IntroductionWelcome| 00:00 |
(MUSIC).
Hi, I am Donovan Keith, and welcome to
| | 00:06 |
Creating Materials in CINEMA 4D.
In this course, we will look at what
| | 00:11 |
materials are, the mechanics of how they
work, and we won't stop until you have
| | 00:14 |
created your own realistic materials.
I'll start by showing you how to use the
| | 00:20 |
content browser to search Cinema 4D's
texture libraries for materials you can
| | 00:24 |
use right away.
Then show you how to use the different
| | 00:28 |
material channels to create basic
materials, like metal and glass.
| | 00:33 |
We'll see how to create complex layered
surfaces, using photo based textures and
| | 00:38 |
the filter shader.
We'll be covering all these features plus
| | 00:41 |
plenty of other tools and techniques.
By the end of this course, you'll be able
| | 00:45 |
to take even the simplest of models and
use materials to give them a sense of
| | 00:50 |
substance and history.
Now, lets get started with creating
| | 00:54 |
materials in Cinema 4D.
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| Using the exercise files| 00:00 |
If you are a premium member of the
lynda.com library, you have access to the
| | 00:04 |
Exercise files used throughout this
course.
| | 00:06 |
These files can be found on the Exercise
Files tab on the main course page.
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The Exercise files are divided by chapter
and numbered by exercise.
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Each exercise will have it's own .C4D
file, with the same name as the exercise.
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You may also see a file with the word End
as the suffix.
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These End files contain the materials you
should be able to create by following the videos.
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In addition to the main C4D project file,
you may also see a folder called tex.
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This is short for textures and will
contain any images that you might need to
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complete a given exercise.
You may also see a folder labeled ref,
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which is short for reference and inside
you might find reference imagery that will
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help you to complete your exercise.
The course was recorded using Cinema 4D
| | 00:51 |
R-14 Studio.
But if you're using an older version of
| | 00:54 |
Cinema 4D, you'll be happy to know that
the materials manager hasn't changed
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significantly over the past few versions.
And you should be able to follow along
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with pretty much all of the exercises.
If you're using Cinema 4D Prime or Body
| | 01:06 |
Paint, there's a chance you'll run into an
error message mentioning something about
| | 01:10 |
global illumination.
This may have some impact on the
| | 01:12 |
appearance of your lighting, but it will
have no impact on your ability to create
| | 01:16 |
and edit materials, which is the subject
of this course.
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If you don't have access to the exercise
files, you can follow along from scratch,
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or with your own assets.
Let's get started.
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|
|
1. Understanding MaterialsUnderstanding materials| 00:00 |
Modeling defines the shape of an object,
and lighting helps to reveal its form,
| | 00:04 |
textures or materials as CINEMA calls
them, reveal the substance of an object.
| | 00:09 |
Everything in our world is made up of
different sorts of stuff or materials.
| | 00:14 |
This bucket for example, is made up of
plastic and some sort of metal.
| | 00:17 |
This, even though I'm not sure what it is,
I can tell is metallic.
| | 00:20 |
And without having to touch it, I know
that this parking structure is mostly made
| | 00:24 |
of concrete.
Some textures are made up of multiple
| | 00:26 |
surfaces, like this peeling paint, where
we see both the paint and the wood below it.
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And we're able to distinguish between
these two materials based on the ways that
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they impact the light that hits them.
The paint is a little bit shinier and the
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wood is more diffuse.
Our goal in this course, will be to
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attempt to accurately represent these
different substances, so that our viewers
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can identify objects and what they're made
of.
| | 00:49 |
In an animation, we can use movement and
sound to help evoke the thingness of a thing.
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But with still images, we're limited to
representing different materials using
| | 00:57 |
visual appearance alone.
Take this teapot with tea for example.
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We can take a simple teapot model in CG
and apply a glass texture to it.
| | 01:05 |
We can then take that model and fill it
with a liquid, and use a very similar
| | 01:08 |
material but slightly tweaked in order to
make it look like it's full of tea.
| | 01:12 |
All of these images were created using the
same base model, but they all appear to be
| | 01:17 |
made of vastly different substances.
This is the power of materials.
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Materials are one of the primary tools
that we have in computer graphics, in
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order to create a sense of reality.
And as you can see how this single teapot
| | 01:29 |
has been transformed, it's easy to make
the case that materials might be the most
| | 01:33 |
important element.
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| Creating and applying materials to objects| 00:00 |
After watching this video, you will be
able to create and apply simple solid
| | 00:03 |
color materials to your objects.
Making a new material is fairly simple.
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All you have to do is click on the Create
New Material in the Materials Manager.
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What this will create is a new material in
your Materials Manager with the name of Mat/g.
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You can rename this material by double
clicking.
| | 00:19 |
Let's call this one Blue.
And you can finish naming it by hitting Return.
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Double-click on your text or preview ball
to open it up.
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This will bring up what's called your
Material Editor.
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This has all of the properties for your
material.
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You can also access these material
properties from the Attributes Manager.
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However, I recommend using your Material
Editor as it is better designed for this use.
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You can adjust the color of your material
by first clicking on the Color tab or
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channel and then changing the color.
You can change the color with these RGB
| | 00:50 |
sliders here, and by dragging down the R
and G, we get a nice blue material.
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To apply our material to our object, we
can drag that material onto the object in
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the View port and release.
We can also drag our material onto the
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name of an object in the Objects Manager.
Notice that our material didn't land on
| | 01:10 |
our lid.
So, I'm going to drag a material onto my
| | 01:13 |
lid in my objects manager.
We have some more options for how to
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adjust the colors of our material.
We can click on this colored chip, which
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will bring up more advanced color picker,
and I like it because it has access to
| | 01:24 |
Hue, Saturation and Value.
And I feel like those are just more human
| | 01:29 |
ways of understanding and working with
color.
| | 01:31 |
If that's you preferences as well, you
might decide to change your overall system
| | 01:35 |
preference to work this way.
To do that, go to Edit > Preferences.
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Go to the units tab, and adjust your color
picker.
| | 01:44 |
You can choose to work in RGB or HSV.
Your settings will update as soon as you
| | 01:52 |
change tabs and change back in color.
But I'm going to use RGB for the rest of
| | 01:56 |
this series.
Creating a new material is as easy as
| | 02:02 |
using the new material command followed by
a drag and drop.
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| Using the Interactive Render Region to preview your materials| 00:00 |
When working with materials, you'll want
to make sure that you are getting the
| | 00:02 |
highest quality preview of the final
result that can.
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In this video, we'll go over your
different preview options.
| | 00:08 |
Go ahead and double-click on this mirror
ball texture in the Materials Manager.
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The first place that you can preview your
material is in the Material Editor here.
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You'll see a texture preview ball, like
so.
| | 00:18 |
You can adjust the size of this preview by
right clicking and choosing between Small,
| | 00:23 |
Medium, Large and Huge.
Huge is not quite so grandiose as its name
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would imply, but it is a nice improvement.
If you need an even larger texture
| | 00:32 |
preview, you can right click on this
preview and choose Open Window.
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This will open up an interactive preview
that you can edit.
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You can also adjust the size of this
window by clicking and dragging on the
| | 00:43 |
right hand side.
You can always render a preview of your
| | 00:47 |
view port by tapping Ctrl+R or Cmd+R.
You can access this same function by
| | 00:53 |
pressing this first Render button.
A command that I really like to use is
| | 00:57 |
something called an Interactive Render
Region.
| | 00:59 |
Which you can access by pressing and
holding on this Middle Render button and
| | 01:02 |
choosing Interactive Render Region.
You can also get access to it by using
| | 01:06 |
Option or Alt+R on your keyboard.
This will bring up a window with the four
| | 01:11 |
corners that you can drag to adjust.
What you typically want to do is drag
| | 01:15 |
until you see a representative sample of
your material.
| | 01:18 |
And as you make adjustments, this will
update in real time.
| | 01:23 |
This typically defaults to having the
triangle about halfway up, which is a low
| | 01:27 |
resolution preview.
If you're testing lighting that's great
| | 01:30 |
but for materials, I always want to have
that little triangle all the way at the
| | 01:33 |
top so I get a nice crisp preview.
If this is rendering a little bit too slow
| | 01:38 |
for you, you can go into your render
settings.
| | 01:40 |
If you've activated global illumination,
you'll probably want to turn that off.
| | 01:44 |
If your dealing with a complex material
that has blurry reflections and
| | 01:48 |
refractions, you might want a change from
the Standard renderer to the Physical renderer.
| | 01:53 |
In the Physical tab, you can adjust your
sampling quality.
| | 01:56 |
Low will typically be fine for most
materials.
| | 01:59 |
But if that is still slow to render, you
can change from the Adaptive mode to Progressive.
| | 02:04 |
Which will give you a preview very quickly
as you make changes and get progressively
| | 02:09 |
better over time.
Now this sampling mode is not to be used
| | 02:13 |
for your final renders because it's
insanely slow and it never ends.
| | 02:16 |
When you don't need it, be sure to turn
off your Interactive Render Region because
| | 02:20 |
it's a big resource hog.
You can also improve the quality of your
| | 02:23 |
Editor Preview.
If you can you want to work in OpenGL and
| | 02:27 |
also in your options ensure that you have
Enhanced OpenGL turned on.
| | 02:31 |
You can also turn on Noises and
Transparency.
| | 02:35 |
Now OpenGL and especially Enhanced OpenGL
can lead to instability on some systems.
| | 02:42 |
So if you notice that Cinema 4D is
crashing, turn off Enhanced OpenGL.
| | 02:46 |
And if that doesn't work, you might just
have to turn off OpenGL all together.
| | 02:49 |
While waiting for a full frame render of
your scene can be a nice excuse to take a
| | 02:53 |
walk and grab a cup of coffee.
The Interactive Render Region will help
| | 02:56 |
you stay productive as you experiment with
your materials.
| | 02:59 |
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| Using the Content Browser| 00:00 |
In this video, we're going to talk about
the content browser.
| | 00:03 |
And how you can use it to take a scene
that's sort of naked like this.
| | 00:06 |
And turn it into a fully textured scene in
just a matter of minutes.
| | 00:11 |
We're starting with a scene that's got a
teapot, a table, which is made out of a cube.
| | 00:14 |
And a back wall that's made out of a
plane.
| | 00:17 |
By the end of this series you'll be able
to create almost any material you want
| | 00:20 |
from scratch.
However just because you can do something,
| | 00:23 |
doesn't mean you need to.
Cinema 40 comes with a number of preset
| | 00:26 |
content libraries, which are available
from your Content browser.
| | 00:30 |
Now, depending on your version of Cinema
4D, you may have access to different resources.
| | 00:35 |
If your using Cinema 4D Prime, you'll have
access to fewer materials than someone who
| | 00:39 |
was say using Cinema 40 studio.
Let's go ahead and explore our Content browser.
| | 00:43 |
Start by clicking on the Content Browser
tab on the right hand side of your screen.
| | 00:47 |
Next, let's click on the Presets button up
on the top of our screen.
| | 00:52 |
What this will do is bring us to a Preset
folder that stores a number of presets for
| | 00:56 |
each of the different versions of Cinema
4D.
| | 01:00 |
To adjust the size of your previews, you
can use this slider down below to adjust.
| | 01:05 |
You can also adjust the size of your
Content browser overall by grabbing the
| | 01:08 |
borders of its frame.
Clicking and dragging to resize.
| | 01:11 |
Now, you can click your way through each
of these folders.
| | 01:14 |
Like, for example, the Prime folder.
Inside of there, you'll find a folder
| | 01:17 |
called Materials.
And a lot of good materials are found in
| | 01:20 |
the Basic folder.
This'll get you off to a pretty good start
| | 01:23 |
for a bunch of different projects.
What I'm going to do is show you how to
| | 01:28 |
search the entire Content library for
different materials.
| | 01:32 |
The first step is to select that Presets
button.
| | 01:35 |
If your search window is already open,
like mine, you want to click first to
| | 01:38 |
close it.
And click Tree open it so that it knows to
| | 01:41 |
search in the current folder.
And then you want to type in what you're
| | 01:44 |
looking for.
I'm going to start by looking for a
| | 01:47 |
ceramic texture.
If you don't get any results maybe search
| | 01:53 |
for something like paint or chrome.
But, I'm going to search for ceramic, and
| | 02:00 |
I'm going to grab one of these, sort of,
reddish ceramics.
| | 02:05 |
And I'm going to apply that to my teapot,
to make it look like it's made out of clay.
| | 02:09 |
Now, you'll notice that it did not apply
to my entire object, so I'm going to drag
| | 02:13 |
from the Content browser onto the lid
here.
| | 02:17 |
Next, I'm going to search for a texture
for my table.
| | 02:19 |
And for that, I'm going to choose a wood.
So, I'm going to type in wood, and again,
| | 02:24 |
depending on your version, your results
will probably vary, but somewhere in here
| | 02:27 |
is probably going to be a wood texture
that you can use.
| | 02:30 |
For my tabletop, I'm going to try to find
a tiled wood.
| | 02:35 |
And I'm going to drag that onto my
tabletop.
| | 02:37 |
Next, I want to search for a texture for
my back wall, and for that I am going to
| | 02:42 |
search for paint.
There is a lot of different color paints
| | 02:45 |
and towards the bottom with any luck, you
will find a wall paint.
| | 02:49 |
And then you can click and drag that onto
your back wall.
| | 02:52 |
Again if you can't find this specific
material, just grab any of the material
| | 02:55 |
and practice applying it.
Once you're done you can hit Cmd or Ctrl+R
| | 02:59 |
to see what you've come up with.
Now, you may notice that your render is
| | 03:01 |
pretty slow.
So, if you want you can also go into your
| | 03:04 |
render settings and tweak those.
For example, you might turn off global
| | 03:08 |
illumination or advance shadows.
For example, in my Options tab, I'm
| | 03:13 |
going to temporarily turn off shadow and
render again.
| | 03:18 |
While creating a material from scratch can
be a truly rewarding experience.
| | 03:22 |
You should strive to remember that the
finished image is what most people will be seeing.
| | 03:26 |
The content presets that come with Cinema
4D can help you achieve a good looking
| | 03:29 |
final result much more quickly than if you
were to build every element yourself.
| | 03:32 |
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| Applying materials to NURBS caps and polygon selections| 00:00 |
In this video we will create and apply
materials to different parts of our object
| | 00:04 |
using Polygon Selection tags.
We'll also talk about the special case of
| | 00:08 |
applying materials to the caps and
rounding of an extruded, lofted or laved object.
| | 00:14 |
As we've learned in earlier videos to
apply a material to an object all you have
| | 00:17 |
to do is drag and drop.
Let's put down a blue base coat on both
| | 00:21 |
our text and our oil tank.
Click and drag the blue material from the
| | 00:24 |
materials manager onto the text object and
click and drag from the materials manager
| | 00:28 |
onto the oil tank object.
Now, if we want to restrict our material
| | 00:32 |
to a portion of our oil tank, an easy way
to do that is by selecting its polygons.
| | 00:38 |
If I select my oil tank, and go into
Polygon mode, I'll find out that I
| | 00:41 |
actually can't select these polygons.
So, in order to access them I need to make
| | 00:46 |
my object editable, which I can do by
pressing this button right here, or
| | 00:49 |
hitting the C key on my keyboard.
Please note that once you make your object
| | 00:54 |
editable you won't be able to go back in
and adjust it's parameters like radius.
| | 00:57 |
So, make sure that you've got your object
in the shape that you want before you do this.
| | 01:01 |
What I'm going to do now is select some
polygons.
| | 01:04 |
And to do that, I'll take my Live Select
tool and click and drag to make a selection.
| | 01:09 |
I'm going to make a fairly abstract
selection, but you can make one that's
| | 01:12 |
more particular.
To add to your selection, hold down the
| | 01:14 |
Shift key and click.
And to remove from your selection, hold
| | 01:17 |
down the Ctrl key, click and drag.
I now have the polygon selected that I
| | 01:22 |
want to add my selection to, so I'm just
going to click and drag my material from
| | 01:28 |
my materials manager on to the selected
polygons.
| | 01:32 |
What this will do, is create a Polygon
Selection tag on my object, which you can rename.
| | 01:38 |
I'm going to name this one ArrowHead.
Because for some reason, this reminds me
| | 01:44 |
of an arrowhead.
Now, when I render this, I'll see that
| | 01:47 |
I've lost my Selection tag.
It's disappeared.
| | 01:51 |
And that's because my material here is
looking for a Polygon selection named
| | 01:57 |
Polygon Selection.1.
If I want I can just type in ArrowHead.
| | 02:04 |
But I'm finding that's not working for me
and that's probably because I forgotten
| | 02:07 |
how I capitalized it.
So, what you can do is drag this triangle
| | 02:10 |
from right here down into the area where
it says Selection.
| | 02:15 |
And it will link this material to this
Selection tag.
| | 02:18 |
Now, if I want to layer on an additional
material it's as simple as painting out
| | 02:23 |
another selection and dragging on that
material.
| | 02:27 |
I can also reorder these materials left to
right and the left most material is the
| | 02:31 |
one that will go on the bottom.
And the one that is on the right will
| | 02:35 |
right over any other materials underneath
it.
| | 02:40 |
If you want to create your own Polygon
Selection tags without first adding
| | 02:43 |
material, just select the polygons you
want, then go to Select > Set Selection.
| | 02:48 |
You can then go in and rename it like we
did for the other.
| | 02:51 |
Now, let's go ahead and tackle putting
textures onto our text object we've got a
| | 02:58 |
good base coat of blue but what I would
like are red caps and green roundings.
| | 03:03 |
To achieve this what I'm going to do is
drag my red material onto my extrude nerbs object.
| | 03:10 |
And in the selection field of my Texture
tag, I'm going to type in C1.
| | 03:15 |
Note that that is a capital C.
What this does is restrict my material to
| | 03:20 |
a Preset Selection tag that we can't see
right now.
| | 03:23 |
I'm going to go ahead and apply the green
to the rounding, so drag that green
| | 03:30 |
material onto the extruded arms.
And set the selection here to capital R1,
| | 03:35 |
short for rounding one.
