Advanced Label Texturing in Cinema 4D & Redshift

hi guys ross here and welcome back to another video so in today's video i'm going to be showing you how i created this label using cinema 4d and redshift we're going to be talking about how to set up the different embossings different finishes how to get a realistic paper texture but also a few tips and tricks on lighting your scene and really getting the most out of your label so without further ado let's jump straight into this project and show you how to set up one of these labels so we're in cinema 4d and i'm just going to lock the render view so i can jump out of the camera really quickly and you can see this is the setup for this project and we've got a bunch of different lights going on which are all doing slightly different things some of them are really helping to kind of showcase these different finishes while some are just acting as kind of key lights for the label i'm going to go through these a little bit later but i do just want to dive straight into the label and kind of get stuck into the nitty and gritty so let's jump into our label material we have here and have a look at how this is set up now depending on your experience with redshift this may look fairly simple to you or it may look pretty complex but i'm going to break it down either way and hopefully you guys find something useful in it but first off i want to talk about my kind of approach to a project like this or setting up a label like this with different embossings and different finishes so this is actually a client project and when they came to me they said okay we want this label it's going to have this slightly rough card paper texture to it it's going to have an embossing on the logo and it's also going to have a nice uv glossy finish on the water droplet so in my mind i'm thinking okay we need to create the base label which is going to have no finishes just going to be used to get a really nice paper texture and just get the reflection the roughness at the right amount and then we need to create a material for the logo where it says oh water which is going to be the embossed glossy finish and then we also need to create another material for the embossed glossy water droplet so that's three materials which you can see here in this material setup so we have the base label here so if i plug this into the surface i have a shortcut set to shift q but you can go up to tools and connect node to output so if i have this selected press shift q it's going to connect it straight to the surface which is really handy when i want to see a specific node so for example here is just the plain label you can see we have no finishes and this is being plugged into the diffuse color of this material so this is the base label material you can see we have no finishes it's literally just a label now there is a little bit of detail which we've already dialed in if i go to fixed scaling on the render view and start to zoom in and then let's just set a render region so it renders a bit quicker you can see that we're already getting a little bit of that paper texture come through and i'm going to show you guys how to set that up really quickly so let's start to isolate these textures we have plugged in the diffuse label and this is just the artwork they supplied to me you can see in photoshop here we have a flat artwork which they actually supplied to me in illustrator but i've brought into photoshop and i'll talk a little bit more about that later but that is the flat artwork and you can see we're getting no reflection no paper texture nothing just a very simple artwork in there essentially so what we're going to start to do is actually dial in some of that paper texture so i'm using a paper texture from ccotextures.com if i just zoom out this is what it looks like when it's kind of wrapped onto the label and this can be found here ccotextures.com paper01 because it's under the creative commons license it means you can use it for personal commercial basically any type of work that you would like to so we've loaded in that texture and it actually comes with the roughness map it will come with a diffuse map and a normal map and we want to use the roughness map which is basically going to allow us to control uh the texture of the reflections so this is the default texture i've then ran it through a triplanar node which we probably didn't really need to use but basically it's going to allow us to make it a little bit smaller so you can see it's kind of shrunk down that texture and it's also going to try blend it throughout the object honestly we probably could have just used the texture and then gone into the remap here and just scaled this down you can see it actually gives us pretty much the same result as the triplaner but i usually like to use a triplaner especially for more complex objects because it's going to help to get you kind of clean uvs on corners and just save you uv unwrapping sometimes so we've used a triplaner node like i said to just shrink that texture down because you want the scaling to look realistic if the texture is too big the eye is going to catch that immediately and you're going to realize that you know it's a fake image and the texture looks all off that's not how a label would look like in real life and actually you have to go quite close to a label to really kind of capture those details so that's why we have shrunk the texture down now if i was to plug that tri planar straight into the reflection roughness and i'm actually going to take the bump out