5 Ways to Use Surface Imperfections in Arnold in Cinema 4D | Greyscalegorilla Product Training

hey chad here from grayscale gorilla and i get this question a lot about our surface and perfection maps that we have in grayscale gorilla plus people aren't really sure where to put them what's the best practice what's the best way to use these things so i went ahead and made a video showing my favorite ways of using surface imperfection maps in arnold so let's check it out all right so let's talk about some surface imperfection maps in arnold here so if you aren't familiar with grayscale gorilla plus you should be because it's awesome and we have a ton of surface imperfection maps uh different kinds of kinds of stuff scratches smudges crust all kinds of stuff we also have materials tons and tons of materials and hdris for plus members and if you're not a member go check it out anyway all right so let's grab in our plus library here which you have access to all this amazing stuff let's grab one of these new crust maps and bring that in and if you have never heard of a surface imperfection map generally what they are are black and white tileable images help that help you make things look less perfect and there all kinds of stuff there's in our case we have smudges to make things look smudgy scratches we have crust we have all kinds of stuff that that are gonna help you make your stuff look more realistic and i'm gonna walk you through some of my favorite uses of these types of maps today here in arnold okay so we've got we've dragged our crust in here and let's go ahead and just isolate that out to the viewport and or the ipr let's also tile it so we get a little bit more detail so typically when i'm using a surface imperfection map i'm going to be piping it into either a ramp or a range and let's go ahead and throw it into this ramp so you can see what that looks like the reason you would throw it into a ramp is that you want to control the white values you want to be able to clamp it visually so if i grab pipe it into a ramp like this and i have the type set to custom i can then sort of like start to clamp my blacks in i might even be able to you know mess around with my white a little bit i can even add other knots in here and get some really interesting looking effects really quickly here and really break it up a lot now typically i'm not really doing that typically i'm just kind of leaving it like this but i will clamp it down or maybe i'll even invert it if i right click this and say invert i can invert that gradient and get a completely different value so it's taking these black and white values of that map and re-mapping them along this gradient i can also change the value of that as well so if i just reset this down to default maybe i change this black value to like 50 gray and maybe this white is going to be just a little bit uh like maybe 69 so you can really just kind of come in here and mess with it visually and see it in the ipr which is kind of why i prefer using a ramp the other method that i sometimes will use is i'll throw it into a range which is going to be pretty much the exact same thing as the ramp but it's going to be a little a little bit more precise not necessarily precise but it's a little bit easier for me to use this in let's say like a roughness where i know the exact value that i want to map that remap this value to so the change range is exactly a good thing it's got an input range of zero to one and an output range of zero to one so if we clamp that black just by moving the input min up we're doing the same thing that we were doing in that ramp and we can clamp the white down like that and then of course the output is like what's the value of the output that you're remapping to so in our case it's still zero to one so if we wanted to make this not quite black we could make that point two or point four and if we wanted the white to not be white we could change that to point five and now we've got like a real subtle kind of uh surface imperfection going so this is very useful for things like roughness if you really need to get in there and control the actual output max okay so let's take a look at the first use case of this typically what i'm using these for is in roughness so here we have a material where i've got one of our smudges from our plus library brought in and i'm pushing that into a ramp where i'm just darkening the white a little bit and creating this smudged out look so if we just isolate this map here you can see it's kind of a greasy fingerprint kind of smudge map going on and then we're remapping those values so that they're not completely rough because if we left those at default from zero to one and we look at that material it's way way way too rough so that's remapping and piping this into the roughness of the spec of this material and it is going to be way way way too rough so we need to grab that ramp and grab that white and just kind of bring it down to a more manageable uh level and we might even clamp this black and maybe we don't want it to be completely black because we don't want the shiniest parts of this material to be completely shiny so that's feeling pretty good it's feeling pretty much like a a good amount of roughness there and again that's going into the roughness specular um so moving on we could then start to use these in different places like the bump so here we have a material where i'm taking that exact same kind of roughness but now i'm adding not a smudge actually this is needs to be renamed this is actually crust and this is going into a ramp rgb and into a bump and that bump is going into the normal geometry of this standard surface now this bump i i knocked the the the bump height way down but we could also do that in the ramp as well so if we make this default and when you say reset to default it's very very very bumpy it's not really what we want so maybe we want to clamp the black a little bit and maybe that black just wants to be 50 which is kind of the water level of this bump map