This is all looking very good, however
| | 03:40 |
when I rotate to the back I see that this
is not affecting the back as well.
| | 03:44 |
So, what you can do is just select both of
these extra tags that are on your object,
| | 03:49 |
hold down the Ctrl key and click and drag
to your right.
| | 03:52 |
That will make a copy of them once you
release.
| | 03:55 |
What you're then going to do is select
each one of them in turn and change the
| | 03:59 |
number 1 to 2.
Cap1 becomes Cap2 and for this selection
| | 04:04 |
R1 becomes R2.
If you're curious to know how this is
| | 04:11 |
working behind the scenes, just make the
Extrude nurbs object editable.
| | 04:15 |
And you'll notice that each of these
rounding objects has a Polygon Selection
| | 04:22 |
tag named R1, which you can double click
to select those polys.
| | 04:25 |
But you don't have to make that object
editable to take advantage of those tags.
| | 04:29 |
So, I'm just going to undo back to the
point where I've just gotten Extrude nurbs.
| | 04:33 |
For more graphic texturing jobs, you can
often get away with simply apply materials
| | 04:38 |
using Polygon Selections.
| | 04:39 |
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| Using the various material channels| 00:00 |
In this video, we're going to briefly go
over the different material channels
| | 00:03 |
available to you in Cinema 4D.
Don't worry if you don't catch everything
| | 00:07 |
the first time around.
I'll be going into more detail about each
| | 00:09 |
of these channels in future videos.
Open up the Tile Tarnish Material that you
| | 00:14 |
find in your Materials browser here.
You'll see that we have the color channel
| | 00:18 |
activated and inside of the color, I've
loaded an image of some brick that I
| | 00:22 |
photographed near my apartment.
I'm going to take my preview here and make
| | 00:26 |
it larger.
I'm going to right-click and choose Open Window.
| | 00:30 |
This is going to allow me to adjust the
size of my preview window, and I'm going
| | 00:34 |
to choose something large just so that our
demonstration's a little bit more
| | 00:37 |
interesting here.
If you want, you can also switch to a
| | 00:39 |
different object by right-clicking and
choosing for example a cube or a rounded cube.
| | 00:46 |
Or you can even try something a little
more odd or abstract like this Object with
| | 00:51 |
Soft Shadow.
Which gives us a good preview of a
| | 00:54 |
material that has got some hard edges as
well as some smooth curves.
| | 00:58 |
But, for this video I think I'm going to
stick with a Sphere.
| | 01:02 |
(SOUND).
The color channel allows you to set the
| | 01:04 |
base color for your object.
This is the color of your object without
| | 01:08 |
any lighting on it.
The diffusion channel (SOUND), allows you
| | 01:12 |
to add dirt and grime to your material.
I've loaded in a black and image of a
| | 01:17 |
scratched metal plate, and used that to
tarnish this material.
| | 01:22 |
The Luminance channel, when turned on,
will take whatever texture you have in
| | 01:26 |
there, and put it on top of your object,
as a self-lighting element.
| | 01:29 |
So the lights in your scene aren't going
to affect this.
| | 01:34 |
And using the combination of the shader,
which is something we'll talk about more
| | 01:36 |
later, and an image.
I've been able to get the edges of my
| | 01:41 |
bricks to glow like this.
Now, I'm going to turn off Luminance,
| | 01:45 |
because most materials aren't glowing like
this.
| | 01:48 |
The Transparency channel, when activated,
will make your object transparent, and the
| | 01:52 |
use of refraction can make it bend light,
as it passes through.
| | 01:55 |
But I'm going to turn transparency off, so
that we can get a better looking tile.
| | 02:00 |
The Reflection channel, allows you to
simulate reflections in your scene, and
| | 02:05 |
you can also load in a black and white
image to adjust the strength of that reflection.
| | 02:10 |
I can also modulate the overall strength
of reflection in my scene, like so.
| | 02:15 |
The Environment channel, is a lot like
reflection, except that it allows you to
| | 02:18 |
reflect an image of your choosing, as
opposed to the actual environment.
| | 02:24 |
The Fog channel, when activated, makes
your object, foggy.
| | 02:27 |
It becomes more the color you select here
based on its distance.
| | 02:32 |
(SOUND).
The Bump channel allows you to add
| | 02:35 |
scratches and surface detail to your
object, using a black and white image.
| | 02:40 |
The Normal channel is like an advanced
bump.
| | 02:43 |
And I'm not going to be getting into this
in any detail.
| | 02:45 |
But if you do some research on the
internet, it's some pretty cool stuff.
| | 02:49 |
The Alpha channel allows you to punch
holes in your material using a black and
| | 02:53 |
white image or shader.
The Specular channel, when turned on,
| | 02:58 |
creates a highlight on the surface of your
object.
| | 03:01 |
And you can modulate the strength of that
highlight using a black and white image.
| | 03:06 |
The Glow channel, when activated, will
take your object and give it a glow, very
| | 03:10 |
often using the color of your surface.
And the Displacement channel will take the
| | 03:15 |
surface of your object and move it out
along the normals of its points.
| | 03:20 |
Which allows you to create some effects
that aren't possible with bump.
| | 03:23 |
Now you don't have to use every single one
of these material channels in every single texture.
| | 03:28 |
In fact, I tried for this example, and it
looked terrible.
| | 03:31 |
For a lot of materials, you can get away
with just using color, bump, and specular.
| | 03:36 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
2. Creating Simple MaterialsCreating shiny plastic with the Specular channel| 00:00 |
The Specular channel allows you to
simulate the appearance of a light source
| | 00:04 |
reflecting on the surface of your object.
This is called a specular highlight.
| | 00:08 |
In this video we're going to be creating a
simple plastic material.
| | 00:12 |
Something like you see in this photograph
here.
| | 00:15 |
These are some images of cleaning bottles,
and you'll notice that they're all a
| | 00:18 |
variety of different colors but their
general appearance is roughly the same.
| | 00:22 |
And on each of these objects there is a
brighter white area.
| | 00:27 |
And this white area is actually a
reflection of a light source in the room,
| | 00:31 |
these are our highlights on our surface.
You'll notice that they are, at least for
| | 00:36 |
the most part, fairly broad and soft in
appearance.
| | 00:39 |
And it's the specular highlight that helps
to figure out what our surface is made of.
| | 00:43 |
Now, I want to just show you a quick
demonstration of what a specular highlight
| | 00:47 |
is and how it works.
I've got a scene with a simple sphere and
| | 00:52 |
I've given it a reflective material.
And on one side of the ball were seeing a
| | 00:57 |
specular highlight and on the other side
of the ball we're seeing an actual
| | 01:00 |
reflection of a light source.
So, the scene is fairly simple in construction.
| | 01:05 |
On the left hand side, I have a Cinema 40
light source.
| | 01:08 |
And it's casting a specular highlight on
the left side of our ball.
| | 01:11 |
And on the right hand of our scene, I've
created a luminosphere simulating an
| | 01:15 |
actual physical light source.
Sort of, like a China ball on a film set.
| | 01:19 |
And you'll notice that they look pretty
similar.
| | 01:21 |
If I turn off my actual, sort of, physical
light we'll see that we get something that
| | 01:26 |
looks like this.
There's an area of illumination as well as
| | 01:28 |
a bright area of reflection of our light
source.
| | 01:31 |
And then I'm going to turn off my Cinema
4D light and turn on instead, a reflection
| | 01:36 |
of my light source.
A blurry reflection, and we see, again,
| | 01:39 |
something very similar.
Now, our specular highlight is dependent
| | 01:42 |
on the brightness of our light source and
a number of other factors.
| | 01:45 |
But just know that the specular channel is
allowing us to simulate a reflection of a
| | 01:50 |
real light source.
So, go ahead and open up the shiny plastic
| | 01:53 |
starting scene here.
And create a new material by going to
| | 01:57 |
Create > New Material.
Now, name this material Shiny Plastic.
| | 02:01 |
And double click on it to start editing
the material.
| | 02:07 |
We get a color channel by default as well
as a specular channel.
| | 02:11 |
The specular channel is what's
contributing this highlight.
| | 02:13 |
So, if you click on the check mark next to
specular, you'll see that the specular
| | 02:16 |
highlight is disappearing.
And let's just turn it back on.
| | 02:19 |
And go to our color channel here.
I like to look at my reference images
| | 02:24 |
whenever I'm building my materials.
So, I'm going to open up that image of
| | 02:27 |
that plastic again.
And just keep it off to the side here.
| | 02:35 |
I'm going to try and match that sort of
blue turquoise bottle in the center.
| | 02:38 |
So, go ahead and open up Color.
And select a color that roughly matches.
| | 02:47 |
For myself that's an r value of 88g of 172
and b of 200.
| | 02:50 |
Next, go to the specular channel, and we
can adjust the width/height, fall off and
| | 02:59 |
inner width in order to better simulate
our reflection of our light source.
| | 03:02 |
So, let's just adjust the width here.
Now, the width parameter controls how soft
| | 03:08 |
your surface appears.
The greater the width, the more blurry the
| | 03:11 |
reflection of the light source is going to
look.
| | 03:13 |
If you want your object to appear hard,
like a, a glass or a metal, you want to
| | 03:17 |
have a fairly small width for your
highlight.
| | 03:19 |
For a plastic like this, I think we can
get away with a width of, maybe, 40%?
| | 03:24 |
Now, height is going to control the
strength of the reflection in our surface,
| | 03:28 |
so by increasing the height, we're making
our surface feel more reflective.
| | 03:32 |
Or it's also making our light source
appear brighter.
| | 03:35 |
If we lower the height, it's going to make
our surface appear less reflective.
| | 03:39 |
And what I'm going to shoot for with my
height here is something that matches that
| | 03:43 |
image pretty well, and for me that's, I
guess, a height of about 35%.
| | 03:47 |
The fall off here, allows you to control
the hardness or the appearance of the
| | 03:50 |
hardness of you light source.
By increasing this value, there is a
| | 03:56 |
harder transition between the reflection
and the surface of your object.
| | 04:01 |
A greater falloff number allows you to
more easily simulate a large area light.
| | 04:05 |
Whereas a smaller number is better for
simulating a point light source, something
| | 04:09 |
very bright like the sun perhaps.
So, I'm going to set my falloff, it may be 12%.
| | 04:14 |
And inner width here is a parameter that I
don't tend to use, but basically what it
| | 04:18 |
does is it sets the point of total
brightness in your reflection and you can
| | 04:22 |
use this to create a really hard edged
bright reflection.
| | 04:25 |
I'm going to keep that at 0%, though.
Now, let's just apply this material to our
| | 04:30 |
object and see what it look like.
I'm going to drag it onto my teapot here
| | 04:35 |
and give it a render.
And certainly we might want to do a little
| | 04:40 |
bit of tweaking but I'd say that this is a
pretty good simulation of the soft plastic material.
| | 04:44 |
Now, while the specular channel is
something of a hack in that it's
| | 04:48 |
simulation of a reflection and not an
actual reflection.
| | 04:51 |
The correct settings can create a shiny
material that renders in a fraction of the
| | 04:54 |
time it would take to render the more
realistic scene with those blurry
| | 04:57 |
reflections and visible area lights.
| | 04:59 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a mirror ball with the Reflection channel| 00:00 |
The Reflection Channel allows us to
simulate the appearance of shiny or
| | 00:04 |
reflective objects.
In this video, we're going to use the
| | 00:06 |
Reflection Channel to create a mirror
ball, or I guess you might know it as a
| | 00:10 |
disco ball.
It looks something like this.
| | 00:12 |
Now, this is a photograph, so, our results
will probably look a little bit different.
| | 00:16 |
But this will give you a sense of what
we're shooting for.
| | 00:19 |
The first step is to create a new
material.
| | 00:22 |
And I'm going to go to my Material
Manager, and go to Create > New Material,
| | 00:26 |
and I'm going to name this, mirror ball.
Next, I'm going to open up this material
| | 00:35 |
and activate Reflection, and just apply it
to my disco ball object and press Render.
| | 00:46 |
Now, it's starting to look a little bit
like a disco ball.
| | 00:49 |
It's certainly reflecting some part of the
world, we can see a reflection of our floor.
| | 00:54 |
And it's looking alright in that, that
sort of the plating that its got on it is
| | 00:57 |
doing a lot of the work for us.
But I don't know, it still looks a little,
| | 01:00 |
how do you say, ugly.
How do we go about making it look better?
| | 01:04 |
Well, the key to creating an interesting
looking reflective object, is to take your
| | 01:09 |
object and put it inside of an interesting
environment.
| | 01:12 |
Now, I've already done some work for you
in that I've created a sky object in the scene.
| | 01:16 |
And if you go into your four way view, you
can't really see it because it's
| | 01:19 |
infinitely large, but just trust there's a
big sky encompassing all of this.
| | 01:23 |
And in your Material Manager, there's a
material called hdri001, which I've pulled
| | 01:27 |
from the content browser.
Now, drag hdri001 onto your sky ball, and
| | 01:34 |
give this material another Render.
What you'll see is that we're now
| | 01:40 |
reflecting a more interesting environment,
at least in the top half of our object.
| | 01:44 |
Now, if I took my mirror ball out of this
studio environment, it might look even better.
| | 01:49 |
Now, another thing that I might want to do
is make this mirror ball look a little bit cheaper.
| | 01:54 |
At the moment, it looks like we've hired
NASA to create a perfect mirror for our
| | 01:58 |
mirror ball.
Let's go into our mirror ball texture again.
| | 02:01 |
So, I'm just going to single click on that
texture there.
| | 02:03 |
Go to the Reflection Channel and adjust
its brightness.
| | 02:06 |
I'm going to set the brightness of my
reflection to about 90%.
| | 02:10 |
So, the reflection isn't quite as strong,
and render again.
| | 02:15 |
It's a little bit more dim.
And if I want, I can further degrade the
| | 02:18 |
quality by going into that Reflection
Channel and adding what's called blurriness.
| | 02:21 |
And it does exactly what you'd think.
It takes your reflection and it makes it a
| | 02:25 |
little bit blurrier.
Now, the problem with this is that it can
| | 02:29 |
be incredibly slow.
Now, the machine I'm working on is
| | 02:32 |
actually pretty zippy, so, you won't
experience that.
| | 02:35 |
But avoid cranking up the blurriness
setting too high as that will definitely
| | 02:38 |
slow down your renders.
But looking at this material, I see that
| | 02:42 |
we've done a pretty good job of simulating
a mirror ball.
| | 02:44 |
So, in short, the Reflection Channel can
help you create realistic metals,
| | 02:48 |
plastics, and other shiny objects.
But bear in mind that reflections can
| | 02:52 |
easily double render times, and blurry
reflections can be even slower than that.
| | 02:55 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating glass using transparency and refraction| 00:00 |
In this video, we'll use the Transparency
channel and the Refraction setting to
| | 00:04 |
create a glass surface.
Let's start by creating a new material.
| | 00:07 |
Go to Create > New Material, and let's
rename this material Glass.
| | 00:14 |
Go ahead and double click to open up your
material.
| | 00:18 |
I'm going to turn off the Color channel
because this is a transparent object and
| | 00:22 |
it's getting most of its light just from
its transparency.
| | 00:25 |
I'm going to now turn on transparency by
clicking on the check mark next to transparency.
| | 00:29 |
Next, let's adjust our specular settings.
So click on the Specular channel.
| | 00:33 |
And let's just go ahead and bring down the
width because this is a hard surface.
| | 00:37 |
And increase the height.
Depending on your scene you may be able to
| | 00:42 |
turn off the specular all together.
Now let's go back to the Transparency channel.
| | 00:46 |
Inside of Transparency is a setting called
Refraction, and this is really the heart
| | 00:51 |
of any good transparent material.
Go ahead and set refraction to 1.6.
| | 00:55 |
Now you may wonder one, what is refraction
and two, where did that number come from?
| | 01:00 |
Well, I want to remind you of a really
great feature in Cinema 4D which is its
| | 01:05 |
online help.
So if you right click on any setting in
| | 01:08 |
Cinema 4D, you can choose Show Help, and
that will bring up the page in the manual.
| | 01:13 |
First, I see a list of useful refraction
values, and one of these is Glass.
| | 01:20 |
We see that glass has a refraction of
somewhere between 1.44 and 1.9.
| | 01:24 |
I just chose 1.6 because it's somewhere in
the middle.
| | 01:27 |
Now if we want, we can also take a look at
what refraction is, and there's a little
| | 01:32 |
illustration here.
Imagine this arrow is a ray of light,
| | 01:36 |
entering a spherical surface.
As it enters, it enters a surface that has
| | 01:40 |
a refraction index of 1.5, and it's being
bent.
| | 01:43 |
Now, as it exits that surface, it's being
bent again.
| | 01:47 |
And a refraction index of 1.0 is the same
as air which as far as we're concerned
| | 01:52 |
doesn't really bend the light at all.
Now back at our scene here, we've created
| | 01:59 |
a glass material.
Let's just apply it to our teapot and give
| | 02:02 |
it a render.
And what we get is something like this.
| | 02:09 |
It's looking pretty good considering the
amount of effort that we've put in.
| | 02:12 |
Now, the issues that I'm seeing are a lot
of aliasing at the tops and bottoms of my teapot.
| | 02:18 |
Basically those areas where there's a lot
of refraction sort of piling up on top of itself.
| | 02:23 |
In order to improve the look of all
transparent materials.
| | 02:26 |
What you need to do is go into your Render
settings, go to the Anti-aliasing tab and
| | 02:31 |
change anti-aliasing from Geometry to
Best.
| | 02:34 |
The default settings I believe are one by
one and four by four.
| | 02:38 |
And while that will help some, that won't
completely correct a lot of the more
| | 02:43 |
intense refraction problems.
So to correct those, instead of cranking
| | 02:47 |
up the settings for my scene as a whole.
What I'm going to do is add a compositing
| | 02:51 |
tag to my teapot.
So I'm going to select my teapot, right
| | 02:55 |
click and choose Cinema 4D Tags >
Compositing.
| | 02:59 |
Once there, I'm going to go into my Force
Anti-Aliasing setting and check that.
| | 03:05 |
The minimum is one by one and four by
four.
| | 03:07 |
I'm going to crank this up a bit to say
four by four and eight by eight.
| | 03:12 |
Now this will slow down the render of my
glass.
| | 03:15 |
But it will not slow down the render of
anything else which is quite nice.
| | 03:19 |
Now for me this might be a little bit too
slow, so you can continue to play around
| | 03:23 |
with these settings.
