Adding texture with shaders

Quite often when you create metallic materials they look a little too perfect and too shiny. And one of the things that sets Cinema 4D Lite, apart from things like After Effects is you can actually add texture to your surfaces. As well as just adjusting attributes in terms of reflection. And specular highlights and things like that. So, texture will actually add depth to the surface, allowing you to create a kind of rough or bumpy surface. Which looks a little less perfect than this shiny surface we have here.

So, we're in chapter 804 c4d. If you double click the metal material down here in the Material manager, to open it up. And in here, we have a section called Bump. And bump is what will add texture to your surface. Now at the moment, nothing is adding a bump. In order to add a bump, you need either load an image to control the bump or you can create your own texture using what are called shaders. Now you can also load the image here.

And if you loaded the image, it would be called a Bitmap shader, so you're basically using an image to control the surface properties of your material. Or you can choose one of these, and these are custom shaders that you can use to create various different textures and patterns. I'm going to choose one that you'll be familiar with, noise. Now, anyone that's used After Effects will be familiar with the term noise. From fractal noise, turbulent noise and all those other lovely plugins that you use.

And this is similar but you can see what it's doing. It's taking this noise and creating like a bumpy texture from it. And this is giving me feedback, as to how that will look on the object. You can see down here, that it's way too much. Really over the top for this. So, what we're going to do is, you see this little black triangle? You can actually open up the (INAUDIBLE) and get control of the shader itself. So, you've got Basic and Shader tab. If we go down to the Shader tab, first thing we can adjust is the color.

We're going to leave those though. The other thing that you can adjust is the type of noise. And if I just move that over here, and click on that, you should see a list of different noise types. So we have box noise, blistered turbulence, (UNKNOWN), What I'm going to do is stick with the default one, just to show you what you can do with the default noise. But feel free to explore that a little bit later. Now the first thing we're going to change is the global scale of the noise.

We're going to bring that way down to about 5%. Because we want a really fine noise. In fact, we could go even lower than that. I think 3% would be plenty for us, just to create the texture we want. And then if we scroll down here, you'll notice you have various different sliders for brightness and contrast. So, I could bring the contrast down, and maybe the brightness up. And that's going to smooth out that noise a little bit more. Now you'll notice things are really starting to slow down as I start to add more channels, bumps, specular, reflection, it's all having to be calculated.

But don't worry because I'll show you ways of speeding up this later. But what you could do is just maybe make. Your preview area a little bit smaller while we're doing this. We only need to see a small section. And we'll also bring down the bump strength, so I'm going to bring that down really quite low, probably to about 3% again. So, now we have a very slight surface texture created by that bump map. I'm going to bring it down even lower. So it's just a very, very slight suggestion of a surface.

And you'll see that if I switch it off and on again, it just adds a little bit of roughness to that surface so it's not quite as perfect as it was before. Now I want you to have a play with this. Also have a play with the different noise types. Go into the Noise section and try out some of the different noises. Let's just show you some of those. So maybe try some of these, as well, some different ones and have a bit of fun experimenting with using noise to create bump maps.