input off i'm just going to remove that quickly and i plug this into the surface with shift q again and let's just zoom back in and turn on that render region you can see we're starting to get some of that paper texture come through you can see it in the reflections here and you can also kind of just see it here where the highlight is and actually you know i will plug the bump back in which i will talk about in a second but you can see it's got quite a glossy finish to it and realistically labels aren't that glossy you can see especially here from where the light is hitting it on the left hand side it looks pretty glossy and that's like i said not how a label would work so we want to make it have a bit more of a matte finish and the way we can do that is by using a ramp so i just want to talk about how roughness works or glossiness when it comes to reflections and textures so if i just showcase this texture real quick it's got quite a dark gray finish to it and basically if we just had like a solid white color that's going to be zero glossiness so that's going to be a matte finish in terms of reflection and if we had a black color that's going to be completely glossy so for example if i got a color constant set this to white plug that into the reflection roughness and then plug that into the surface you can see we have a very matte finish if i just kind of crop that down you can see it's very matte there's no no glossiness to that whatsoever you can still see the paper texture because we've got it plugged into the bump but if i then change that color to black this should give us a very glossy result so let's turn that down this is going to take a second to refresh and now you can see we have a very glossy finish to our texture so basically like i said at the moment we have this gray paper texture quite dark gray which means it's on the glossier side so we need to use a ramp to remap the colors of this texture to brighten it up which we're doing using this ramp node here so if i connected that to the surface you can see we've brightened up that texture we've clamped the black values a little bit we've significantly increased the texture brightness by just bringing this white slider in so now when we plug that into the reflection roughness and then plug that material into the surface you can see the finish is much more matte compared to the previous darker texture we had which was giving us a glossier result so this ramp node is super powerful i use it in pretty much all my textures especially when it comes to actually loading textures like this in where i need to adjust the brightness the ramp node is super helpful and you can actually use this to recolor textures as well but for a roughness map we need to keep it black and white so just increasing and kind of changing the positions of these points here we can increase the brightness of the texture and give us a nice matte finish which looks more realistic so you can see as well we're getting some really nice bump details in and like i mentioned a minute ago we're using a bump map here so like i said the paper texture comes with a normal map so we've plugged that in so that's the exact same paper texture but just on a normal run this through a tri-planer so that it matches the same size as the texture being used for the reflection roughness and then we're just plugging that into a bump map which is basically displacing um the material um but a bump is a bit more subtle than displacement bit easier on the processing power um and it's more for kind of smaller details so you can see we have a really nice paper finish to this and if i just disable that bump so if i just cut that line there you're going to see we're going to lose a lot of detail because it's not catching those reflections on those bumps and you can see it is a little bit because obviously we have the texture plugged into the reflection roughness but that bump is really helping to add another level of detail to that label so i'm just going to undo that and let's disable that render region and go to fit window and like i said because these details are quite small when it comes to an actual label you're not going to pick up on them too easily when you're looking at the full image but it is just a subtle detail to really help to increase that realism and when we start to get a cleaner render from this when we let it render out for a little bit you'll start to see those paper details come through and it's just a really nice kind of detail in there to help to increase the realism so we've got our base label there we've got a really strong starting point but what we need to do now is start to add in those extra embossings and glossy finishes so i'm going to run through this texture and then i'm going to start to show you how you can actually set everything you need to set up in photoshop so our next material is going to be for the water droplet and basically what we want for this is a super glossy material so um we have so to start off we have the same diffuse map plugged into the diffuse color because obviously we want to pick up the color and the artwork as a starting point but if we actually dive into the material we have zero roughness and we have an ior of three which is closer to what a kind of aluminium chrome ior would be and basically the higher the number the glossier the finish is going to be so we could crank this all the way up to 10 and get a super bright glossy material but three is a good enough amount to get some really nice results so we've got that base texture