Now there are a couple other settings that
| | 03:26 |
I want to show you in the glass material.
One of them is something called Total
| | 03:31 |
Internal Reflections.
And what this does is it allows you to
| | 03:35 |
create effects sort of like fiber optics.
Where light can get trapped inside.
| | 03:39 |
And then there's this Exit Reflection
Setting.
| | 03:41 |
Now, both of these, if left on, give you a
more realistic glass.
| | 03:45 |
But for the purposes of say advertising,
you sometimes want to remove extraneous
| | 03:49 |
reflections and for me Exit Reflections
will do that.
| | 03:52 |
That'll just sort of just clean up the
appearance of your material.
| | 03:55 |
So I'm going to turn off Exit Reflections
and let's just do one final render.
| | 04:05 |
Now, we did have a wait a little bit
longer for this to render, and I'd say
| | 04:08 |
there are still a few anti-aliasing issues
around the area of the lid.
| | 04:11 |
But all in all, I'd say this is a pretty
solid looking glass and it doesn't take
| | 04:15 |
much effort to get a really great looking
image.
| | 04:17 |
With the correct transparency settings,
realistic glass is surprisingly easy to recreate.
| | 04:21 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding liquid to a glass using the transparency absorption settings| 00:00 |
Accurately creating the look of liquid
inside of a transparent container, is a
| | 00:04 |
common challenge.
Let's tackle it.
| | 00:06 |
So, the goal of this video is to create
something like this image that we see here.
| | 00:10 |
Now, this is a photograph of a glass
teapot with some tea inside of it.
| | 00:13 |
Now, our teapot looks a little bit
different, but the principles for creating
| | 00:16 |
something like this are the same.
Now in my Cinema 4D Scene, I have a teapot
| | 00:22 |
model, and inside of there, you'll see a
HyperNURBS object that says TeaPot.
| | 00:27 |
Inside of there, another polygon object
that's the teapot model itself.
| | 00:30 |
I'm going to just temporarily turn off my
interactive render region, and I'm
| | 00:34 |
going to go into my front view.
So I can see what's going on here.
| | 00:39 |
I've just tapped the H key on my keyboard
to frame this up, and if you type the O
| | 00:42 |
key you can frame the models specifically.
Now, what I have here is my tea pot model
| | 00:47 |
and inside of it I've got a liquid model.
Now I'm going to hide that so you can see
| | 00:52 |
actually what's going on here and unhide
it again.
| | 00:54 |
So what I've done is taken the polygons
that make up the surface of my teapot and
| | 00:59 |
sort of sliced them and added a top to
them.
| | 01:01 |
Now the real key point here whenever
you're creating a liquid is for it to
| | 01:06 |
interact a little bit with the glass
volume itself.
| | 01:08 |
So it actually intersects with the glass.
Here it is with the liquid, and without.
| | 01:13 |
So you'll see it's at the edge interacting
ever so slightly.
| | 01:16 |
And that overlap is what allows you to get
that really nice clean line of the liquid
| | 01:21 |
extending all the way to the edge of your
frame.
| | 01:23 |
Now, another thing to keep in mind is
that, whenever you're modeling the liquid,
| | 01:26 |
you do not want the polygons to sit in the
exact same position as the glass surface.
| | 01:31 |
Because you'll get these black artifacts
in your render.
| | 01:33 |
So if you ever see weird artifacts in
transparency, could be you have
| | 01:36 |
overlapping polygons.
Now let's go on to how to create a liquid.
| | 01:40 |
I'm going to start by creating a New
Transparent material, and call this
| | 01:44 |
material Tea, tea.
I'm going to turn off Color and Specular
| | 01:50 |
and turn on Transparency.
Now, we're going to set the refraction
| | 01:53 |
index to 1.3.
If you'll recall in the last video we used 1.6.
| | 01:57 |
So, we're using a different refraction
index to make this material look different.
| | 02:00 |
And 1.3 is roughly the refraction index of
water, and I assume the refraction index
| | 02:06 |
of t is something pretty similar.
Now, let's just apply this material to our
| | 02:11 |
liquid object, and take a preview render.
And for this I'm going to turn on my
| | 02:15 |
Interactive Render region and render just
a sliver of my scene.
| | 02:22 |
And we can see that's a little hard to
make out, but there's a slight line now
| | 02:26 |
for our liquid.
I'll go over to the edge where there's
| | 02:28 |
perhaps a little more difference in
shading.
| | 02:31 |
I can now see that my teapot looks like it
is filled with water which is pretty
| | 02:35 |
accurate considering the refraction index
here.
| | 02:38 |
Now, in order to create a material like
tea, we going to have to use something
| | 02:42 |
called Absorption.
Now, I am going to take another look at
| | 02:45 |
the image in my picture viewer.
And what I want to point out to you, is
| | 02:49 |
that at the center of our tea, it is a
really rich color and towards the edges
| | 02:54 |
it's becoming darker.
That's in part because of the environment
| | 02:57 |
it's reflecting.
But, you'll also notice that there are
| | 03:00 |
certain parts in here where the tea is
thinner and the color is lighter.
| | 03:05 |
And as the tea thickens, as there's more
tea in our image, it gets a little darker.
| | 03:10 |
So, what we're going to do is adjust some
properties of our tea here.
| | 03:14 |
So, first I'm just going to change the
overall Color of my liquid.
| | 03:17 |
So, I'm going to click on the Transparency
Color and let's just pick a maybe a light yellow.
| | 03:23 |
So, for R I'm going to type in 255, for G,
208 and for B, I'm going to chose 154.
| | 03:32 |
And that gives me this sort of light
yellow.
| | 03:34 |
Now rendering this, we'll see that we're
already closer in appearance to the look
| | 03:41 |
of tea.
The only thing that we're missing now is
| | 03:44 |
this absorption color.
So the absorption color is the color it's
| | 03:47 |
going to be at it's darkest.
So I'm going to take this absorption
| | 03:49 |
color, and I want to make this maybe more
of a red.
| | 03:51 |
So I'm going to choose 223 for red 42 for
green and 28 for blue, and just choose OK.
| | 03:57 |
And what we now see is that in the thicker
regions, we get a little bit of a reddish hue.
| | 04:02 |
And the absorption distance here controls
how quickly that red hue takes over.
| | 04:06 |
So, if I was to set this to a lower
number, like say one, the material become
| | 04:11 |
dark once we get one centimeter into the
surface.
| | 04:14 |
If I increase it to something like 10 or
12, it's going to be 10 centimeters into
| | 04:18 |
the surface, before this red color starts
to take over darkening our overall transparency.
| | 04:23 |
I'm just going to do a full frame render.
And take a look at this.
| | 04:30 |
Liquids in glass are a common request in
product rendering.
| | 04:33 |
Now, remember to model the liquid as
slightly larger than the interior profile
| | 04:37 |
of its container to avoid render
artifacts.
| | 04:39 |
And adjust the Absorption settings in
order to create a darkening of the liquid,
| | 04:43 |
the thicker it gets.
| | 04:44 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating terra-cotta using the Oren-Nayar model in the Illumination channel| 00:00 |
The Cinema 4D material defaults are a good
starting place for a lot of different
| | 00:03 |
surface types, however, they really start
to breakdown when you're trying to
| | 00:06 |
simulate a rough surface.
In this video, we're going to go ahead and
| | 00:09 |
create a terracotta material.
And to do that, I'm going to start by
| | 00:12 |
creating a new material.
I'm going to name it terracotta and I'm
| | 00:18 |
going to apply it to my teapot.
Also, I'm going to turn on my Interactive
| | 00:23 |
Render Region, which I can access by
pulling down this menu or by hitting
| | 00:28 |
option R on my keyboard or Alt+R on a PC.
So right now we're getting a material that
| | 00:34 |
looks perhaps like plastic or maybe a
porcelain with a high sheen.
| | 00:38 |
But what I want is terracotta, which is a
sort of a baked clay which is very rough
| | 00:42 |
in appearance.
So let's open up the material and start by
| | 00:45 |
getting the color a little bit closer.
So in the color channel, I'm going to play
| | 00:49 |
around with these colors until I get
something I like the look of.
| | 00:53 |
So a reddish brown, maybe a little
desaturated, and some values that I found
| | 00:59 |
pretty accurate in a previous attempt were
2, 4,2 ,1,1 ,7 and 75 for B.
| | 01:09 |
Now already, I'm getting something a
little closer but this specular highlight
| | 01:13 |
is making the object appear plastic.
So I'm going to disable specular.
| | 01:18 |
We're already significantly closer, but I
want to tweak something which is called
| | 01:22 |
the Illumination model and to get to it I
need to click on the Illumination tab and
| | 01:26 |
select model here.
And right now it defaults to Blinn, which
| | 01:29 |
is the name of the mathematician or
perhaps computer graphics scientist who
| | 01:34 |
named this shading model.
Orn and Ayer was a couple of folks who
| | 01:38 |
created another model.
So let's select Orn and Ayer and take a
| | 01:40 |
look at the difference here.
You'll immediately see in our texture
| | 01:45 |
preview ball, that he shading seems a
little bit more flat and that's due to the
| | 01:49 |
roughness of our surface.
This roughness property allows us to
| | 01:53 |
create the effect of a really rough
surface.
| | 01:56 |
And I believe it was originally created in
order to better simulate the appearance of
| | 01:59 |
something like the moon.
So let's change the roughness here from
| | 02:02 |
50% too 100%, to see what this is doing at
full strength.
| | 02:08 |
Looking good.
Now, I'm just going to do a final render.
| | 02:11 |
While Cinema 40 provides us with some
pretty good default settings, remember to
| | 02:17 |
switch over to the Oren-Nayer model
whenever you're trying to create a rough,
| | 02:20 |
diffuse surface.
Stick with (UNKNOWN) Phong if you're
| | 02:22 |
trying for plastics and metals.
| | 02:24 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
3. Working with ShadersCreating a colorful background using the Gradient shader| 00:00 |
The gradient shader allows us to create
smooth transitions between an arbitrary
| | 00:04 |
selection of colors.
This is useful in creating everything from
| | 00:07 |
the sky to a particular sort of car paint.
In this video we're going to create a sky
| | 00:12 |
material, a striped background as well as
an all purpose lighting gradient that will
| | 00:17 |
allow you to create more beautiful
transparent objects.
| | 00:21 |
Let's start by creating a new material.
Name this material Sky, and open up the
| | 00:26 |
material by double clicking on the
material preview ball.
| | 00:30 |
Let's go to the color channel and load in
a gradient.
| | 00:33 |
You do that by clicking on the triangle
next to where it says texture, and
| | 00:36 |
choosing gradient.
Next, let's edit this gradient by single
| | 00:41 |
clicking on the color preview there.
You can adjust the type of your gradient
| | 00:45 |
from 2DU which is a horizontal gradient to
2DV which gives you a vertical gradient
| | 00:50 |
like this.
Let's go ahead and apply this material to
| | 00:53 |
our sky object just click and drag the
material in your material editor to your
| | 00:57 |
sky object and release.
Now let's give it a render.
| | 00:59 |
What you may notice is that you don't
really see much in the way of a gradient
| | 01:04 |
and that's because our sky is an
incredibly large object.
| | 01:08 |
It is encompassing our entire scene.
That's why I'll sometimes add a sphere to
| | 01:12 |
my scene underneath my sky object and I'll
name it preview sphere.
| | 01:16 |
This allows me to turn on or off a preview
of my gradient on my sphere right here.
| | 01:23 |
So when I render, I can see the full look
of my gradient on this surface.
| | 01:29 |
Let's go ahead and play around with some
of these colors.
| | 01:31 |
First up, I'm going to drag this black
knot towards the middle of my gradient.
| | 01:37 |
Next, I'm going to take this white knot
and drag it over next to the black knot.
| | 01:41 |
I now have a black and white stripe like
so.
| | 01:43 |
I am going to double click on the white
dot to open up my color picker and I am
| | 01:47 |
going to choose a light blue.
I am trying to create a sky material and
| | 01:51 |
they typically go from a light blue, to a
darker blue at the top.
| | 01:56 |
To add a new knot, I can just click below
the gradient here and it will add a new color.
| | 02:01 |
And I can double click on that color to
adjust it.
| | 02:04 |
I'm going to shift it a little bit more
towards purple.
| | 02:06 |
And I'm going to darken it signifigantly.
Then I'm going to choose OK.
| | 02:09 |
I now have a transition from the lighter
color to a darker color.
| | 02:13 |
And this material is on my sky.
So if I render now, I've got a better
| | 02:18 |
looking sky gradient.
And if I turn off my previous sphere, I
| | 02:21 |
can see this in my actual sky.
Now, it doesn't look like much at the
| | 02:25 |
moment, but, if I had a reflective object
in here, we'd definitely be seeing
| | 02:29 |
something a little more interesting.
Next, let's create a new material, and I'm
| | 02:32 |
going to call this one striped background.
I'm going to double click on this material
| | 02:37 |
to open it, and, in the color channel
again.
| | 02:40 |
I'm going to choose the triangle next to
texture N gradient to add a gradient
| | 02:43 |
shader, I'm going to open up my gradient
shader and I'm going to change the type
| | 02:47 |
from 2DU to box.
And what this gives me is a shade of it
| | 02:52 |
looks a little like this.
Now if I click on this triangle next to
| | 02:55 |
gradient, I can adjust the interpolation
between my points.
| | 03:00 |
It's currently set to smooth knot But if I
set this to none there will be no
| | 03:06 |
transition between my points right here.
So if I want I can drag this white all the
| | 03:13 |
way over to the middle here.
Set position to 50% and now I have a white
| | 03:18 |
stripe with a black box in the center and
if I apply this to my background object
| | 03:25 |
and render.
I still see my sky.
| | 03:27 |
And so I'm going to hide my sky by double
clicking on the two dots next to it to
| | 03:31 |
hide it in the editor and the renderer and
I'm going to render again.
| | 03:34 |
And I now see this black and white stripe.
Now if I want more stripes, I could just
| | 03:40 |
click and add more, or I could right click
on this area just below the gradient and
| | 03:44 |
choose double knots.
And that's going to duplicate all of my
| | 03:49 |
gradient, knots again.
I'm going to get something like this.
| | 03:51 |
If I want it to be even more dense, I can
right click and double knots again, so now
| | 03:57 |
when I render, I get this nice striped
pattern.
| | 04:00 |
Which will be great for an abstract video
background.
| | 04:03 |
Now, last but not least, I'd like to show
you another type of gradient that's pretty
| | 04:06 |
commonly used.
And I'm going to do that by creating a new material.
| | 04:10 |
I'm going to turn off the color channel as
well as the specular channel.
| | 04:15 |
And I'm going to turn on luminance.
I'm not going to add a gradient shader to
| | 04:20 |
this luminance channel.
And I'm going to change the property of my
| | 04:24 |
gradient, I'm going to change it's type
from 2DU to 2D circular.
| | 04:29 |
And what I now see is that I've got a
gradient going from black in the center to
| | 04:32 |
white on the edges.
I want it to be the opposite of that.
| | 04:35 |
So, I'm going to right click in this area
between my knots and chose Invert Knots
| | 04:40 |
which will flip them backwards.
And now I have what it looks like a
| | 04:43 |
vignette effect.
I can close my material editor, and apply
| | 04:48 |
this to my background and render again.
I now have this beautiful vignette.
| | 04:52 |
And if I want, I can add in say a
transparent object, like the teapot that I
| | 04:56 |
already have hidden in my scene and render
again.
| | 05:00 |
And we'll see that we get this really
great looking render without almost any
| | 05:04 |
effort whatsoever.
The infinite resolution of shaders makes
| | 05:07 |
them excellent for texturing large objects
and backgrounds.
| | 05:09 |
The gradient shaders many different modes
make it versatile and it will likely find
| | 05:14 |
its way into every one of your cinema 40
projects.
| | 05:16 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a more realistic plastic with the Fresnel shader| 00:00 |
Materials aren't equally reflective from
all angles.
| | 00:03 |
The Fresnel shader allows you to create
more intense reflections at the edges of
| | 00:07 |
your objects than in the middle.
In this video, we're going to try and
| | 00:10 |
create a more realistic plastic.
One where the edges are more reflective
| | 00:14 |
than the center.
Let's take a look at our reference image here.
| | 00:17 |
You can see that this is a harder plastic
than the one that we created earlier.
| | 00:20 |
On the edges, we definitely see more
reflection of the white environment as
| | 00:24 |
opposed to say at the middle of our salad
bowl here which is pretty diffuse.
| | 00:27 |
So, let's create a new material.
And I'm going to call this plastic for now.
| | 00:34 |
And I'm going to double click on this
material to edit it.
| | 00:38 |
Let's start by picking a color.
I'm going to go with a medium green here.
| | 00:44 |
My RGB values are 134, 175, 92.
But it's alright if yours are different.
| | 00:50 |
Next, I'm going to go ahead and activate
the Reflection Channel, which turns on
| | 00:54 |
reflection for my object.
If I bring the brightness of my reflection
| | 00:57 |
down to say 50% and apply this material to
my teapot and Render, I get something that
| | 01:05 |
looks pretty good, but it looks more like
glass or metal than it does like plastic.
| | 01:11 |
So, there's some changes we have to make.
I'm going to click on my texture here, and
| | 01:16 |
the triangle next to that and choose
Fresnel.
| | 01:18 |
What you will see is a thing that looks a
lot like a gradient.
| | 01:21 |
But what you will notice is that in your
texture preview here, our reflections have
| | 01:25 |
drastically changed.
They are much brighter on the edges than
| | 01:28 |
they are in the middle.
And if you click on the texture here, what
| | 01:31 |
we'll see is this black and white
gradient.
| | 01:34 |
I am going to change my preview from this
flat 2D to a sphere, and I do that by
| | 01:39 |
right clicking and choosing Sphere.
And what you'll find is that the color of
| | 01:44 |
my gradient is based on whether or not a
polygon is facing my camera.
| | 01:48 |
The polygons that are facing the most away
are white, where as those that are facing
| | 01:52 |
the closet to the camera are black.
We can adjust this, we could say have our
| | 01:58 |
gradient go from white, which is totally
reflective at one end, to a medium grey,
| | 02:03 |
which is half-reflective in the center.
