From the course: Cinema 4D R18 Essential Training: Product Visualization and Design

Luminous materials - CINEMA 4D Tutorial

From the course: Cinema 4D R18 Essential Training: Product Visualization and Design

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Luminous materials

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- [Narrator] We can use the Luminance channel to simulate a self illuminating object. So we've got this simple scene to kick off the example. And you can see we only have a material on the cube currently. So, I've got this set to display in Quick Shading just so we can see what's going on. I actually have a, the Gouraud Shading We have a very low light somewhere over here. And so we can't actually see too much of what's going on. Let's just take a render and we'll just see what this looks like in the current setup. So, Shift R, and I'm going to render the picture view, okay. Barely visible, okay so, now let's come back out and we'll create a new material and just going to create a duplicate of this so, I'm going to click it and command drag it out. And I'm going to rename this to be LUM. And let's open that up, and we will enable the Luminous channel. And I want to come over to the Color channel. And this is a simple work flow tip to take one color, that we have already set up in the color channel here. And we can just click it, and the icon changes. And we can move over and then just drop it onto the Luminance, like so. And now we've got the same color copied across. We can disable the Color channel, and just close down that material editor. Now let's drop this unto the sphere. So I'll drag and drop it on and you can see that we have a luminous material on here. Now the Luminance channel, it does work in a similar way to the Color channel. Where what you're seeing you can pick a color but the Luminance channel is not effected by lights in the scene. As we can see here, so, let's take a render now and just have a look at what we've got. Okay so still pretty dark but you can see that sphere is very bright in fact. And, as we said before it's knowing the lighting. It is itself it's own light, and now when this gets interesting is when we start to add global illumination. And so I'm just going to come up to the Render Settings and enable Global Illumination. Not even going to look at the settings that I've set up for this, and don't worry we'll get to how this was was setup in a later chapter. For now let's just look at what happens when we render with Global Illumination turned on. So the Global Illumination Is taking this lighting information from our sphere and illuminating the objects around it. And suddenly this scene has become more vibrant and bright and that sphere, got this lovely lighting effect happening here at the base and it's just giving a beautiful glow onto the cube. So, now let's look at another example. In this example we want the buttons of the hair dryer to light up. Or maybe have that sort of nice blue glow. So, look at the buttons material. And, we need to turn on the Luminance channel. Currently we have that Color channel turned on. Now we don't need to have an image in here we can just rely on the Alpha channel. So I'm going to turn off the color and you can see that we've got an Alpha channel as well. So we need to do in the Luminance is actually just come over and maybe choose a color that we want the buttons to be when they're illuminated. So, I'm going to go for this blue here, this silver electric blue. And you can see even in the Viewport that we're getting some feedback there, so let's just render this. And you can see now that we have some bright illuminated buttons. So the Luminance channel allows you to create light emitting materials which when applied to objects make them luminous.

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