plugged in and we have then actually created a normal map for that drop so this is going to be used to drive the embossing of this material so if i plug this material into the surface you can see that we're already getting that embossing on that water droplet there but because it's a super glossy material we're starting to pick up some gloss on the actual label itself so by using this material blender we're actually able to isolate this material so like i said we're stacking up these different materials and then we're using textures to basically isolate each area of the label so if i connected the material blender to the surface this is our final output you can see we have our base texture we're going to have our water droplet and the way we've managed to isolate that super glossy finish just to that water droplet is through a alpha mask texture so if i just connect that to the surface really quick you can see we have a black and white mask here so what's basically happening is we've plugged in this material into layer one so we have our base label plugged into the base layer we have our super glossy water droplet plugged into layer one which if i just disconnected all these lines really quick plug the material blender in and let's enable layer one and just set it to white so now we have layer one but it's got no mask to it so it's basically multiplying it onto the base layer so you can see we're getting the embossed water droplet but now we've got that super glossy finish across the whole label because we have nothing to mask it out to that water droplet so we're using this texture here like i showed you a second ago which is a black and white texture and we're able to plug this into the material blender and we want to effect layer one because that's our water droplet material and we want to plug that into the blend color so this is basically going to act as a mask for this material for layer one and allow us to just keep the glossiness in that area so the way that alpha masks work is that anything that's white is going to be visible and anything that's black is going to be hidden so if i now plug this material blender into the surface now i do need to untick additive because basically that's still keeping it on multiply you just want to untick that we're just going to leave you with the default diffuse color and then just isolate this material using this alpha mask so you can see how this starts to work we now just need to create another alpha mask for the logo and then create another glossy material for the logo let's dive into photoshop and you can see we have the flat artwork which the client has provided and this originally was provided in illustrator but i brought it over into photoshop which is where i like to kind of set up my labels for cinema 4d just because it's a little bit easier okay so you can see we have a few different variants because there was a few different bottles i had to do but this is the cucumber one and you can see it's a smart object which means it's going to actually link back to the original illustrator artwork which they provided me so it's going to load up illustrator real quick and i think we're going to be missing a few links but i'm not going to get too worried about that so let's ignore those and basically this is going to allow me to kind of um manipulate this label and then it's going to update in photoshop so if i deleted this logo saved it and then go to photoshop it's going to update it and because we're missing the links it's going to remove those two so i'm just going to undo that quickly but you can see how we can start to kind of take different elements we need and use these to create masks now the best way to do this is actually to right click on our diffuse layer and go a new smart object via copy which basically means if i dive into this smart object ignore those dive into here and if i was to delete this logo here save this go back into photoshop see it's missing from this layer but then if i go back to the layer we had before everything's still there whereas if i was to just duplicate it without making it a new smart object and i updated this new layer it's actually going to update the original one as well so you just want to make sure you're doing that whenever you're making an adjustment to the smart object unless you want them all to be linked so this is our new smart object and obviously you can see we're missing some of the links okay so i'm going to dive back into that smart object let's just ignore all those and let's just undo that so we have the logo back so let's say we just want to isolate this logo because we need this to be used as the mask so what i'm going to actually do is select everything hold shift and click the logo to deselect it and then we're also going to deselect the background layer so now if i delete everything we have the background white layer and we also have the logo layer so if i save this now it's updated in photoshop and now we just have the logo and a white layer now the reason why i keep the background layer is because if i deleted it saved it go into photoshop you can see it's going to reposition that logo to where it thinks the center is whereas if we keep that background layer in it's still kind of treating this as the art board so it'll keep that logo in place and it doesn't really matter because then we can just get the magic wand tool uh select part of the logo and then go select similar and then we could just create a mask so we have something like that which is basically how we're going