And we can play around with this for quite
| | 02:07 |
some time.
But if we're trying to get a realistic
| | 02:09 |
appearance, we can use a physical model,
by turning on Physical.
| | 02:13 |
And adjust the index of refraction value
to one that matches the composition of the
| | 02:18 |
material we're trying to re-create.
And plastic has a refraction index of
| | 02:21 |
about 1.5 or so.
And even though plastic is not necessarily
| | 02:27 |
transparent, it does still have this
refraction index.
| | 02:31 |
And if you're curious to know what some of
these other values are, you can just click
| | 02:35 |
on the preset here and select the one
that's most appropriate.
| | 02:38 |
Or if you want you can right click on IOR
and choose show help, and you'll probably
| | 02:41 |
get a table with more specific values.
Now, this is looking pretty good.
| | 02:46 |
I'm going to take another look at my
teapot and Render again.
| | 02:49 |
I now see that it is more reflective on
the edges than in the center, and overall
| | 02:53 |
looking pretty good.
I might want to add in a little bit of
| | 02:56 |
transparency like we saw on the other.
So, I might turn on transparency and set
| | 03:01 |
that to maybe 20%.
And if I want, I could also add some
| | 03:05 |
blurriness to my reflection and just keep
tweaking until I get something that I
| | 03:08 |
really like.
But the key point here is that the Fresnel
| | 03:10 |
shader is a simple way to add some realism
to the reflection of your materials.
| | 03:14 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a brass material using the Noise shader in the Bump channel| 00:00 |
Not all surfaces are perfectly smooth.
In fact, very few are.
| | 00:04 |
The Bump channel allows us to add the
appearance of surface imperfection without
| | 00:08 |
having to model in all of those details.
In this video, we're going to try to
| | 00:12 |
create a scratched brass material.
Here are some reference images.
| | 00:17 |
As you can see, our reflection is being
broken up by the surface imperfection.
| | 00:21 |
Some look like scratches that are heading
in a very specific direction, and then
| | 00:24 |
there are these larger just sort of
general bumps.
| | 00:27 |
We're going to focus on re-creating those
linear scratches.
| | 00:31 |
I've taken the liberty of creating a
simple brass material as our starting
| | 00:34 |
point, which we're going to add some bump
to.
| | 00:36 |
Go ahead and open this brass material.
Navigate to the Bump channel and turn it on.
| | 00:43 |
In the texture pull down, select Noise.
And what we're going to see almost
| | 00:51 |
immediately is a bumpiness take over our
service, almost sort of a cellular look.
| | 00:56 |
Now, if we open up this material, we can
take a look at what's causing this.
| | 01:01 |
We see that we get a black and white
image, that looks kind of like film grain
| | 01:05 |
that's been blurred out.
This is a standard noise type.
| | 01:07 |
The white values here are pushing our
surface outward and the black values are
| | 01:12 |
pushing it inward, or at least that's the
appearance that it's creating.
| | 01:16 |
If you look at the silhouette of your
object you'll notice that it's still
| | 01:18 |
perfectly smooth.
So, bump is a simulation of this added
| | 01:22 |
surface detail, but it doesn't actually
add it.
| | 01:24 |
So, depending on your needs, you may have
to go with displacement.
| | 01:28 |
To adjust this Noise shader, there are a
number of different parameters.
| | 01:31 |
The global scale will increase its size,
and the low clip and high clip values will
| | 01:36 |
allow you to create some very specific
effects.
| | 01:39 |
I want the top part of my surface to be
mostly flat.
| | 01:42 |
So, I'm going to take my high clip value
and I'm going to bring it towards the left.
| | 01:47 |
What this does is create large regions
where the surface is perfectly smooth,
| | 01:52 |
while there are still some smaller
regions, these black areas that have been
| | 01:56 |
dug out.
The lower you drag this high clip value,
| | 01:59 |
the fewer and farther between those black
regions are.
| | 02:03 |
So, the number of scratches you have is in
part determined by this high clip setting.
| | 02:08 |
If you want to make sure that all of these
scratches go to a specific depth and stop
| | 02:11 |
there, you can adjust the low clip
setting.
| | 02:13 |
But I like the fact that these are
going to all have a variable depth.
| | 02:16 |
Next, we can adjust the relative scale of
our noise on different dimensions.
| | 02:20 |
We see three fields here and they
represent x, y, and z scale.
| | 02:24 |
I'm going to lower my y scale to 10%, and
what this is doing is bringing these
| | 02:30 |
scratches down in size.
And I'm going to increase the size on x
| | 02:35 |
and z to 200, and this is going to give me
much longer scratches.
| | 02:41 |
I now see these long scratches going
across the surface of my object, but there
| | 02:45 |
are not that many of them.
So, I can come in here and adjust this
| | 02:47 |
high clip setting to adjust the overall
number.
| | 02:51 |
If I want to take all of this and make it
significantly denser, I can go into my
| | 02:55 |
Global Scale parameter and scale that
down.
| | 02:57 |
I think I can get away with just setting
the Global Scale here to 50%.
| | 03:01 |
This is looking pretty good, but I have a
feeling I'm not going to know how this
| | 03:04 |
really looks until I render it out at full
resolution.
| | 03:08 |
But what I will notice already is that I'm
getting some anti-aliasing issues.
| | 03:11 |
And that happens anytime you've got a
drastic change from one color to another
| | 03:15 |
within a pixel.
So, let's go into our render settings, go
| | 03:18 |
to our Anti-aliasing tab and ensure that
we've got Best Anti-aliasing turned on.
| | 03:24 |
And perhaps up the level here from two by
two to eight by eight.
| | 03:30 |
I'm now going to press my middle Render
button and take a look at how this looks.
| | 03:35 |
Well, this may not be a one for one match
for our reference material, I'd say we're
| | 03:39 |
off to a pretty good start.
So, remember, the Bump channel allows us
| | 03:43 |
to add rough surface detail to our
materials, but it needs a black and white image.
| | 03:47 |
The Noise shader is a really great way to
easily generate a black and white image
| | 03:52 |
for your Bump channel.
| | 03:53 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding grunge to paint using the Noise shader in the Diffusion channel| 00:00 |
The diffusion channel allows you to add
grunge to the appearance of your materials.
| | 00:05 |
When combined with a well-selected noise
shader, you can strip your materials of
| | 00:08 |
some of their perfection, and make them
look like they've spent some hard time in
| | 00:11 |
the real world.
In this scene, we have a teapot that I've
| | 00:15 |
applied a basic paint texture to.
It's got a little bit of noise in the bump
| | 00:18 |
channel, to give us some of the surface
depth that you'll sometimes see when
| | 00:22 |
you're painting on a wall.
But, it looks like no-one has ever
| | 00:25 |
interacted with it, so let's go ahead and
open up our material, and activate the
| | 00:29 |
diffusion channel.
The diffusion channel takes a black and
| | 00:34 |
white image as it's input.
So, in the texture channel, I'm going to
| | 00:37 |
click on the triangle, and load my Noise
shader.
| | 00:41 |
So what you'll see is that, pretty
quickly, we're already adjusting the
| | 00:44 |
overall brightness, and darkness of our
texture.
| | 00:47 |
Let's go ahead, and turn on our
interactive render region to get a more
| | 00:50 |
realistic preview, and what I'm seeing, is
this.
| | 00:54 |
It looks all right, but it's a little
general.
| | 00:56 |
Also, it's a little difficult for me to
make out the dirt, just so I can adjust it.
| | 01:00 |
So let's take our mix strength here, and
crank that all the way up to 100%.
| | 01:04 |
And what you'll see is that, wherever
there is blackness coming from our
| | 01:09 |
diffusion, there's no specular highlight.
And that's because we have effects
| | 01:13 |
specular turned on in diffusion.
So it's basically darkening the color of
| | 01:17 |
our texture, as well as turning off any
specular highlights where there's black.
| | 01:20 |
The same for Affect Reflection.
Let's go into this Noise shader and pick a
| | 01:25 |
different type of noise.
So click on your Noise shader and click on
| | 01:29 |
this triangle to the right.
And what you'll see is a quick preview of
| | 01:32 |
a bunch of different noise types.
Now, I normally just sort of come in here
| | 01:36 |
and eyeball it.
But, I've already built this material, and
| | 01:39 |
I know that I liked Luka the last time
that I did so.
| | 01:42 |
So I'm going to select that here, and what
we're now going to see, is what the Luka
| | 01:46 |
shader looks like.
It kind of looks like a weather pattern of
| | 01:49 |
a sort, all swirling and dark.
Now, if we adjust the overall scale of
| | 01:53 |
this material, we can make it larger, so
the Global Scale, for example, I could set
| | 01:57 |
to, say, 200.
And now I'm dealing with something larger,
| | 02:01 |
but I would also like to make my material
seem streaked vertically.
| | 02:06 |
Like, maybe it's been rained on or people
have run their fingers down through the surface.
| | 02:10 |
So, I'm going to bring down the Relative
Scale on x and z.
| | 02:13 |
I'll set those both to 50%.
And now we're going to see a little bit
| | 02:19 |
more up down streaking but, oddly I don't
see any of those, I don't know, finger
| | 02:24 |
drags like I'd like to see.
And that's because I'm currently using
| | 02:28 |
what's called a 3D noise.
And it's generated in 3D space and if we
| | 02:31 |
were to move our object it would sort of
be cutting through this viscus cloud and
| | 02:36 |
what I would rather have is a two
dimensional noise that's getting painted
| | 02:40 |
onto the surface of my object.
So, I'm going to change the space here
| | 02:42 |
from texture to UV(2D).
And what I'll now see is something like this.
| | 02:48 |
A texture that's following the form of my
object.
| | 02:53 |
Let's say we are off too a pretty good
start here, just playing around with a
| | 02:56 |
contrast settings will allow me to further
enhance this.
| | 02:59 |
By increasing the contrast we are creating
a regions where there are definite marks
| | 03:03 |
on our paint.
You can also adjust the low and high clip
| | 03:06 |
to ensure there darkness, but I would say
this is all right.
| | 03:09 |
In fact, I would say that if I saw while
this ugly, I would run in the opposite direction.
| | 03:14 |
So, let's go into the diffusion channel.
And lower the mix strength here, to
| | 03:18 |
something a little more reasonable.
I'm going to set it down to 20%, and see
| | 03:21 |
what that looks like.
Much better, it's really pretty subtle,
| | 03:25 |
you almost can't see it.
And that's the goal.
| | 03:28 |
You want it to suddenly add to the realism
of your image, you don't want it to
| | 03:32 |
distract from your subject.
So, again, this is it without, and this is
| | 03:37 |
it with.
The diffusion channel allows you to
| | 03:39 |
control the color specularity, luminance
and reflectivity of a material with a
| | 03:44 |
single image or shader.
If you find your surfaces are looking just
| | 03:47 |
too clean, add a little grunge with the
diffusion channel.
| | 03:49 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
4. Working with TexturesMapping an image onto a video screen using the Luminance channel| 00:00 |
You've (UNKNOWN) seen an image like this
many times before.
| | 00:03 |
In motion graphics, this is called a Video
Wall.
| | 00:06 |
In this video, we will create a plain and
put some footage, apply to our object and
| | 00:10 |
enter that we don't distort it.
We'll also use the Luminance channel to
| | 00:13 |
simulate a self illuminating object like a
television screen.
| | 00:16 |
Let's start by creating a new material.
I'm going to call this screen, and double
| | 00:24 |
click on the material to open it up.
Now, up until now, we've been pretty much
| | 00:29 |
just using the Color channel.
I'm going to turn off the Color channel
| | 00:32 |
and this time use the Luminance channel.
The Luminance channel functions very
| | 00:36 |
similarly to the color channel, in that it
allows you to pick a color and that's the
| | 00:39 |
color your object becomes.
Except the Luminance channel is no longer
| | 00:43 |
affected by the lights in your scene.
Luminance objects are well, Luminance.
| | 00:47 |
They light themselves up, and if you have
global illumination turned on in your
| | 00:51 |
scene, they also light up the objects
around them.
| | 00:54 |
Which is why we are using the Luminance
channel to create a video screen.
| | 00:58 |
To load in a texture, in this case an
image, we are going to click on these
| | 01:01 |
three dots next to word says texture.
And then I'm going to navigate in my
| | 01:07 |
examples folder, to my video screen
folder, and inside of there, the tex folder.
| | 01:13 |
Which is short for texture, and it's where
CINEMA 4D looks by default for all of your textures.
| | 01:17 |
I'm going to select the television screen
content image and choose Open.
| | 01:23 |
We'll see that the image shows up on this
luminous sphere right here.
| | 01:27 |
Now, I could just put this on any old
object, and let's try that.
| | 01:31 |
Let's add a cube to our scene and apply
our screen to that cube.
| | 01:36 |
And what you'll hopefully notice is that
our image is distorted.
| | 01:40 |
And what's happening is we're taking our
rectangular image and mapping it onto a
| | 01:45 |
square cube, and it's distorting our
image.
| | 01:47 |
So, a cube is not a good candidate for
this.
| | 01:50 |
Instead, what we're going to use is a
plane.
| | 01:53 |
So, go ahead and add a plane object to
your scene.
| | 01:55 |
And my general rule is to adjust the plane
settings so that it matches the settings
| | 02:01 |
of my image.
So, click on the attributes tab.
| | 02:04 |
And I'm going to adjust the width to 1920
to match the width resolution of my image.
| | 02:09 |
And I'm going to set the height to 1080.
I'm also going to adjust the orientation
| | 02:15 |
to minus z.
Now, by default, there are way too many
| | 02:19 |
segments on a plane like this.
And you do need some segments for good
| | 02:23 |
preview shading, but you don't really need
20.
| | 02:26 |
So, I'm going to cut this down may be four
for width and three for height.
| | 02:30 |
And next, I am going to apply my screen to
this object.
| | 02:35 |
And if I tap the H key on my keyboard, it
will frame my entire scene, and I can now
| | 02:40 |
render this video frame.
And you'll notice that we get something
| | 02:44 |
like this.
And what we're seeing is our luminous
| | 02:46 |
plane lighting up a sphere that we don't
see in our scene.
| | 02:49 |
Well, that sphere actually exists inside
one of our hidden layers.
| | 02:53 |
So, go into the Layers tab here, and turn
on Object Manager for both of these
| | 02:58 |
layers, and turn on the visibility as
well.
| | 03:02 |
I'm now also going to have us look through
a different camera.
| | 03:05 |
So, go to Cameras > Use Camera and change
to the Camera object.
| | 03:11 |
Inside of here, we're looking into a scene
that I've pre-built with a television screen.
| | 03:16 |
Let's just take our plane and scale our
model down so that it fits inside.
| | 03:22 |
Because I'm scaling without grabbing my
handles, I'm getting a nice uniform scaling.
| | 03:26 |
So, it's going to fit very neatly inside
of the frame that I've built for it.
| | 03:31 |
And let's render our final scene here.
Notice that the global illumination is
| | 03:35 |
taking this lighting information from our
screen and using it to light the floor.
| | 03:39 |
And it's even showing up a little bit in
some of the reflections on this black
| | 03:43 |
television frame.
The Luminance channel allows you to create
| | 03:46 |
self lighting or luminous objects.
When carefully combined with other
| | 03:50 |
channels, you can create a video screen.
| | 03:52 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a stenciled graphic with the Alpha channel| 00:00 |
Layering semi-transparent images can allow
you to create a complex final result that
| | 00:04 |
is greater than the sum of its parts.
The same is true of materials.
| | 00:08 |
In this video, you'll use the alpha
channel to create a stenciled graphic that
| | 00:12 |
you can layer on top of another material.
To start, I'm going to show you the image
| | 00:15 |
we're going to be working with.
I've got it open in Photoshop here.
| | 00:19 |
It's a logo for a fictitious company
called KinetECO, and we've got the primary
| | 00:23 |
colors of the logo on the background
layer.
| | 00:25 |
And if we go to the Channels tab, we'll
see that we have a Red, Green, and Blue
| | 00:30 |
channel as well as something called an
Alpha channel.
| | 00:33 |
The Alpha channel is white wherever our
texture is going to be opaque.
| | 00:37 |
And it's black wherever it's going to be
transparent.
| | 00:40 |
If you want to save out an alpha channel
for an image and you don't have one yet.
| | 00:43 |
Just make a selection in Photoshop, then
go to your Channels tab and click on this
| | 00:49 |
icon here, which will add an Alpha channel
you can work with.
| | 00:52 |
I'm going to go ahead and save my image
now and head back into Cinema 4D.
| | 00:57 |
Now in Cinema 4D, I want to create a new
material.
| | 01:00 |
So I start by creating a new material and
I'm going to call this Kineteco Logo and
| | 01:04 |
I'm going to open that up.
Now in the Color channel I want to load in
| | 01:12 |
that image.
So go to Color and click on those three dots.
| | 01:15 |
Go to your Texture folder and grab
kinetECO Alpha_Still.
| | 01:18 |
And choose Open.
You'll notice the resolution is 1280x720
| | 01:23 |
and the plane that I've created for us to
map this onto has the same aspect ratio.
| | 01:30 |
If we were to apply this material to our
plane in the objects manager and render,
| | 01:34 |
what we would see is this.
Our Kineteco logo with its black
| | 01:37 |
background still intact.
What we want to do is punch that
| | 01:40 |
background out.
Now to do that, we're going to need to
| | 01:42 |
load our same image into the alpha
channel.
| | 01:45 |
We can do that by going to those three
dots again.
| | 01:47 |
Or we can copy our texture from one
channel to another, which is what we're
| | 01:51 |
going to do.
Click on the triangle next to where it
| | 01:53 |
says texture, and choose Copy Channel.
This is loading this image into memory.
| | 01:58 |
We're now going to go to the alpha
channel, turn that on.
| | 02:02 |
And click on the texture triangle there.
Next choose paste channel and it's
| | 02:07 |
going to load in that image, so now when
we render, we this is.
| | 02:12 |
Our kineteco logo is showing up with no
black edges.
| | 02:17 |
Now if we want we can also turn off our
Specular channel to get rid of that
| | 02:21 |
highlight that is washing out our image.
