and how you can use these to add breaku...

Patreon Tutorial #54 - New Caustics and Custom Toon Tone Tonemapping - Part 1

Hey guys, in part 1 of Patreon Tutorial #54, I go over the new Caustics features. There was a total overhaul to the Caustics UI, making it easier than ever to work with caustics in your scenes.

Whether you want to use global caustics in a single click or override different aspects globally. You can even go back to using them in a fully manual assignment way if needed, this gives users the best of both worlds, ease of use, and maximum control to art direct them.

I will also go over...

Patreon Tutorial #54 - New Caustics and Custom Toon Tonemapping *Available Sept 4th*

Hey guys! The next Patreon tutorial will be covering some of the new and exciting features in Redshift. The long-requested Brute Force Caustics technology is finally arriving, and with it there is a total overhaul of the Caustics UI, and workflow. I will be covering all these new changes, and how the new UI and all the parameters work in practice. The new system is much easier to use, but it still maintains all the robust flexibility the older system provides if an artist requires it.
I wi...

Patreon Tutorial #53 - Volumetric Rest Grids & Distance Shader - Part 3

Hey guys, this tutorial will cover the awesome new Redshift Distance shader. This is a very useful utility shader that is very flexible and useful for a wide variety of purposes. I personally love this shader for environment work, as it lets you easily make masks and blends between different objects, but it is capable of a lot more.

This node while straightforward to use can be tricky at times, I go over all the different parameters and how they function from a technical aspect. These d...

Patreon Tutorial #53 - Volumetric Rest Grids & Distance Shader - Part 2

In this next tutorial, I cover a few of the new Copernicus features and how we can use them with Redshift. This new technology is very powerful and be used in many different areas and ways inside of Houdini. One of the easiest ways it can be used is for post-processing renders. A powerful way to do this is by leveraging the variety of OpenFX plugins that exist in typical compositing applications. These open up amazing possibilities for getting a variety of looks directly inside Houdini. You c...

Patreon Tutorial #53 - Volumetric Rest Grids & Distance Shader - Part 1

Hey guys! In this new tutorial, I will be covering a complex and often mysterious subject regarding volumetric Rest Fields and how they can be used to stick procedural noises to our volume. This is in particular useful for volume displacement to add detail to our volume, or with the density to cut out detailed holes into the volume.

This is not discussed often and is a subject matter with very little information out on the internet. The addition of the new Standard Volume in Redshift op...

Patreon Tutorial #53 - Volumetric Rest Grids & Distance Shader - Parts 1-3 *Available August 4th*

Hey everyone! This month’s tutorial will cover several topics that have been frequently requested. Instead of a single project, we’ll have three separate tutorial clips, all releasing on August 4th.

• First Tutorial: We’ll dive into using Rest Fields to stick noises to our volume during volume displacement. It’s a pretty niche topic with limited info online, so I hope this helps clear things up.

• Second Tutorial: I’ll ...

  2024-07-31 22:38:24 +0000 UTC View Post

Patreon Tutorial #52 - Toon Shading Fundamentals - Part 2

Hey everyone, in part 2 of the Toon Shading Fundamentals tutorial I will be picking up directly where we left off in part 1 by picking up the techniques covered in part 1 and using them in a more practical sense. I will go over using some of our non-Toon shaders like the RS State Shader and Maxon Noises in combination with the Contours Shader to break up the outlines and contours.

I review how we can use textures to get some interesting looks when mixed with the Toon Shaders. I show you...

Patreon Tutorial #52 - Toon Shading Fundamentals - Part 1

Hey guys, here is part 1 of this month's Patreon Toon shading fundamentals tutorial. This tutorial is going to cover the Toon shader, Contour Shader, and Tonemap Pattern shader. I go over the different parameters and how they work, their relationships with each other, and lights. I also go over making customized specular patterns, tone mapping, and other interesting controls to adjust the shaders and get very specific looks.

I also cover how we can break up the contour outlines on our o...

Patreon Tutorial #52 - Redshift Toon Shader Fundamentals *Available July 4th*

Hey everyone! The new upcoming Patreon tutorial is scheduled for release on July 4th. I will be delving into all the new Redshift Toon shading features. There’s a lot to cover, including several new shaders specifically designed for toon shading, while offering a lot of flexibility with our current shaders.

In this tutorial, we’ll focus on the following shaders:

• Toon Shader

• Contour Shader

2024-07-01 22:19:29 +0000 UTC View Post

New Houdini 20.5 Sneak Peek

The new Houdini 20.5 feature reel has just been released. One of the biggest new additions is the new "Copernicus" context, aka COPs have finally been resurrected and rebuilt from the ground up. A lot of awesome and exciting new features are packed into this release.

Patreon Tutorial #51 - Standard Volume Fundamentals - Part 2

Hey guys, in part 2 I will be showing some practical examples applying some of the fundamentals I went over in the previous tutorial. In this case, I will be starting with a Cloud VDB and how we can quickly set a cloud shader for this sort of VDB and what the different settings do to influence the overall look of the cloud.

After that I go over building a simple mixed-color smoke sim using Axiom and how we can import the color voxel grid into our shader setup using the Volume Attribute...

Patreon Tutorial #51 - Standard Volume Fundamentals - Part 1

Hey guys, in part 1 of this tutorial I will be going over the fundamentals behind the new volume shader and how each parameter works, along with the relationship it has with the volumetric object and scene scale.

Scale in particular is very important, and its relationship to the scattering and attenuation/transparency parameters on the Standard Volume. How procedural shading works with the new volume shader, including noises and displacement. How to approach adding your volume grids usi...

Patreon Tutorial #51 - Standard Volume Fundamentals *Available June 4th*

Hey guys! With the recent release of Redshift 3.6, the all-new Redshift Standard volume shaders were added, opening an entirely new workflow and a range of shading possibilities. This month's will be available June 4th. The tutorial will cover the fundamentals behind these new volume shaders and practical techniques you can apply to your projects.

I will review the parameters and how they function, relative to each other and the scene scale. i will also go over the Volume Scalar Attribu...

E-On Vue & Plant Factory are now Free

Sad news regarding E-On Vue and Plant Factory, they are now end of life, and are no longer being developed. However, Bentley has released the latest versions of these apps for free public use. You can download them from the link below. A final gift to the community.

Download Link - https://www.bentley.com/software/e-on-software-downloads/

Patreon Tutorial #50 - Desert Environment - Part 8

This is it, the final part of this tutorial series! We finally made it. In this final part, I will show you guys how to make a quick shadow caster based on some VDB clouds, and also how we can save this mask for future usage as a background pseudo-cloud asset. I will then go into the neat SideFX Labs Pick & Place utility SOP. This is a very useful SOP designed for manual placement of specific assets instead of mass scattering. It allows for precise placement of objects with an easy-to-use...