From the course: Learning Cinema 4D Lite for After Effects

Adding surface detail with a Relief object

From the course: Learning Cinema 4D Lite for After Effects

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Adding surface detail with a Relief object

We're in chapter 313.C4D if you want to follow along. And we've had to look at how we can add detail to our object by carving holes in the object and also applying other objects to the object. But one object we haven't really looked at which is slightly different from the others is the Relief object. And what the Relief object allows us to do is add detail based on an image file. So we're going to say, add a relief object. I'm going to drag it up here, roughly to where the chest is, and at the moment you can't really see anything. This little box that indicates the relief object. And if we have a look over in the Object properties in the Attributes manager, it asks us to choose a Texture layer, and I'm going to do that now. I'm going to go into my project files Chapter 3 and into the text folder, there is a folder and a file called Robot_texture.png. If I double click that to apply it, see what it does, it applies this image and creates a texture from it. Now, if you want to see that image, you can open that in Photoshop or Preview, or any other application that you can view PNGs in. It's just a black and white image, a very simple one. And any areas that are black will be kind of punched into the layer. Any areas that are white will be pulled out from the layer. So, it creates a kind of displacement, if you like, and we can change the orientation of that. So if I put that plus z or, you know, whatever I decide to have it at, that's fine. Okay. Now, I can change the size, obviously, I want to do that. So I'm going to change that to 100. And we'll maybe make the y value 20. Okay? And the depth, we'll make 20 as well. And that's going to make a much smaller shape. Let's just make that a little bit bigger. Let's put the y value. Now you get a little bit confused, because we've rotated it. Of course, the x, y and z have kind of shifted around. And so, actually adjusting the z value feels like I'm adjusting the y value, because of the way that it's rotated. And we can put her into position, and there you can see we've added a bit of relief to our object. Just a very quick way of adding detail to an object. And of course you can adjust the settings. Adjust the depth if you want to. And the depth segments give it a little bit more or less detail. You can also adjust the bottom detail as well to make it look like it's kind of a flatter edge rather than a pointed edge. So, a really nice easy way of adding detail to your image, you can also use it to add like little button shapes and things like that. So a relief object is a quick way using an image to add texture detail to the surface of your object.

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