If we want, we can also go with one of
| | 02:25 |
those selections that we saved earlier in
Photoshop.
| | 02:27 |
So if you click on your texture here, you
can choose a different Layer set.
| | 02:32 |
So where it says Layer Set here, choose
Select, and it's going to allow me to
| | 02:36 |
choose from my alpha channels.
And I'm going to select alpha2, which was
| | 02:41 |
just sort of an arbitrary rectangle that
selected.
| | 02:44 |
And if I want, I can turn on Show Layer
Content.
| | 02:46 |
It will show me what those look like.
Now I'm going to choose OK.
| | 02:50 |
And when I render, I now see that my
selection has been kept from Photoshop.
| | 02:55 |
Now, because it was arbitray it doesn't
make a lot of sense what we're seeing here.
| | 02:58 |
So I might in fact just switch back to
alpha1 by going to Layer Set > Select,
| | 03:03 |
Alpha 1.
Let's render one more time and yep,
| | 03:09 |
everything is back to the way it should
be.
| | 03:11 |
If we want, we can also layer our
textures.
| | 03:14 |
So let's just create a simple purple
material.
| | 03:16 |
Go to Create > New Material, I'm going to
call it purple.
| | 03:21 |
And in the Color channel, I'm going to
change its color.
| | 03:23 |
I'm going to select light purple, and I'm
going to apply this same material to our
| | 03:32 |
plane in the objects manager.
Now notice that it has completely
| | 03:36 |
overwritten the logo that's below it.
So in order to still see our logo, we have
| | 03:41 |
to drag our logo material to the
right-hand side of our purple texture tag there.
| | 03:47 |
So now when we render, we see these two
textures layered on top of each-other.
| | 03:50 |
The easiest way to create a sensitive
graphic is to save it out of an
| | 03:53 |
image-editing program like Photoshop with
a transparent background.
| | 03:58 |
But you can also use the luminance channel
of any image or shader as an alpha channel.
| | 04:02 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a simple chrome material using an HDRI image in the Environment channel| 00:00 |
Some of the most reflective materials you
see in computer graphics aren't actually reflective.
| | 00:04 |
They are using something called an
Environment Map.
| | 00:06 |
In this video, we will learn how to use an
Environment Map to create a classic
| | 00:10 |
illustrated chrome look.
In this scene, we've got a simple teapot
| | 00:13 |
in an empty environment.
So when I render, all I'm seeing is this
| | 00:16 |
sort of simple gray version of my teapot.
Now if I was to create a new material and
| | 00:22 |
make that material 100% reflective and
apply that to my object.
| | 00:26 |
Rather, if I was to drag that material
directly onto my teapot, I would still
| | 00:33 |
have a largely black scene.
In fact, it's even darker than it was
| | 00:37 |
before because now it's reflecting an all
black environment.
| | 00:40 |
Well, I suppose I could build a really
rich environment for this object to live in.
| | 00:44 |
Or I could go with a simpler solution,
which is to use something called an
| | 00:48 |
Environment Map.
So, what I'm going to do is turn off my
| | 00:50 |
Reflection channel, and instead, turn on
my Environment channel.
| | 00:54 |
Now, in the Environment channel, what you
want to do is load in a panoramic image.
| | 01:00 |
So I'm going to click on these three dots,
navigate to my Texture folder, and import
| | 01:05 |
the environment panorama.jpg file.
And I'm going to turn off color.
| | 01:10 |
So now when I render this image, I see the
following.
| | 01:13 |
What's also really cool is that as you
rotate around your view.
| | 01:16 |
If you have OpenGL turned on,you'll get a
real time update of your object and it's reflection.
| | 01:25 |
If you want, you can also take this and
make it blurry by adjusting the Blur
| | 01:30 |
Offset and Blur Scale settings.
Now, the blur won't show up in your preview.
| | 01:34 |
But if you render, you'll see a nice
blurry environment.
| | 01:38 |
If you click on the Texture Preview chip,
you can also adjust the Exposure.
| | 01:43 |
If you have an HDRI image, you'll have
quite a bit of latitude here.
| | 01:45 |
We'll be a bit limited because this is
just a JPEG.
| | 01:47 |
By increasing the value, we can brighten
the overall image.
| | 01:52 |
The difficulty with this is that it also
brightens my darker regions in my image.
| | 01:56 |
So I'm going to leave Exposure at zero,
and I'm going to adjust my white point.
| | 02:00 |
I'm going to bring that number down, so
that my blacks stay blacks, but that my
| | 02:04 |
whites blow out.
I now get something that looks like this.
| | 02:08 |
When creating reflective objects, the
object's surroundings are as important as
| | 02:12 |
the shape and reflectivity of the object
itself.
| | 02:15 |
A simple panoramic image in the
environment channel can bring an otherwise
| | 02:18 |
dead reflection to life.
| | 02:19 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating concrete with seamlessly tiling textures| 00:00 |
In this video, we'll be using image based
textures and the tiling settings in the
| | 00:04 |
texture tag in order to create a seamless
concrete texture.
| | 00:09 |
When you're creating materials, you
typically have two uses.
| | 00:13 |
One is going to be a material that's being
specifically created for single object for
| | 00:18 |
a specific shop.
And with that you have a fair amount of
| | 00:20 |
freedom in how you want to approach it.
In another example, you're trying to
| | 00:23 |
create a texture that you can reuse across
a number of different projects.
| | 00:28 |
And if you're going to use an image-based
texture, you want to try and create a
| | 00:30 |
texture that is seamless and that will
tile well.
| | 00:33 |
Some textures may be seamless, but won't
tile well.
| | 00:36 |
This right here is a great example of
that.
| | 00:39 |
What we have is a texture to put it side
by side by side with itself.
| | 00:42 |
It would tile seamlessly.
But the blemish here would make its
| | 00:46 |
presence known pretty quickly.
A better texture would be something like this.
| | 00:51 |
It's pretty anonymous.
There are no strong shifts in lighting
| | 00:54 |
across the image.
And all in all, this is a pretty good
| | 00:58 |
candidate for tiling.
This third image here, we'll discover, is
| | 01:01 |
actually tileable despite having a lot of
these really distinctive characteristics.
| | 01:06 |
So let's take a quick look at the tiling
settings in Cinema 4D's texture tags.
| | 01:11 |
In the middle of our scene right here,
we've got a plane that has got a
| | 01:16 |
checkerboard with a gradient mapped onto
it.
| | 01:18 |
And I've selected this, just so that we
can easily see what's happening with our tiles.
| | 01:22 |
Go ahead and select the texture tag on the
simple tile object.
| | 01:26 |
In our texture tag, we've got a number of
settings at the bottom.
| | 01:29 |
Offset u and offset v refer to the
movement of our texture left right in
| | 01:34 |
texture space.
Notice that as we adjust the offset u.
| | 01:39 |
And we reach the edge of our frame.
It sort of loops back around on itself.
| | 01:43 |
It's automatically tiling.
Offset v will move our texture up and down.
| | 01:52 |
Link view and link v will allow us to
adjust the size of each individual tile.
| | 01:58 |
And if we use more tiles on U than V, what
we'll quickly arrive at is a stretch texture.
| | 02:03 |
Where something is a little bit distorted.
So, our checkerboard here which was square
| | 02:08 |
before is now definitely stretched
vertically.
| | 02:11 |
So notice that as I'm adjusting the late
view, the number of tiles is also
| | 02:16 |
changing, so let's just change tiles U and
V to 2.
| | 02:20 |
Well, that gives us at least a pretty good
start in how to approach this.
| | 02:23 |
Let's go ahead and delete our simple tile
and now move on to a real world texturing example.
| | 02:30 |
Let's start by trying to put our plain
texture onto our floor.
| | 02:39 |
And I'm going to turn on my interactive
render region so I can see what it's
| | 02:42 |
looking like.
As I render, I see that my texture has
| | 02:46 |
been applied and seems to be tiling well,
except when I look at my texture tag, it's
| | 02:50 |
actually not tiling at all.
What's happening is our photograph, which
| | 02:54 |
was probably from a region that was maybe
six by six feet.
| | 02:57 |
Is being expanded to a region that's maybe
100 by 200 feet, something like that.
| | 03:01 |
So, what I want to do is increase the
number of tiles.
| | 03:04 |
Let's choose something like 5 tiles by 5
tiles, and let it render again.
| | 03:08 |
What you'll see if that the scale of our
texture now now more closely represents
| | 03:12 |
the scale of our scene.
So, when you're working with these
| | 03:15 |
textures, be sure to re-size them in such
a way that they mimic the environment.
| | 03:21 |
Next, let's go ahead and apply our paint
streak material to the back wall.
| | 03:28 |
And adjust our interactive render region
to take a look at that.
| | 03:31 |
Now, looking at this, I see that the
texture scale is way off.
| | 03:37 |
These streaks are just massive.
So what I want to do is increase the
| | 03:40 |
number of tiles.
I'm going to say increase tiles U and V to
| | 03:44 |
five and five and see what happens.
Well, what I see is really significant
| | 03:50 |
tiling, it's very evident that there is an
up-down tile going on.
| | 03:55 |
And that's because there's a big
difference in the brightness between the
| | 03:59 |
top of the image and the bottom of the
image.
| | 04:01 |
So what I'm going to do is set tiles v to
one.
| | 04:04 |
So there's no vertical tiling.
And then I'm going to adjust tiles view
| | 04:09 |
until the texture distortion is fairly
minimal.
| | 04:11 |
So for me, that's going to be maybe four
tiles.
| | 04:14 |
Looking at this, I'd say that looks pretty
good.
| | 04:16 |
Next, I'm just going to copy my texture
from my floor to my ceiling.
| | 04:20 |
So, I'm going to select the texture tag
that's on my floor, hold down my control
| | 04:24 |
or command key and drag.
And now, let's take a look at the top here.
| | 04:29 |
That's looking good as well.
Now, let's see if there's a place where we
| | 04:32 |
can get away with this blemish texture.
I'm going to apply it to my pillar A right here.
| | 04:37 |
And what it's going to do is take that
texture and stretch it over the entire surface.
| | 04:42 |
Well, for me, I don't really want it to
stretch like that, so I'm going to have to
| | 04:47 |
adjust tiles V to maybe bring down the
amount of stretching here.
| | 04:53 |
The problem is that that tiling is now
super evident, so what I'm going to do is
| | 04:57 |
actually turn off tiling.
What that's going to do is limit the
| | 05:01 |
texture to exactly one appearance.
Now, what I'm going to do in order to keep
| | 05:07 |
the bottom of my object looking good is
just apply that plain texture.
| | 05:10 |
Apply it to pillar a, and drag that
blemish texture on top.
| | 05:16 |
So we now have something that looks like
this.
| | 05:18 |
Now I'd say we're pushing our luck trying
to use this blemish texture on two
| | 05:22 |
pillars, so maybe we should just apply it
to one, but, I'll leave that to you.
| | 05:27 |
Let's just go ahead and render this out
and see what we've come up with.
| | 05:30 |
While procedural textures are great for
their infinite resolution and seamless appearance.
| | 05:34 |
There's nothing like a photo based texture
for creating real world wear and tear.
| | 05:37 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adapting existing textures with the Filter shader| 00:00 |
There're many times when the texture that
you want, is only a little bit different
| | 00:03 |
from a texture that you've already got.
In those situations, the Filter Shader is
| | 00:07 |
an excellent tool for adapting existing
textures to your new needs.
| | 00:11 |
In this scene, I've taken a lot of the
textures from our sort of parking
| | 00:15 |
structure scene and adapted them to the
appearence of a downtown loft.
| | 00:20 |
I've changed the dimensions to my building
slightly and adjusted the lighting, but
| | 00:23 |
even though I've done all of that, it
still looks a little bit like a prison cell.
| | 00:26 |
So, let's go ahead and play around with
giving our floor a stain, but you'll see
| | 00:31 |
this sometimes in downtown lofts where the
management are trying to sell their
| | 00:35 |
concrete slab for a little bit more.
So, let's open up this floor texture, and
| | 00:40 |
let's add a little bit of Specular to it.
So I'm just going to turn on the Specular
| | 00:46 |
channel, and it's going to give me a
little bit of highlight, and looking at
| | 00:48 |
this, we'll see how we're doing.
The Specular is doing a little bit, but
| | 00:52 |
not too much.
Maybe I'll lower the width, and the height
| | 00:54 |
a little bit, but the thing that's really
going to help sell this is a little bit of reflection.
| | 00:58 |
So I'm going to turn on reflection.
And I'm going to load in, to the texture
| | 01:01 |
there, a Fresnel shader.
Now, I want this to not be as strong, so
| | 01:06 |
I'm just going to set the mix mode here
from normal to multiply and I'm going to
| | 01:10 |
set the brightness of my overall
reflection to about 40%.
| | 01:14 |
Now all of these are simple changes that
we've made, but what if we wanted to
| | 01:20 |
change, say, the color of our material?
Well, all we have to do is go into our
| | 01:26 |
color channel, and take a look at this
texture.
| | 01:28 |
What you'll see is that we've got a
photograph that we've loaded in.
| | 01:31 |
And what I want to do is shift the colors
of this and to do that, I am going to
| | 01:35 |
click on this triangle and choose the
Filter shader.
| | 01:38 |
The Filter shader allows me to make a lot
of the same adjustments that I can make in
| | 01:43 |
Photoshop in terms of Hues, Saturation,
Gamma.
| | 01:46 |
Think of it as sort of a portable level's
adjustment.
| | 01:49 |
What we are going to start with, is a
slight Hue shift.
| | 01:51 |
So, take the Hue.
(SOUND) It lets you shift it more towards
| | 01:57 |
blue green which for me is about 160
degrees.
| | 02:01 |
And I'm also going to play around with my
Gamma, which allows me to adjust the
| | 02:06 |
brightness and darkness of my image while
still keeping strong darks and white whites.
| | 02:13 |
And I'm going to shift this a little bit
darker.
| | 02:15 |
And the thought that the stain is perhaps
going to make this concrete darker in appearance.
| | 02:21 |
I might now also go in and add a little
bit of Saturation.
| | 02:25 |
So I'm going to take my Saturation, and
increase that slightly.
| | 02:29 |
And so now, when I render, I've got this
more interesting colorful treatment.
| | 02:34 |
Now, it could be that they used a really
strong stand.
| | 02:37 |
And none of the original color came
through.
| | 02:38 |
And in that situation, you would turn on
colorize.
| | 02:40 |
Which will give this a very uniform color.
You might then shift the Hue more
| | 02:46 |
specifically towards blue.
Like, say, 227 is what I came up with here.
| | 02:51 |
And increase that Saturation.
You can also lower the brightness to just
| | 02:55 |
darken it overall.
And when we render, we now get something
| | 02:58 |
like this.
So remember if you've got a texture that's
| | 03:02 |
almost there, the Filter shader lets you
quickly change the Hue Saturation and
| | 03:06 |
value of the texture.
Saving you a trip to Photoshop and
| | 03:09 |
allowing you to easily add variation to
your textures.
| | 03:11 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
5. Applying Materials with Texture ProjectionsPlacing decals on objects with the Fit to Region and Fit to Image commands| 00:00 |
In this video, we'll go over how to place
decals on the surfaces of your objects
| | 00:04 |
with a minimum of distortion.
To start, you're going to need an object,
| | 00:07 |
as well as a texture that's got an alpha
channel.
| | 00:11 |
In this case, I've loaded in my KinetEco
logo, and also loaded in that same image
| | 00:16 |
into the Alpha channel.
Now I've cropped the image to be square or
| | 00:20 |
as close to square as I can manage to make
my life a little bit easier in the future.
| | 00:24 |
Now that's not mandatory but it will save
you some time and effort.
| | 00:28 |
Lets start by applying this label material
to our detergent bottle.
| | 00:32 |
And just give it a quick render and see
what we come up with.
| | 00:34 |
Well the texture certainly is on the
surface of our object.
| | 00:38 |
It looks nothing like the image file.
And I don't think our client would be
| | 00:40 |
particularly happy to see this.
So let's use a different command.
| | 00:44 |
Start by going into your front view so
that we're looking at our object dead on.
| | 00:49 |
Next, select your texture tag.
And go to Tags > Fit To Region.
| | 00:54 |
This is going to allow us to drag out a
box by clicking and dragging from the
| | 00:58 |
upper left to the lower right.
In the rough shape of our logo on the
| | 01:02 |
surface of our object.
Now when I look at my object again in my
| | 01:08 |
front view what I'll see is that I've got
a looping texture going across the surface
| | 01:13 |
of my object.
I don't want it to loop like this, so I'm
| | 01:16 |
going to go into my Texture Tag settings,
and turn off Tile, and render again.
| | 01:21 |
Looking at this now, I see that my
texture, is where I wanted it to be on the
| | 01:25 |
surface, and it fits very nicely.
There might, however, be just the
| | 01:29 |
slightest bit of distortion.
So to fix that, I'm going to click on this
| | 01:33 |
tag, and go to Tags > Fit to Image.
I'm then going to select the image file
| | 01:40 |
that I used in the color channel and
choose Open.
| | 01:44 |
Notice that in our texture tag our length
U or the width of our image is staying the same.
| | 01:49 |
Where as length V has been adjusted to
better fit the source image.
| | 01:53 |
Lets go ahead and rotate around our object
and just see how everything's looking.
| | 01:58 |
Well, see that we're running into a slight
problem here on the back.
| | 02:02 |
So to fix this issue where the text area
is bleeding from the front all the way to
| | 02:06 |
the back of my object I'm going to change
the side from both to front.
| | 02:10 |
Now my texture preview in my editor won't
correct this.
| | 02:13 |
But when I render it will be gone.
Next, how would we go about applying a
| | 02:18 |
texture to a region of our object, that
doesn't line up neatly with one of our views.
| | 02:24 |
Say we wanted to map this logo onto this
region right here.
| | 02:28 |
Well what you want to do, is rotate your
view.
| | 02:31 |
So that you're looking at it more or less
dead on.
| | 02:34 |
You want to be facing it as directly as
possible.
| | 02:37 |
You want to apply that label again onto
your detergent bottle.
| | 02:41 |
And go through that same procedure.
Tags > Fit to Region.
| | 02:45 |
Draw a box where you want it to appear.
Then turn off tile.
| | 02:51 |
Change side to front.