to create this mask for the logo so i'm going to press w on my keyboard get the magic wand tool select our logo and then select similar and then i'm just going to create a new layer and let's just go edit fill and let's fill it with white hit ok com control d to deselect create a new layer below it and fill that with black so now we have this white and black alpha mask and pretty much we can just export this as a png and you can see if i go into my texture folder i've actually exported this already and we have that black and white alpha mask for the logo which is the same as the one i showed you a second ago with a water droplet so you can create your alpha masks this way so we have one for the logo but if i wanted to go back to the original label i could just right click new smart object via copy and do the same with the water droplet so we've got the alpha mask for it now we need to create the normal map which is what you're seeing here this is going to allow us to create a bump map which is going to give us the embossing we need and really helped kind of dial in that extra level of detail so the way we can do that is actually just select the white and black layers we've made so the logo and the black background and i'm going to duplicate these by pressing ctrl j or command j if you're on a mac right click and convert to smart object and if i go up to filter 3d and generate normal map it's going to kind of do its thing and you can see now it's created a normal map for us and we get a lovely little preview here which i can scroll around um hold on it's a little bit temperamental there we go uh showing us what the normal map looks like projected onto a sphere so by default it's giving us a blur of two but if i was to crank this up to something like 20 we're gonna see update here on our artboard but also update in the little preview here so you can kind of tweak with this until you get a right amount of blur i'd probably go for something like five maybe so we get some nice soft edges there because if you actually look at most embossings they do have quite a soft edge to them and they are very very subtle so so you don't want it to have a harsh edge you do want it to have quite a nice soft finish to it so we can hit ok on that it's going to convert it to a normal map and if for any reason you know you load into cinema and it is too soft or it's too harsh because we convert it to a smart object we can actually dive in here it's going to open it back up and we can tweak with the settings adjust the blur adjust the detail scale and tweak that until you get a result that you're happy with so now we can do the same just export this as a png you can see if i go into my texture folder i have the logo normal here and then also the mask so now we have the alpha mask and the normal map so you can basically do this with any part of the artwork that you need just isolate the areas in illustrator bring them into photoshop create a mask out of them and then you can use that to create a normal map so pretty quickly we've created a bunch of different textures to drive the bump and drive the alpha mask which we can then bring into cinema 4d so we're going to dive back into there and you can see where this is going we're now going to do the exact same process with the logo so we have a normal map created for the logo just make sure you enable the gamma override uh plug that into a bump plug that into a material and we're gonna then plug that into the material blender so if i just go up here layer two layer color two so we're gonna plug that in and you can see by default nothing has happened nothing's changed and that's because when you don't have a texture plugged into the blend color it's gonna be set to black which means nothing is happening so we're gonna take that same alpha mask but this time for the logo and plug that into the blend color too now if we plug the material blender back in we have that lovely embossed logo at the top and that essentially is how i set up the label so i'm going to run through the lights just to kind of finish off this video and show you how to really showcase these different finishes and get the best result from your label so i'm quickly going to do a little setup here so i'm going to lock the render view so i can jump out of the camera and still keep the camera in place here and let's just go through the lights one by one so so we're going to start off with the background hdr which we've actually excluded from the label so it's affecting everything except the label which allows us to get these really nice reflections on the bottle itself i've then used basically a duplicate of that hdr but this time including the label um i've adjusted the hdr a little bit so that the lighting's more focused in this middle bit here and i've also turned down the exposure because when i used the same hdr as the background one the label was overexposed but the background wasn't so i just had to separate them out into two separate ones so this bottle hdr here i've just bumped down the exposure so it doesn't blow the label out and you can see already we're starting to pick up on some of these really nice details in the label so if i just isolate this down here and zoom in you can start to see how we're already picking up on that paper texture which looks really nice and to kind of push this further i have created some more lights so let me just fit that back to the window so we have this left label light here which is just this big area light being used to brighten up the left hand side