and maybe we just want to add that little bit of of crust in there but maybe we don't want that to stick out we want that to stick in so i'm just going to make this dark instead and now we have sort of a pitted look to this material okay so the next one that we might want to do is a decal so what if we want to take a surface imperfection and make it look like a decal is kind of like worn away and is aged a little bit so let's take a look at that material so this one is pretty basic we've got another sort of crust material from the plus library piped into an rgb ramp kind of clamping it down a little bit and we're multiplying that on this textures alpha so we're splitting out this textures alpha by the way an image texture in arnold has an output of rgb and a so if you're using a png you can just turn on the alpha and you can output let me just zoom in on that so you guys can see a little bit better you can actually output the alpha right there so i'm just basically taking the alpha and i'm multiplying this crust on top of it from there i'm going into a layer rgba node which kind of acts like a photoshop comp it's got uh you know blending modes and whatnot and so i'm just basically taking the color in my my first layer here and i'm kind of sticking this decal on top so it looks like this so that's going into the standard surface color and then we have to still have the same roughness that we set up earlier and the same bump normal that we set up earlier so if we keep going down into this next one this next one gets a little bit more complicated so if we look at this we're using this time not only the standard surface of this painted material which you can see right here but we also introduced another material kind of this iron material and if you look there it's got some scratches in it because we're using some of our surface imperfection scratches which are found in our plus library we have a whole set of scratch maps which are fantastic so with those in here and we're kind of splitting this off and creating a bump map from it which is then going into our metal and then that that same scratch is getting clamped down into a ramp to reveal a mix shader so now we're using it to mix two different completely different materials so now we've got a a crust driving this decal we've got a fingerprint smudge driving the paint we've got another piece of crust driving the normal we've got a scratch map driving the two different materials this bullet mix shader so again we're using lots of different ones here to show you the the variety of stuff that you can do with surface imperfections okay so this last one here is probably the most complicated uh and don't don't be intimidated by this is not that much different than what we've been doing we've got the first couple materials that we talked about before but the big difference in this one is we also introduced kind of a white painted material that uh it kind of makes it look like maybe there was another white object next to it and it kind of chipped off some of the paint when it bumped into it and then this last one is like a dark gray almost black material and for that we're using a crust and we're clamping that map down through a ramp to kind of bring in some dirt into this and we can make that more dirty just by taking this last one and making it a little darker here or a little brighter rather bringing that matte so that it cuts into that dirt a little bit better so here we're layering one two three different mix shaders and you want to use mix shaders rather than a layered shader because these are a bit more optimized they're just a little bit more faster um so yeah we're it's very it's pretty simple we can just walk through real quick we've got our painted material that we set up that we walked through earlier we're adding that uh scratches that are revealing that iron then this next one is revealing some of that like paint that's kind of rubbed off from another object and this last one is dirt so here in this one shader we're looking at a bunch of different ways that you can use surface imperfections we're using it uh to cut out this texture we're using it in roughness using it in bump using it to reveal other materials so there are like a ton of uses for surface imperfections and uh as a plus member you get access to all of these and we're constantly coming out with new ones and and new materials and new hdris uh new plugins i'll you know just like go check out plus basically is what i'm trying to say because it's it's awesome anyway so these are just like some of my favorite uses of surface imperfections but there really aren't any rules you can kind of go out there and like mess with them and do what you want like create what you want with them that they're kind of malleable that way so i hope you got something out of the video let me know in the comments if there's something you want me to dive deeper on in the next one hope you enjoyed the video and i'll see you next time thanks for watching uh if you haven't subscribed to the channel consider subscribing if you liked the video got something out of it give us a thumbs up and if you want to learn more about our surface and perfection maps over on grayscale gorilla plus there's a link down below in the description i highly recommend checking out we've got tons of awesome stuff we've got plugins materials textures surface imperfection maps training we've got everything over in grayscale gorilla plus so go check it out and until next time i'll see you around

Channel: Greyscalegorilla

Views: 6,676

Keywords: Cinema 4D, c4d, tuts, tutorials, motion graphics, greyscalegorilla, c4d tutorials, cinema 4d tutorials, chad ashley, chad ashley arnold, surface imperfections, surface imperfections cinema 4d, surface imperfections c4d, surface imperfections arnold, arnold renderer, arnold renderer c4d, arnold renderer cinema 4d, gsg surface imperfections, greyscalegorilla surface imperfections

Id: RHoeYXJOqZw

Length: 10min 36sec (636 seconds)

Published: Thu May 27 2021