Click on the tag again and in the Tags
| | 02:57 |
pull down choose Fit to Image and what
this is going to do when we select our
| | 03:02 |
source image is ensure that our image is
nice and square.
| | 03:06 |
Now looking at this, it's looking quite
good.
| | 03:08 |
The only issue I'm seeing is that we're
getting a little bit of bleed through down
| | 03:13 |
here in the lower right hand corner.
And we can correct that using polygon
| | 03:17 |
selection tags, like you saw earlier in
this course.
| | 03:20 |
Placing a decal on an object is as simple
as using the Fit to Region command
| | 03:25 |
followed by Fit to Image.
Play around with this and see what you can
| | 03:28 |
come up with.
| | 03:29 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Selecting the appropriate projection mode for your model| 00:00 |
Sometimes, just dragging and dropping a
material on to your object doesn't give
| | 00:03 |
you a good looking result.
In those instances, you may need to change
| | 00:06 |
from the default UVW projection to some
other mode.
| | 00:10 |
In this video, we'll go over those
different modes and when it is appropriate
| | 00:13 |
to use each.
In this scene, I've got a few primitive
| | 00:15 |
objects, a sphere, cube, cylinder, teapot
and a text object.
| | 00:20 |
Now, typically when you apply a texture to
these objects, it's going to look pretty
| | 00:24 |
good, because they have what's called UVW
coordinates built into them.
| | 00:28 |
However, I've stripped out those UV
coordinates for our objects, so that
| | 00:32 |
there's no translation between our 2D
texture and our 3D object.
| | 00:36 |
And CINEMA 4D has to try and wing it.
So, let's go ahead and take this UV test
| | 00:40 |
map and apply it to our sphere.
We'll see that when we click on our
| | 00:44 |
Texture tag, and go to the tag settings,
the projection here is listed as spherical.
| | 00:49 |
Now, typically, this will be UVW mapping.
With a spherical map, CINEMA 4D is taking
| | 00:55 |
our map and trying to apply it to our
object, as if it was wrapping it along a sphere.
| | 01:00 |
It takes the left side of the image and it
connects it with the right, and then it
| | 01:04 |
pinches all of the pixels along the top
and all of the pixels along the bottom
| | 01:08 |
until you get something that looks like
this.
| | 01:10 |
On a sphere, spherical projection looks
pretty good.
| | 01:12 |
However, when we take that same projection
mode and apply it to a cube like so.
| | 01:19 |
Notice that on my cube here, that
projection is spherical by default.
| | 01:23 |
We get these strange results.
The texture is now stretched in upward
| | 01:28 |
directions, downward directions.
In fact, the only place it looks even sort
| | 01:32 |
of normal is on the top.
Until you realize that our texture doesn't
| | 01:35 |
actually come to a point like this.
Naturally, it's being forced into that position.
| | 01:41 |
So, we can see that the spherical
projection is not a good one for this cube here.
| | 01:48 |
If you go to your Texture mode on the left
hand side and also select your cube
| | 01:53 |
object, you'll get a preview of the
texture projection and how it's being
| | 01:57 |
applied to your object.
You'll see that you've got a sphere right now.
| | 02:00 |
Let's click on our cube and try a
different projection method.
| | 02:03 |
I'm going to change from spherical to
flat.
| | 02:07 |
You'll see that our texture is mapped
pretty much one to one along the front of
| | 02:10 |
our object, and it looks pretty good from
there.
| | 02:13 |
However, when we rotate our texture, we'll
see that it's being stretched all the way
| | 02:16 |
through our object and giving us these
strange results.
| | 02:18 |
So, for a cube, it probably makes more
sense to change from flat to, you guessed
| | 02:24 |
it, Cubic mapping.
With cubic mapping, you get six copies of
| | 02:28 |
your texture projected from all sides.
I'm now going to apply a texture to my cylinder.
| | 02:37 |
The default mapping is spherical, which
looks pretty good, except that you'll see
| | 02:41 |
we get some distortion around the
hemisphere and some stretching also as we
| | 02:45 |
near the poles.
So, spherical projection is not the best
| | 02:48 |
for this, let's choose cylindrical.
Cylindrical projection takes the left side
| | 02:52 |
of our texture, connects it with the right
and then projects more or less like a flat
| | 02:57 |
projection up and down.
It looks pretty good from all areas,
| | 03:01 |
except on those objects that are closed at
the top.
| | 03:04 |
Which is well, most objects.
Let's try that same projection on our
| | 03:09 |
teapot here.
I'm going to drag the UV test map onto my
| | 03:13 |
teapot and see what we get.
With a default spherical projection, we
| | 03:17 |
get the pinching at the top and at the
bottom, as well as some stretching on the sides.
| | 03:22 |
With a cylindrical projection, it's
looking a little bit better, but we're
| | 03:27 |
still getting that pinching at the top and
at the sides.
| | 03:31 |
Frontal mapping takes the texture from
whichever direction the camera is
| | 03:35 |
currently facing and projects it on to the
surface of your object.
| | 03:39 |
This can work pretty well in specific
situations, but it's not generally applicable.
| | 03:44 |
A more specialized version of Frontal
mapping is something called Camera mapping.
| | 03:50 |
I'm going to go ahead and add a camera to
my scene by clicking on the Camera Object.
| | 03:53 |
I'm now going to rotate my editor camera
away from that area.
| | 03:58 |
So, we'll see that we have a camera that's
looking at our object from a different angle.
| | 04:02 |
I'm going to click on the texture that is
on my teapot and change the projection
| | 04:07 |
from frontal to Camera mapping.
With Camera mapping, you can select which
| | 04:11 |
camera to project your texture from.
I'm going to take this picker and select
| | 04:15 |
the camera object that I added.
What you will now see is that from that
| | 04:19 |
camera's perspective the texture looks
great.
| | 04:22 |
But when you rotate away from that
perspective, it starts to break down.
| | 04:25 |
This gives us a little more latitude as we
rotate around our object, and is often
| | 04:29 |
used when painting matte paintings.
Another projection mode here is Shrink
| | 04:34 |
Wrapping, and what it does is it maps the
texture onto your object.
| | 04:39 |
There's something akin to spherical
mapping.
| | 04:41 |
It basically drapes a giant sheet over the
top of your object, and then collects all
| | 04:45 |
of the loose edges down at the bottom and
pinches them together.
| | 04:49 |
Depending on your needs, this can be a
really good way to get a general
| | 04:52 |
projection for an object.
None of these methods are perfectly suited
| | 04:57 |
to every object.
So, what you need to do is sort of look at
| | 05:00 |
your object and figure out which is
going to be the best case scenario.
| | 05:05 |
For my teapot here, I'm going to change
from Shrink Wrapping to Spherical.
| | 05:11 |
And I get a pretty good default
projection.
| | 05:13 |
The only real issue that I'm seeing is
this pinching along the top.
| | 05:17 |
And I can quickly solve that by choosing a
different projection method for my lid.
| | 05:21 |
For my lid, I'm just going to apply a
texture, and then go into my top view.
| | 05:28 |
Select my texture tag, and go to Tags >
Fit To Region.
| | 05:32 |
And just drag a box around that lid.
When I go back to my 3D view, I see this.
| | 05:39 |
And what's happened is my texture tag has
been transformed from spherical to flat projection.
| | 05:45 |
And because I drew out that box in the top
view, my flat projection has automatically
| | 05:49 |
been rotated to fit my shape.
So, that's a pretty good bet for a texture
| | 05:54 |
like this.
Now, for something like our text object,
| | 05:58 |
let's figure out what we can do.
By dragging my material onto my
| | 06:01 |
(INAUDIBLE) text object, I see that it's
looking well, pretty weird all around.
| | 06:07 |
The caps have no texture and the sides are
covered in a really dense version of my UV texture.
| | 06:12 |
So, in this situation, I can cycle through
these, or I can go with a pretty good bet
| | 06:18 |
which is cubic.
Which is going to give you a projection
| | 06:20 |
that doesn't really distort from any
particular side, but will give you
| | 06:24 |
distinct seems at the edges.
Well, there won't always be an ideal text
| | 06:29 |
projection for your object.
There's a good chance that there is a
| | 06:32 |
method that is better suited to your model
then the default.
| | 06:34 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adjusting material placement using the Fit to Object command and Texture Axis tool| 00:00 |
In this video, we're going to texture an
object that doesn't have good UVW coordinates.
| | 00:05 |
In this case, the cap of this bottle.
We're going to use the Fit To Object
| | 00:09 |
commands along with the Texture Axis tool,
in order to better position our texture.
| | 00:13 |
Let's start by opening up the ridge
texture just to see what we're working with.
| | 00:18 |
To little difficult to make out, but what
we have got is a shader that is creating
| | 00:22 |
black and white ridges.
And there is a lot of tiles along the U
| | 00:27 |
axis, but not many vertically.
We are going to take this texture and
| | 00:30 |
apply it to our cap.
The default UVW mapping projection looks terrible.
| | 00:36 |
I'm going to switch to the slightly better
cylindrical projection.
| | 00:41 |
And what we'll see when we render is that
the sides of our object look great, but
| | 00:45 |
the top and bottom look a little funky.
And that's because their texture is the
| | 00:50 |
wrong size for our object.
Let's go ahead and fix that.
| | 00:52 |
Start by selecting your texture tag, and
ensure that your object is selected as well.
| | 00:58 |
Next, go to your Texture mode.
You'll see a preview of your texture on
| | 01:04 |
your object.
You'll see that it's created a cylinder
| | 01:08 |
that's much larger than the object itself.
If we want, we can try and size and
| | 01:13 |
position this texture using the Texture
Axis mode.
| | 01:16 |
So, if I was to take my Texture tool and
my Axis mode, I could now come in here and
| | 01:21 |
re-position and re-size this.
Now, that's a fair amount of manual work
| | 01:25 |
and pretty intensive when there's a tool
that'll get us most of the way there to start.
| | 01:29 |
And that tool is the Fit To Object
command.
| | 01:31 |
Go ahead and select this texture tag, and
go to Tags > Fit To Object.
| | 01:37 |
This is going to automatically re-size
your texture projection to better fit your object.
| | 01:43 |
Now, looking at this, we're much closer to
where we want to be.
| | 01:46 |
However, the bottom of our cap is still
looking pretty funky.
| | 01:50 |
To correct this, I'm going to do two
things.
| | 01:52 |
First, I'm going to click on my texture
tag and turn off Tile.
| | 01:57 |
And this is going to prevent our texture
from looping, so that when we render we
| | 02:01 |
don't get a repetition of this on the top
of our object.
| | 02:03 |
Now, what we need to do is scale down our
texture projection so that it fits just in
| | 02:07 |
this middle part of the cap.
Again, make sure you're in Texture mode
| | 02:11 |
with the Axis mode selected.
Next, take your Scale tool and grab the
| | 02:17 |
green y axis, and scale it down on the y
axis.
| | 02:22 |
You'll see that this is resizing our
textures vertically.
| | 02:25 |
If we want to place them, we can now take
our Move tool and shift this texture up or down.
| | 02:31 |
You can continue to tweek this until you
get something that looks really quite good.
| | 02:35 |
I'm going to go ahead and frame my scene
by tapping the H key on my keyboard.
| | 02:38 |
And I'm now going to render the view.
Now, while our bump map may not hold up in
| | 02:42 |
closeup, it does pretty well from a
distance here.
| | 02:45 |
To recap, the Fit To Object command will
give you a good starting point for most
| | 02:48 |
texture projections.
But in those times when it's not quite as
| | 02:52 |
smart as you would hope, the Texture tool
in Axis mode will allow you to manually
| | 02:56 |
place your texture.
Just remember to always leave Axis mode
| | 03:01 |
once your done.
| | 03:01 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
6. Creating Layered MaterialsBreaking down real-world materials into their channels| 00:00 |
Being able to look at an object in the
real world, and figuring out why it looks
| | 00:04 |
the way that it does is a crucial skill
for working successfully in CG.
| | 00:09 |
In this video we're going to take a look
at a couple of different materials from
| | 00:12 |
the real world, and try and break them
down.
| | 00:14 |
We're going to start with a rusted metal.
Here's an image that I downloaded from a
| | 00:18 |
stock photo website.
But if you have the chance to interact
| | 00:21 |
with rusty metal in the real world, well,
first get your tetanus shot, and then two,
| | 00:24 |
give it a shot because it's a lot more
instructive than just looking at a flat image.
| | 00:29 |
Looking at rust up close we see that it is
composed of a couple of things, at least
| | 00:33 |
in this example.
We've got our metal as the base and then
| | 00:37 |
we've got this red rusty component.
And whenever I'm looking at a material I'm
| | 00:41 |
really concerned with three primary
things.
| | 00:44 |
I want to know what color it is, and
that's the color before any lighting has
| | 00:48 |
been applied to it.
I want to know, the specularity of it.
| | 00:51 |
Is it shiny?
Is it not shiny?
| | 00:53 |
If it's shiny, how broad is my highlight?
How reflective is that, how sharp is that highlight?
| | 00:59 |
And then I'm also looking at the bump
component.
| | 01:02 |
Is the surface smooth, or is it bumpy?
And when I feel like overachieving, I also
| | 01:06 |
worry about, the diffusion channel, which
allows me to determine how absorbtive a
| | 01:11 |
material is.
How much light is it not reflecting back?
| | 01:15 |
So, looking at this metal we see again
that there are two key components.
| | 01:18 |
There's the metal and there's the rusted
metal.
| | 01:21 |
And then this, I think we're also looking
at some paint that's weathered away, but
| | 01:24 |
I'm going to ignore that component for
now.
| | 01:26 |
So, thinking about the metal, metal is
typically shiny, its reflective.
| | 01:31 |
Now, in terms of specular, I'm looking for
something that is fairly high or a highly
| | 01:36 |
reflective surface and this specular
shouldn't be to wide.
| | 01:40 |
And in terms of bump, I'm looking for a
fairly smooth surface.
| | 01:45 |
And in terms of color the base color of my
material is probably going to be pretty
| | 01:49 |
close to a dark gray or a black.
It doesn't have much of its own color to
| | 01:53 |
contribute so that's one component of my
material the other component is that rust.
| | 01:57 |
So, I want to know what color the rust is
and for that I looked up another reference image.
| | 02:03 |
This is just an image of I think a steel
plate that's really rusted over and this
| | 02:07 |
allows me to get a good sense of what rust
is like when it's covering an entire surface.
| | 02:12 |
And here I see that rust is sort of a
reddish brown color.
| | 02:15 |
In terms of specularity, I'm not getting
much in the way of highlight here, so I
| | 02:19 |
don't think it has any specularity at all.
And then, in terms of bump, there aren't
| | 02:23 |
allot of really large scale bumps but
there are some finer scale bumps in this
| | 02:28 |
particular rust.
So, I use this information to construct a
| | 02:31 |
render of just my rust.
So, here I have something with roughly
| | 02:35 |
those same colors.
It's not at all shiny and the bump is
| | 02:39 |
present but it's fairly small in scale.
Now, because these are two separate
| | 02:43 |
materials, there's sort of an interplay
between them.
| | 02:45 |
And for that, I've created an alpha
channel.
| | 02:48 |
I took my reference imagery and I tried to
select just those red elements of the rust.
| | 02:53 |
And I'm using that to build an alpha
channel for my steel.
| | 02:56 |
And when I combine all of those together,
here's what that alpha channel looks like,
| | 03:01 |
when it's placed on the surface of my
teapot.
| | 03:05 |
Here's a render of all of these components
together.
| | 03:07 |
And let's just play around with how they
all fit together.
| | 03:11 |
I can turn on or off each of these layers
in my render here, by clicking on the
| | 03:15 |
eyeball next to it in Photoshop.
So, I'm turning off my reflection.
| | 03:18 |
We see that without reflection the steel
portion looks like an oil slick, so the
| | 03:23 |
reflection is really important to it
looking like steel.
| | 03:27 |
Turning off the shadow for a moment, we
can just focus on the material.
| | 03:30 |
The specular channel, when that's removed,
takes the steel, and removes all life from it.
| | 03:35 |
It doesn't even look like oil slick, it
looks sort of like dried tar on the
| | 03:39 |
surface, and the diffuse color here, is
really controlling the color of our rust.
| | 03:44 |
There's no real color contribution from
the steel.
| | 03:47 |
So again, when all of these things add up
together, we create this nice looking material.
| | 03:51 |
Let's try and take those same principles
into an image and see if we can break it
| | 03:56 |
down again.
For this example, we're going to take a
| | 03:59 |
look at an image of some wet concrete.
When we look at this wet concrete, we see
| | 04:03 |
that it is very different across it's
surface.
| | 04:05 |
That were dealing with a lot of different
properties here.
| | 04:08 |
Now, if we think about the color of it, in
the dry regions the color appears to be
| | 04:12 |
sort of a light brown.
In the slightly wetter regions it appears
| | 04:17 |
to be a darker brown.
And then in those regions where we've got
| | 04:22 |
a strong reflection, there doesn't appear
to be much in the way of color
| | 04:25 |
contribution from the color of the
concrete itself.
| | 04:27 |
Almost all of that is coming from our
reflection of the world above.
| | 04:32 |
So, I've taken the liberty of trying to
paint a color map of this.
| | 04:35 |
And it's not perfect, mind you, but it's a
start.
| | 04:38 |
So, the color is just sort of a light
brown going over the course of the whole surface.
| | 04:42 |
I've also painted what's called a
diffusion map.
| | 04:44 |
Now, the diffusion channel, in this
example, well, we can kind of think of
| | 04:48 |
this as a wetness map.
The wetter a region is, the darker the
| | 04:52 |
diffusion is going to be.
And it's also going to make our materials
| | 04:54 |
darker in color.
If I was to take my color channel, turn
| | 04:57 |
that on, take my diffusion channel here,
and turn it multiply.
| | 05:00 |
We'll begin to see something that's fairly
close in color to the actual map.
| | 05:05 |
Now, the bump channel is also very
important, and the bump here is going to
| | 05:09 |
control how bumpy our surface is.
Looking at our reference material, we see
| | 05:14 |
that there's a very distinct bumpiness on
the dry regions, but in those wet regions,
| | 05:18 |
it is again, a mirror-like surface.
So, there's going to be almost no bump in
| | 05:22 |
the center of that water.