of the label and you can see it's already starting to catch the reflections on the embossed logo which is really nice we're actually using a gradient here which is from the grayscale gorilla area light maps pack from the grayscale gorilla plus membership but to be honest you can just add a shader graph and create a ramp in there and the reason why we're doing this is just to give it a softer fall off which just gives us kind of smoother lighting i've then created the exact same light on the right hand side just to brighten up the right hand side of this label but this time using a soft box so we just get again some more detail into the actual light itself and helps to give us some softer results the reason why i use that i think is because the gradient wasn't giving me the result i wanted so i just tried a different image again this is from the area light maps volume 2 from grayscale gorilla i then have this light which is shining through the back wall here um because i've actually added some translucency to this background here so i can shine this light through the back which is not only going to brighten up the background but it's also going to help to inject some light into the liquid itself just helping to brighten up the whole scene and the bottle as well we're then going to add a fill light here which is this big one on the right hand side which is excluding the background and the label so it's just being used to add this highlight to the glass itself and this has a soft box texture on it which has given us kind of like a bluish tone to it like i said in the last video you want to mix some warmer and cooler tones in there so we have a bit of a contrast between this right light and this left light to just add a little bit more detail we then have this light shining through the bottom which is brightening up this label inside so it's literally this tiny area light here if i can select it there we go it's just this tiny light shining through the bottom which if i just disable quickly you can see the label looks super dark inside if i just turn it on helps just brighten it up just helps to give the scene a brighter feel to it and i've actually turned down the spread on this so that it doesn't spread the light out onto the front label and solely just kind of shoots up through the middle there and these last two lights which i'm actually going to show you by themselves are going to be to get the final finishes on this label so you can see at the moment we're not really highlighting those really nice glossy finishes to the water droplet and to the logo so the way to do that is to get some lights which are solely focusing on glossiness so if i turn off all these lights and let's turn on this logo finish here you can see in the settings of this light if i go to ray you can see i've unticked effects diffuse so this is purely just affecting specular which is basically just the reflections and i do just want to dive back into the label really quickly because i have added something to add another level of detail to this water droplet you can see i have this ramp node here if i connect this to the output you can see it's fading from black to white here so basically i'm using this to mask where the reflection is on this water droplet so if i disable that node you can see we've got a super harsh edge there whereas if i plug that into the reflection color we're getting a softer fall-off on that water droplet so it just gives it kind of like a nice smooth glossy finish to it just by using a horizontal ramp of black to white just to kind of fade out that glossiness and that reflection so that's just a small little tip you can do there um and yeah i then have an additional light set up the same way just affecting specular to brighten up the left hand side of the logo here so then when we turn on all the lights this is the finished result so you can see those final two lights are really helping to emphasize and highlight those finishes that we've created and really showcase all the hard work we've put into that material um so it is really important that you set up your lighting in a way that kind of showcases your label in the best way possible so hopefully you guys found this tutorial helpful hopefully i kind of went over everything and explained it in a way that made sense um if you do have any questions let me know in the comment section down below i'm always happy to help out with any queries you may have if you did find this video helpful hit that like button uh hit that subscribe button and hit that notification bell so you know when i next upload i'm really trying to get back on this streak of uploading tutorials i found it really motivating after posting the last video and it did so well so i'm going to keep it up do the best i can pump out as much content as i can for you guys and hopefully you guys find it helpful and on that note i'm gonna stop waffling enjoy the rest of your day you guys and i will catch you in the next video alright peace

Channel: Ross Mason

Views: 11,962

Keywords: iamrossmason, Ross Mason, ross, graphic design, ross mason, cinema 4d redshift, cinema 4d speedart, rendering, cgi, cg, 3d, 3d render, motion design, motion graphics, animation, 3d animation, c4d process, c4d tut, redshift, redshift render, advanced label texturing, packaging texturing, 3d packaging render, bottle render, bottle render c4d, cinema 4d bottle render, redshift texturing, cinema 4d texturing, cinema 4d embossing

Id: N4JSWe31eL4

Length: 26min 47sec (1607 seconds)

Published: Sun May 02 2021