So, taking a look at my bump.
| | 05:25 |
What I see is the bump is totally black
where there's water, and there's a nice
| | 05:29 |
variation in gray scale values where
there's the concrete.
| | 05:32 |
To create a material there's no better
place to start than reality.
| | 05:36 |
Use this as an excuse to get away from
your work station and out into the world.
| | 05:39 |
But when you're out there, see if you
can't figure out the color, specularity,
| | 05:43 |
bump, and maybe even diffusion of the view
you're taking in.
| | 05:46 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a ceramic tile material using the Displacement and Bump channels| 00:00 |
There are many times where creating a
material that gives the appearance of an
| | 00:03 |
object is much easier than actually
modeling that object.
| | 00:06 |
In this video, we'll use the Displacement
channel, the Tile Shader, as well as the
| | 00:10 |
Layer Shader to create ceramic tiles that
push out from the surface of our object.
| | 00:14 |
And we'll apply it to the cylinder to give
ourselves a bit of a challenge.
| | 00:17 |
Let's start by creating a new material.
Name this material tile.
| | 00:23 |
Now, let's add the tile shader to our
material.
| | 00:27 |
Click on the triangle next to texture, go
to surfaces, tiles.
| | 00:32 |
This gives us a gray and red tile.
Go ahead and drag this material on to the cylinder.
| | 00:38 |
As you can see we're going to have to
adjust our tiling settings to get this to
| | 00:42 |
look a little bit better.
Let's play around with the tiles U setting.
| | 00:45 |
I'm going to try a value of 10.
That's a start, but it looks like it's a
| | 00:49 |
little stretched.
Let's try 8.
| | 00:53 |
The value of 6 seems to be just about
right.
| | 00:56 |
Now, let's go into our Tiles shader.
As I want to make these tiles a bit
| | 00:59 |
larger, so let's adjust the global scale
here to 200%.
| | 01:06 |
Our tiles are all now twice as large.
Looking at the Tile shader, we see that
| | 01:11 |
it's got a few perimeters and colors.
It's got a grout color and colors for the tiles.
| | 01:15 |
For the most part grout isn't black.
So let's choose a light grey In the brown area.
| | 01:23 |
And for me, that's a value of R 185, G
178, B 171.
| | 01:29 |
Next, I'm going to adjust the bevel width
here from 30% down to 1%, which gives me a
| | 01:36 |
much tighter configuration.
Now let's give it another render.
| | 01:42 |
That's looking better.
Let's stick with these colors for now.
| | 01:45 |
But try and copy our shader into different
channels and see if we can enhance the effect.
| | 01:49 |
I'm going to start with a Specular
channel.
| | 01:51 |
So in your Color channel, click on the
triangle next to where it says Texture and
| | 01:55 |
choose Copy Channel.
This is allowing us to copy our tile
| | 01:57 |
shader and paste it in the Specular
channel.
| | 02:00 |
Click in the triangle next to Texture
there, and choose Paste Channel.
| | 02:05 |
We now have an exact copy of our material
in the Specular channel.
| | 02:10 |
As a reminder, the Specular channel,
Reflection channel, and many like it, look
| | 02:14 |
for a black and white map.
Where the white values are the highest in
| | 02:18 |
reflectivity or specularity and the black
areas are the lowest in those values.
| | 02:22 |
Now grout is typically not shiny, so I'm
going to set the grout color here to black.
| | 02:28 |
And then I'm going to adjust the tiles
reflectivity or specularity to white, so
| | 02:34 |
the tiles are totally reflective.
Now, I'm going to take this specular map
| | 02:42 |
and copy it by clicking on the triangle
there.
| | 02:45 |
And I'm going to paste this in the
Reflection channel.
| | 02:49 |
So I'm going to turn on Reflection and
click on the triangle and texture here and
| | 02:54 |
choose paste.
Now when I render I see this.
| | 02:58 |
Perfect reflection of my environment but
the tiles are now far too reflective.
| | 03:03 |
What I'd like to do is give them a fresnel
effect.
| | 03:06 |
But I'd also like to combine that with
this existing tiles texture.
| | 03:09 |
In order to do that, I'm going to use
something called the Layers Shader.
| | 03:12 |
Click on the triangle here next to Texture
and choose Layer.
| | 03:15 |
This is going to create a new shader that
we can click on.
| | 03:20 |
And inside of it our Tile shader has
already been copied.
| | 03:23 |
I am now going to load into my Layers
shader a Fresnel shader.
| | 03:28 |
A Fresnel shader if you will recall,
allows you to adjust the reflectivity on
| | 03:31 |
an object based on it's angle.
I am now going to click on this Fresnel
| | 03:34 |
shader to open it up.
And I'm going to change it to a physical
| | 03:38 |
style which gives me something like this.
And maybe I'll change my preset to Plexiglass.
| | 03:46 |
I'm now going to go up one level which
will take me back to my Layer shader by
| | 03:50 |
clicking on this icon.
My Fresnel shader is looking good.
| | 03:54 |
I now have a reflectivity that's based on
my angle.
| | 03:57 |
However, it's no longer turning off in the
areas where there is grout.
| | 04:02 |
And that's because the Fresnel shader is
completely overriding the Tile shader.
| | 04:06 |
I'm going to get the two to play well
together by changing from Normal mode to Multiply.
| | 04:11 |
When I render again, I'll see that there
are now some areas where the reflection is
| | 04:15 |
not doing much of anything at all.
Next, let's go ahead and go to our Bump
| | 04:22 |
channel and turn that on.
Click on the check mark next to Bump.
| | 04:26 |
Click on the triangle here next to Texture
and choose Paste Channel.
| | 04:31 |
When we render now, we get tiles that seem
to have some depth to them.
| | 04:36 |
However they don't appear to have any
shadows.
| | 04:39 |
And this is where it's going to become
important to actually use something called Displacement.
| | 04:44 |
Displacement is like the Bump channel in
that it makes your objects appear bumpy.
| | 04:47 |
However, the Displacement channel doesn't
do this with a texture trick.
| | 04:50 |
What it actually does is move the points
of your object out along their normals or
| | 04:55 |
rather away from the surface.
Go ahead and turn on Displacement.
| | 04:59 |
Click on the triangle next to Texture and
choose Paste channel.
| | 05:03 |
I'm going to turn on my Interactive Render
Region so I can watch these updates in
| | 05:09 |
real time.
Looking at this now there doesn't seem to
| | 05:14 |
be a significant difference.
Let's see what happens when I increase the
| | 05:17 |
height to something like 20.
It looks like our surface moves significantly.
| | 05:22 |
Maybe 20 was overkill, I'm going to try 1.
Well we might be getting some movement here.
| | 05:27 |
But I think were being limited by the
resolution of our cylinder.
| | 05:30 |
And I can see that when I go to Display >
Garage Shading Lines.
| | 05:35 |
And I can see, oh yeah, I don't have
enough points in order to do this.
| | 05:39 |
So let's adjust our height segments, until
we have the same number as we have tiles.
| | 05:44 |
So I'm going to change height segments to
5 and I'm going to play around with my
| | 05:48 |
rotation segments until I have 30 segments
here or one polygon per tile.
| | 05:56 |
Now the displacement still isn't looking
very good and that's because I still don't
| | 06:00 |
have enough polygons in order to see an
appreciable difference.
| | 06:03 |
Now if you're using the prime or light
version of Cinema 4D, you'll have to use a
| | 06:07 |
hyper NURBS object for what I'm about to
do.
| | 06:09 |
However, if you're using a more advanced
version of Cinema 4D, you can turn on
| | 06:13 |
something called Sub-Polygon Displacement.
What this will do is sub-divide your mesh
| | 06:17 |
at render time and allow you to push out
additional polygons from the surface.
| | 06:22 |
And we can now see when we look at this
that it is pushing our surface out just a
| | 06:26 |
little too far.
So I'm going to change the height here
| | 06:28 |
from 1 centimeter to 0.25 centimeters.
And as I look, I can now see my tiles are
| | 06:35 |
on my surface and they don't appear to be
casting shadows.
| | 06:38 |
But we can quickly remedy that by going
into our Sky object, selecting our
| | 06:43 |
Sunlight and ensuring that Area Shadows
are turned on.
| | 06:46 |
Well that doesn't appear to be the issue,
so I suspect it's just our light angle but
| | 06:50 |
let's not get caught up in that detail.
We can continue to play around with this
| | 06:54 |
Displacement Distance, perhaps a value of
something like 0.15 will give us a more
| | 06:59 |
realistic appearance.
I now see that my tiles are pushing
| | 07:02 |
slightly out from the surface in a way
that is more realistic in the appearance
| | 07:06 |
than bump.
And you'll especially see this if you come
| | 07:08 |
in and look at the profile of your object.
Now you can continue layering textures in
| | 07:14 |
this fashion.
Perhaps you might want to to add a noise
| | 07:17 |
to the surface of the tile in the Bump
channel.
| | 07:18 |
The Layers Shader acts like the Layers
Manager in Photoshop and allows you to
| | 07:22 |
creatively stack your materials.
And when only real surface detail will do,
| | 07:27 |
but you don't want to model that detail.
An image or shader in the Displacement
| | 07:30 |
channel can create detail that even holds
up when viewed from extreme angles like we
| | 07:34 |
see now.
| | 07:35 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding soap scum to the ceramic tile's surface| 00:00 |
Materials help to tell the story of an
object's life.
| | 00:03 |
Pristine textures have led ascetic lives
where they've never left the confines of
| | 00:07 |
your computer.
Adding indications of regular use and
| | 00:10 |
abuse can help sell the realism of an
object.
| | 00:13 |
Here are some tiles that I've rendered out
and they look they've walked right off the
| | 00:16 |
showroom floor.
Here they are again with the addition of
| | 00:19 |
some soap scum and mildew.
Now, these are not as much fun to look at,
| | 00:22 |
but they do tell a story.
Perhaps these are tiles from a, college
| | 00:26 |
student's first apartment.
Gee-ross.
| | 00:29 |
In this video, we're going to focus on how
to add soap scum to the surface of our tiles.
| | 00:33 |
Before we do that, we have to sort of
figure out what soap scum is, and for
| | 00:36 |
that, we have reference imagery.
Taking a look at this faucet right here, I
| | 00:40 |
see that there's some white buildup on the
front.
| | 00:42 |
Now, I think that's probably actually a
calcium deposit, but it gives me a sense
| | 00:46 |
of what materials that build up because of
water look like.
| | 00:50 |
Underneath this, I have another example.
And we can see it on the surface here of
| | 00:54 |
this faucet.
It's sort of a white buildup along the top
| | 00:58 |
of my silver here with some splotches in
it.
| | 01:01 |
And soap scum as I understand it is just
soap that's been liquefied and has
| | 01:05 |
splashed around onto surfaces and then
dried again.
| | 01:08 |
So its material properties are pretty
similar to soap itself in terms of color,
| | 01:11 |
it's probably a milky white.
In terms of specularity it's probably not
| | 01:15 |
that shiny.
And in terms of bump, we're not dealing
| | 01:18 |
with a lot of bump if we are at all it
would be the buildup of the surface on our
| | 01:23 |
material over time.
And in order to simulate that, what I've
| | 01:26 |
done is found an image of water buildup.
In this case it's water color on a surface
| | 01:33 |
that's built up over time.
But I feel like I should be able to use
| | 01:36 |
this to create a good alpha channel.
Which I've already done.
| | 01:39 |
So, here we are again.
This is a black and white version of a
| | 01:42 |
certain portion of that previous image and
I've made it seamlessly tileable.
| | 01:46 |
So we should be able to layer this on our
materials in any way that we want.
| | 01:49 |
Once again here is that final result that
we are shooting for.
| | 01:52 |
Just a layer of soap over the surface of
our tiles.
| | 01:55 |
So, let's go ahead and get started.
Create a new material and let's name it
| | 02:01 |
Soap Scum.
Again in terms of color we're looking for
| | 02:06 |
a light gray, maybe with a little yellow
hue to it.
| | 02:10 |
And for me I'm going to use a value of
188, 182, 167.
| | 02:17 |
The specular on this should be pretty low
because it's not a very shiny surface if
| | 02:21 |
at all.
So maybe I'll give it a one or two percent specular.
| | 02:24 |
I'm now going to apply my soap scum
material to the surface of my tiles.
| | 02:29 |
And render.
Well it now just looks like I have white tiles.
| | 02:32 |
And if I'm being generous with myself,
these are tiles that look like soap.
| | 02:36 |
But what we want to do is make it just a
thin layer of this soap.
| | 02:41 |
So the easiest way to do that is with our
alpha channel.
| | 02:44 |
So go ahead and turn on alpha, and into
your alpha channel, load that soap scum texture.
| | 02:49 |
So click on those three dots, and navigate
to your textures folder, and grab the
| | 02:53 |
scumalpha.png, and choose Open.
Looking at our texture again, we now see
| | 02:59 |
more of our tile surface peeking through,
but there appears to be some strange
| | 03:03 |
stretching, and that's due to the fact
that we're using UVW coordinates on an
| | 03:07 |
object that doesn't have good UV setup.
So let's click on our Texture tag and
| | 03:12 |
change Projection from UVW to Flat.
Now I want my texture to cover the entire
| | 03:18 |
surface of my material.
So I'm going to click on Tags and choose
| | 03:22 |
Fit to Object, which will automatically
scale up my texture.
| | 03:26 |
And I'm just going to click yes on this
dialogue.
| | 03:29 |
My soap scum is now spread out over a
larger surface.
| | 03:33 |
And now I want to adjust the strength of
it.
| | 03:35 |
And to do that, I'm going to click on my
triangle here, and use my Filter Shader.
| | 03:40 |
If I open this up now, I've got a few
different things I can access.
| | 03:44 |
If I lower the brightness, I'm lowering
the overall opacity of my surface.
| | 03:50 |
So setting it down to say negative 40
ensures that our soap scum is never over
| | 03:54 |
powering our tile.
If we turn on clipping, we can determine
| | 03:57 |
how thick the buildup is and if there are
any regions that don't have any buildup at all.
| | 04:02 |
By pulling down the high clip, what we're
going to do is make thicker regions of
| | 04:06 |
this soap scum.
And by bring up the low clip, we'll be
| | 04:09 |
able to limit the soap scum to select
pockets.
| | 04:13 |
So let's just play around with the
brightness a little bit more, maybe bring
| | 04:16 |
that down a smidge, and if you want, you
can also play around with the gamma, to
| | 04:20 |
achieve similar effects as the low and
high clip.
| | 04:23 |
This looks pretty good to me now, so I'm
going to close my material editor and do a
| | 04:27 |
preview render.
So to review, what we've done is create a
| | 04:34 |
material that has a properties of soap and
we're using a texture in the alpha channel
| | 04:38 |
to layer it over an existing material.
And if you like to ensure you don't get
| | 04:41 |
your rent deposit back, follow along in a
future video on how to add mildew.
| | 04:45 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding mildew to the ceramic tile's surface| 00:00 |
In this video, we're going to tackle
adding mildew to a grout surface.
| | 00:04 |
This is our image without any soap scum or
mildew.
| | 00:08 |
This is it with the addition of some soap
scum which you can view in a different video.
| | 00:11 |
And this is more or less the final result
that we're shooting for.
| | 00:14 |
So let's talk about mildew and what it's
like.
| | 00:18 |
Now with mildew like all materials, first
we want to try and find some reference
| | 00:22 |
imagery which I've done.
And then we want to talk about the color,
| | 00:25 |
the specularity, the bump and maybe the
diffusion of that material.
| | 00:30 |
So looking at this mildew right here, I
can get a sense of how it's placed, but
| | 00:35 |
it's a little difficult to make out the
color.
| | 00:37 |
In this example, I'm seeing the mildew a
little bit more up close and it appears to
| | 00:43 |
have a fairly high diffusion levels.
So it's darkening the surface that it's on
| | 00:48 |
pretty strongly.
The bump seems to be coming from the
| | 00:51 |
surface below it, the surface of the
grout.
| | 00:53 |
And the color seems to be a little red
brown if it is anything at all.
| | 01:00 |
Now, let's see if we can find a better
example of this and unfortunately we got
| | 01:04 |
exactly what we were looking for.
This is a rust and mildew build up.
| | 01:08 |
Mildew, I believe is a sort of mold that
forms between the tiles in your shower,
| | 01:13 |
and that's why it shows up in these big
clumps and sort of grows out with these
| | 01:16 |
organic borders.
So, in terms of color, we're looking for
| | 01:19 |
something that is sort of black and, rusty
brown, maybe a dark green.
| | 01:24 |
If it's wet, it has a fairly high
specularity, and if it's wet, it also is
| | 01:29 |
fairly high in diffusion.
The bump for the surface is coming sort of
| | 01:33 |
from the grout below and ugh, that's just
disgusting.
| | 01:37 |
Now, onto an image that we're going to use
to try and superimpose our mildew on our surface.
| | 01:42 |
This is a yellow image map that I've
downloaded and it's just a water color and
| | 01:46 |
I've converted this into a seamless alpha
channel that looks like this.
| | 01:49 |
And I've chosen this because it adds
semi-organic borders and well also I
| | 01:53 |
already had it.
So well ideally I would to use a black and
| | 01:57 |
white alpha from say moss growing or
something that's going to have those truly
| | 02:01 |
organic borders.
This is going to have to do because well,
| | 02:03 |
it's what I have.
So let's go ahead and open up our starting scene.
| | 02:08 |
And what we'll see is this, it's our tiles
with a little bit of soap scum on top.
| | 02:15 |
Now, in order to create our mildew, we
have a couple of options.
| | 02:18 |
One, we could add it to our existing grout
texture.
| | 02:21 |
But I don't like that because it makes it
more difficult to scale my texture for my
| | 02:26 |
mildew after the fact.
So I'm going to build it separately.
| | 02:28 |
And to do that, I'm going to create a new
material, which I'm going to name Mildew.
| | 02:34 |
Now, if we'll recall, the color of mildew
is sort of rusty green-brown.
| | 02:39 |
So, I'm going to go into my color channel,
and I'm going to find a green-brown,
| | 02:43 |
fairly dark one, maybe kind of saturated
like this.
| | 02:48 |
And chose Ok.
So for me that's a value of 79 59 22.
| | 02:52 |
Specular, I'm going to keep fairly low.
I'm going to assume that we're working
| | 02:57 |
with mildew that is already dried.
We're not in a wet shower here.
| | 03:00 |
So, I'm going to lower the height, maybe
lower the width a little bit and the
| | 03:06 |
height I'm going to set maybe to 1% or
something very mild.
| | 03:09 |
Now, I'm going to also add a little bit of
diffusion, or darkening, based on my alpha channel.
| | 03:16 |
So in the diffusion channel, I'm going to
turn that on and then I'm going to load in
| | 03:21 |
my scum alpha texture and choose Ok.
What this does is it darkens my mildew in
| | 03:27 |
certain regions and if I adjust my mix
strength here, I can, sort of, layer that
| | 03:32 |
right on top of my pre-existing material.
Now the next thing I'm going to want to do
| | 03:36 |
is add in an alpha channel so that I can
superimpose this on my grout.
| | 03:40 |
So I'm going to go to my Alpha channel,
turn that on, and I'm going to click on
| | 03:44 |
those three dots next to texture.
And I'm going to load in that same scum
| | 03:47 |
alpha map.
That gives me something like this and I'm
| | 03:51 |
now going to apply this material to my
wall/grout object.
| | 03:56 |
And now when I render I get this, it's
pretty good but it looks like it just sort
| | 04:00 |
of a general wash of this mildew.
It doesn't look like it's growing in clumps.
| | 04:04 |
So to achieve that look, I'm going to
click on the triangle next to texture and
| | 04:08 |
use my filter shader.
I'm going to click on my filter shader and
| | 04:12 |
turn on clipping.
Clipping is what allows me to add clumps
| | 04:16 |
of things.
So I'm going to take my high clip value
| | 04:19 |
and drag it over to the left and that's
going to really darken up my mildew on my surface.
| | 04:24 |
There are now regions that are totally
mildew and now I'm also going to adjust
| | 04:28 |
the low clip and bring that fairly close
to the high clip in order to ensure that
| | 04:31 |
there are quite a few regions that have no
mildew whatsoever.
| | 04:36 |
And this gives me that nice clumping
appearance.
| | 04:39 |
Now a problem that I have right now is
that the mildew now appears a little bit
| | 04:44 |
too dark.
Its a little overwhelming so I'm going to
| | 04:47 |
lower the brightness of this material
slightly.
| | 04:50 |
So that some of the grout is still showing
through.
| | 04:53 |
If I didn't want to do that, I could also
go to my diffusion channel, and lower the
| | 04:57 |
strength of my diffusion to ensure that my
material is not being overwhelmed by this
| | 05:02 |
diffusion channel.
So for me, I guess, a mix strength of
| | 05:05 |
about 25% is working pretty well.
I'm going to close my material editor
| | 05:09 |
here, and render out a preview.
Certainly there's some room for some
| | 05:16 |
tweaking here, but I'd say it's a pretty
good looking result.
| | 05:19 |
As you create your materials, think about
what happens to them on a day-to-day basis.
| | 05:23 |
With some creative layering, you can
create realistic wear and tear on a
| | 05:26 |
surface, or in this case, active neglect.
| | 05:29 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a rusted metal material with the Layers shader| 00:00 |
In this video we're going to take a basic
skill material and ravage it with rust.
| | 00:04 |
This is a reference image a general
starting point for what it is we're trying
| | 00:07 |
to create.
And we see that we have steel and we have
| | 00:10 |
rust there, two main materials that play
here.
| | 00:13 |
The steel is shiny.
It's reflective.
| | 00:16 |
It's reasonably smooth.
The specularity, that's going to be fairly
| | 00:20 |
high, and the rust itself is fairly matte.
It's not very specular.
| | 00:26 |
The color is roughly red.
And in terms of bumpiness, there's a very
| | 00:30 |
fine bumpiness to it, sort of, along the
surface.
| | 00:34 |
And the main bump especially in this first
piece of reference is in the interplay
| | 00:38 |
between the steel and the area that's
rusted away.
| | 00:41 |
Now, as we take a look at our Rust Alpha,
this Rust Alpha image is, is seamless
| | 00:46 |
texture that I've created from that Rusty
Steel Reference.
| | 00:50 |
I've selected for the RustyElements and
used those to build up this AlphaChannel.
| | 00:55 |
Now, I've created a scene for us that has
a default rust material.
| | 01:00 |
It's basically a red, and maybe dark gray
material.
| | 01:04 |
And in terms of bump, there's not a lot
going on there.
| | 01:06 |
We've also go a steel material, which is
reflective and it's sitting over the top
| | 01:11 |
of our rust surface on our teapot.
When we render all we really see is this
| | 01:16 |
smooth steel and so what I'd like to go
over now is how to start eating away that steel.
| | 01:22 |
Go ahead and open up the old steel
material and go to the Alpha channel.
| | 01:28 |
It should already be turned on.
Next, to texture here there is three dots
| | 01:31 |
go ahead and click on those and go to your
texture folder and locate the
| | 01:36 |
rust_alpha.png file then go ahead and
choose open.
| | 01:40 |
What you'll notice when you turn on the
interactive render region is that you will
| | 01:44 |
have rust showing through but I think I
might want a little more steel than I am
| | 01:48 |
seeing at the moment.
Also my interactive render region is
| | 01:51 |
pretty slow so I am going to go into my
render settings and temporarily turn off
| | 01:55 |
global illumination.
If you have Cinema 40 Prime this probably
| | 01:58 |
won't even be an issue.
So, now I've got a faster preview and I
| | 02:03 |
can use this to start playing around with
my texture.
| | 02:06 |
I'm going to add a filter shader to my
rust alpha so that I can control how much
| | 02:10 |
rust there is.
Go ahead and add that filter shader and
| | 02:13 |
then click on it.
If you turn on clipping, you can adjust
| | 02:17 |
high clip to ensure that there are more
regions of steel.
| | 02:21 |
And you can bring up the low clip to
ensure that there are more regions that
| | 02:24 |
are totally rusted.
And so now we've got a strong interplay
| | 02:27 |
between the steel and the rust.
I'm now going to use this to feed the bump
| | 02:32 |
channels for both of my textures.
So, I'm going to take my Alpha here, and
| | 02:35 |
I'm going to copy it.
So, take the alpha channel, click on the
| | 02:39 |
triangle next to it, and choose Copy
Channel.
| | 02:41 |
And for your steel, click on Bump, because
my steel is my top texture, I want it to
| | 02:45 |
appear to raise up.
So, I'm going to click on this triangle
| | 02:48 |
next to Texture, and choose Paste Channel.
The steel is now rising up from the
| | 02:53 |
surface, and looking pretty good.
But my rust appears perfectly flat.
| | 02:58 |
I want to give it a little bit of depth as
well.
| | 03:00 |
So, now I'm going to go to my rust
material, go to its bump channel and load
| | 03:05 |
in a texture as well.
And for this, I'm just going to load in my
| | 03:09 |
plain rust alpha.
This way, I can get a lot of variation
| | 03:12 |
within my texture.
And if I want, I can play around with the string.
| | 03:17 |
This is it at plus 100.
Let's see what it looks like at negative 100.
| | 03:21 |
I can't really make this out from this
distance, so I'm going to zoom in just a
| | 03:25 |
little bit on a region.
Let's go ahead and leave the bump strength
| | 03:34 |
at maybe around 50%, and add a filter
shader to add a little bit more contrast.
| | 03:39 |
So, click on the triangle next to Texture
and choose Filter.
| | 03:43 |
Go ahead and click on that filter shader.
And, let's just increase the contrast overall.
| | 03:48 |
It's going to make our bump a little bit
more extreme, and I'd say that we're off
| | 03:52 |
to a pretty good start now.
I'm just going to hit Cmd+Shift+Z to undo
| | 03:56 |
my movement to my camera.
And take a look at my render.
| | 03:59 |
This is looking pretty good, I feel
though, that I'm going to want to
| | 04:03 |
selectively darken parts of my rust, and
I'm going to do that by adding that same
| | 04:06 |
material to my diffusion channel.
So, double click on rust, and activate the
| | 04:11 |
diffusion channel.
And inside of there click on the three
| | 04:15 |
dots and locate that rust alpha image.
You'll see that this is now darkening up
| | 04:19 |
that portion of our image.
If I just lower the mix strength here, I'm
| | 04:23 |
getting a good combination of all of that.
Let's just go ahead and do a final preview render.
| | 04:29 |
Oddly steel looks more like steel when it
rusted.
| | 04:33 |
And that's because of striking difference
in color, specularity and bump between
| | 04:37 |
those two surfaces.
Layering a materials and creatively using
| | 04:41 |
the same map over and over again allows it
to combine these different elements seamlessly.
| | 04:45 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a cracked paint material| 00:00 |
Sometimes materials crack and blister
revealing another surface underneath.
| | 00:04 |
In this video, we will use a combination
of materials, deformers and shaders to
| | 00:08 |
create the appearance of cracking paint.
This is our reference imagery.
| | 00:12 |
If I had to guess the photographer took a
picture of some sun-bleached and damaged
| | 00:17 |
deckchair on the east coast and this is
what here she came up with.
| | 00:22 |
There are a few things that I want to
point out about this.
| | 00:24 |
First the color is fairly uniformed so the
color of our surface is pretty standard.
| | 00:29 |
The top layer of paint doesn't seem to
have much in the way of specular.
| | 00:34 |
In terms of bumpiness the surface is
fairly smooth except for those regions
| | 00:38 |
where it's pulling away.
So it seems to be fairly smooth paint with
| | 00:42 |
these large distortion as it pulls away
from the surface.
| | 00:46 |
And then the really key element in terms
of what sells this a factor.
| | 00:49 |
What creates it is the shadow.
From the outer layer of paint that has
| | 00:53 |
being cast on the painted wood down below.
And so that's what gives us those really
| | 00:59 |
dark lines and regions that makes this
almost look like a salt lake bed that is
| | 01:03 |
dried up.
In order to create this, I've
| | 01:06 |
pre-generated a couple of textures for us.
One is an alpha channel, that is white
| | 01:12 |
where there should be paint and black
where I feel like the lower region is
| | 01:16 |
going to show through.
And there's also this bump, or
| | 01:19 |
displacement map, that is white in those
regions where the paint is peeled the most
| | 01:23 |
away from the surface.
And black in those regions where it's
| | 01:26 |
closest to the surface.
Now, this isn't perfect but it should
| | 01:29 |
probably get us close enough for the
effect that we want.
| | 01:33 |
In order to create this I've got a tea pot
and base paint material.
| | 01:37 |
Let's just take a look at that base paint
material.
| | 01:40 |
The color is a light blue, not quite what
we have from the image but a pretty good start.
| | 01:44 |
And the illumination model is Oren-Nayer
so it's not at all shiny.
| | 01:47 |
So let's go ahead and duplicate this base
layer by holding down the Cmd or Ctrl key
| | 01:52 |
+ dragging.
And I'm going to name this Cracking Paint.
| | 01:56 |
And I'm going to temporarily replace the
material on my teapot with this.
| | 02:00 |
So, I'm going to click and drag cracking
paint onto the texture tag that's on my teapot.
| | 02:06 |
Let's go ahead and load in that alpha
channel first.
| | 02:08 |
So go to alpha and turn that on.
Click on those three dots next to the
| | 02:12 |
texture and select your
blistered_alpha.png file.
| | 02:16 |
Looking at this now, we see that we
already have a nice cracked appearnce to
| | 02:21 |
our pane.
But the surface seems very flat.
| | 02:24 |
I'm now going to go ahead and use my bump
channel to try to bring this surface up a bit.
| | 02:28 |
So turn on Bump, click on those three dots
next to texture, and load in our blistered
| | 02:33 |
map displacement and choose okay.
And this gives us something like this.
| | 02:38 |
It's alright.
Let's see what happens when we increase
| | 02:41 |
the strength of our bump significantly.
It's doing something, but it's just not
| | 02:44 |
giving me the appearance that I want.
And for this, we're going to use something
| | 02:48 |
called the normal channel.
The normal channel is sort of like a child
| | 02:51 |
of the bump channel and the displacement
channel.
| | 02:53 |
It allows you to add surface roughness to
your object that look much better than bump.
| | 02:58 |
Without the need for really detailed
geometry like the displacement channel
| | 03:01 |
asks for so go ahead and turn on the
normal channel.
| | 03:04 |
Lets load in that blistered bump
displacement image again.
| | 03:08 |
And when we render we get a very strange
result.
| | 03:11 |
I'm going to temporarily turn off global
illumination so our renders come up a bit quicker.
| | 03:15 |
So go into your Renders Settings, turn off
Global Illumination and then close the
| | 03:21 |
render settings.
We now get this.
| | 03:23 |
It's still pretty slow and that's probably
due to ambient occlusion.
| | 03:26 |
Now the appearance here is pretty strange
and that's because the normals channel
| | 03:29 |
actually doesn't take a black and white
image.
| | 03:31 |
It takes an RGB image.
But I don't have a specific normals
| | 03:34 |
texture generated, so we're going to use a
special shader that takes our black and
| | 03:37 |
white image and makes it readable by the
normal layer.
| | 03:39 |
So click on that triangle and navigate
down to effects normalizer.
| | 03:44 |
The normalizer allows us to go into our
texture here and adjust its appearance.
| | 03:50 |
Go ahead and increase the strength here.
I'm going to choose a value of 100 and I'm
| | 03:56 |
going to change my filter from Condensed
to Sobel 4X.
| | 04:00 |
And if you right click on the filter here
and choose show help you can read up on
| | 04:04 |
these various filters in the manual and
figure out which one's going to be best
| | 04:07 |
for you.
If you increase the delta value, you're
| | 04:11 |
going to increase the overall strength of
this.
| | 04:13 |
And I'm finding that there's a lot of
really fine detail, a lot of fine noise
| | 04:18 |
here that I don't want.
So what I'm going to do is add a very
| | 04:21 |
slight blur to my image.
So my blur offset here, I'm going to set
| | 04:25 |
to 0.1 percent.
Let's smooth things out a bit, maybe
| | 04:28 |
that's not quite enough, I'm going to try
a full 1%.
| | 04:31 |
And there we are, we now have a more
smooth bump for our paint that's going
| | 04:35 |
over our surface.
Now as I render this I'm seeing a pretty
| | 04:39 |
good looking paint, but if I get in close
to certain regions I start to see that
| | 04:43 |
there's actually no surface underneath
this is showing.
| | 04:46 |
So what I want to do is actually build a
lower surface, and to do that, I'm
| | 04:50 |
going to duplicate my teapot.
And I'm going to name it, Teapot Inner.
| | 04:57 |
I'm going to take my base paint, from my
Materials browser down here and drag it
| | 05:00 |
onto my teapot inner.
So I've got a plain paint.
| | 05:03 |
Now the problem, right now, is that my
teapot and my inner teapot are in the
| | 05:07 |
exact same position.
So I want to take all of the polygons of
| | 05:11 |
my Teapot Inner and just force them in a
little bit, to make it a little bit thinner.
| | 05:15 |
And I could do that by selecting all the
polygons and using a normal move or
| | 05:20 |
adjusting my splines, but there's a trick
for doing this really easily.
| | 05:23 |
And that is to add what's called a
displacer deformer.
| | 05:26 |
So go ahead and click on the displacer and
drag it in to your Teapot Inner as the
| | 05:30 |
last object below all of your other
objects.
| | 05:33 |
The displacer basically does the same
thing as the displacement channel on your
| | 05:37 |
material, but it allows you to preview it
in the editor.
| | 05:40 |
Go to the Shading tab and click on the
triangle next to Shader.
| | 05:44 |
Load in a color and the color I've
selected is white.
| | 05:48 |
Now, what you'll notice is that we now
have a very pillowy marshmallowy looking object.
| | 05:51 |
If I go to my object tab here, I can
adjust the height that it is pushing out
| | 05:57 |
my surface.
Right now, it's set to intensity centered.
| | 06:00 |
I'm going to change this to just Intensity
and I'm going to set the height to
| | 06:03 |
negative 1 and see what happens.
It's looking alright but I don't think my
| | 06:08 |
surface is actually a full 1 centimeter
away.
| | 06:10 |
So I'm going to change that to negative .1
and now when I look I've got a distinct
| | 06:15 |
outer surface and inner surface.
Now, if I was really good I'd go back into
| | 06:19 |
my alpha channel and paint some regions
totally black.
| | 06:23 |
To represent those places where there are
no paint chips on the top layer, but I'll
| | 06:26 |
leave that as an exercise to you.
Layering materials like this can help you
| | 06:30 |
create objects that have an evident
history.
| | 06:33 |
By using the normal channel, you can also
add an appearance of dimensionality to
| | 06:36 |
your textures.
| | 06:37 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
ConclusionNext steps| 00:00 |
Now that you've completed the course, you
may be wondering about some next steps.
| | 00:03 |
Let me recommend some courses to you.
Rob Gerret's CINEMA 4D Essentials covers a
| | 00:08 |
lot of the same ground that we do.
However, he also talks about texturing
| | 00:11 |
with body paint.
And that's something that we really didn't
| | 00:14 |
have a chance touch on.
And body paint is a really great tool in
| | 00:17 |
CINEMA 4D, that allows you to paint
directly onto your models.
| | 00:20 |
And it's defiantly worth a look.
You might also want to take a look at my
| | 00:23 |
course, Production Rendering Techniques in
CINEMA 4D.
| | 00:27 |
In it, you'll find some rendering
techniques as well as some information on lighting.
| | 00:30 |
And lighting really is the key difference
between a good looking render and a great
| | 00:34 |
looking render.
I'd also like to recommend an amazing free
| | 00:37 |
resource, Grayscalegorilla.com.
Nick Cambell and his contributors Chris
| | 00:43 |
Schmidt and a number of others have
created a really great resource with lots
| | 00:46 |
of tutorials on texturing and lighting for
specific cases.
| | 00:50 |
If you'd like an even more in depth
understanding of a lot of the content that
| | 00:54 |
we've covered, you might consider
purchasing a copy of Digital Lighting and
| | 00:58 |
Rendering by Jeremy Birn.
It's a fantastic book and I recommend it
| | 01:01 |
to all beginners in CG.
Thanks so much for watching and best of
| | 01:04 |
luck as you create those materials.
| | 01:06 |
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