Cinema 4D: Metal / Rough Material Setup

[Music] hey guys it's sam for digital meet again and in this cinema 4d tutorial video we're going to be looking at how we can set up a metal rough material in cinema 4d so let's just go over this scene quick i've got a cube in the center of our view here and you can see it's got quite a bit of a subdivision going on there and we'll come to that in a minute and the scene is just basically a floor we've got a sky for our reflections with the hdr and we've got the camera that's locked off and that's the view we're looking through now and that's pretty much it and uh this is the scene that we're going to be using to actually view the material on this box object also i have a unity scene set up with these three boxes in it with some materials i've already set up here and these are the materials that we're going to be recreating inside cinema 4d now the reason that i've set this scene up is for its um comparative value really the these materials and their maps have been set up within unity standard shader that that shader is built for so you just plug in your maps and this is the result that you get so we can use this scene to compare to what we're seeing in cinema 4d to make sure that we're doing things correctly okay so first things first some of you may be thinking i don't know what you mean when you're saying metal rough it's also referred to sometimes as metallic roughness it's just a way of authoring materials which gives you a certain set of texture maps there's also another well-known method called spec gloss or specular glossiness so the two main types of authoring is spec glass and metal rough i prefer metal rough i just prefer authoring materials that way i use them in unity and i'd like to be able to use them in cinema 4d as well so let's have a look at a set of metal rough textures and just go over them quickly and talk about what each one of these textures does i should imagine i'm preaching to the choir with a lot of you but summer may not be so let's have a look at these quick so this is a wooden floor material in fact this is the material for this uh object here so let's just talk about these quickly first we've got the wood floor and you can see underscore ao this is ambient occlusion and the purpose of this map is to darken up places of the object that this map is on and we can even use this to darken up reflections darken up the specular uh even luminance actually so where this map is white it'll have no effect and where it's darker it'll have a diffusion effect moving on next we have the base color sometimes also known as the albedo map this is the actual color of the object obviously as the name implies but this map shouldn't have any lighting information in it whatsoever this should be pure color with no shadowing no specular highlights nothing like that it's just color next we have the height map and this will determine the relative height of the surface of an object typically full black will either be zero or pushing backwards and white will be pushing outwards and the high map will define that next we've got a metallic map this literally determines whether something's metal or not a lot of the time you'll see that this map is just pure black and the way this map works is if something's black it is not metal and if there's sections of the map that is white well then that part of the map is defined as a metal there really shouldn't be any in between because something's either a metal or not i.e a dielectric a non-metal or metallic a conductor next we have the normal map and i'm sure you're all familiar with this map um this is a lot like a bump map which uses black and white to determine sort of uh surface height normal maps kind of the same thing but there's an element of directionality to it as well so that's why you're getting this kind of purple color this is what a normal map should look like and then we get the roughness map and this determines what part of the object that this map is on is smooth or rough and because this is a roughness map the darker it is the more smooth it is and the more white it is the more rough it is on this map in particular you'll see that these areas here aren't very rough but then you get patches where it gets rougher like here so now we've gone over the maps that is used in a metal rough workflow we can actually start jumping in and plugging them into our cinema 4d material i've got no lights in the scene at present i'm using my hdr map down here which is on my sky object and i've got its texture in the luminance channel and i've got global illumination turned on in my render settings and that's what we're going to use to light the scene if i just give this a quick render now you'll get an idea of what the scene looks like so let's close that and create our material and we'll open this up and we'll call this wood floor because that's what we're going to deal with first so color it's pretty obvious we can plug in our base color map and this let's get this on our material as well and also i know that my maps are 2k so i'm actually going to go into the editor slot here and make sure that they're displayed at 2k in the viewport there we go a little bit more detail now so that's pretty much it for the um color map you can also see we've got a specular highlight here and that's because it when you create a cinema 4d material it's always got this default specular in now i'm going to remove that i rarely use specular in cinema 4d because it is basically like a fake reflection i'd rather have an actual reflection instead of sort of like a fake specular so i'm gonna get rid of that so that's our color dealt with next we've got diffusion now this is where our ambient occlusion map goes so let's um let's plug that in so there's our wood ao so we can plug that in there and it's very subtle you notice that in the cracks there if i turn this on and off it kind of darkens up those areas slightly so so far if we give this a render very flat looking we've got a bit of detail picked out in our ambient occlusion but that's pretty much it for now reflectance i'm going to skip over for now and actually just deal with the easier maps so next we have our normal map so we turn the normal channel on open up our textures and we plug in our normal map now there's something important to know about the metal rough workflow it depends what you're authoring these maps in so if you're using something like marmoset or substance painter or something like that and you choose their preset metal rough and kick these out more than likely you're gonna get a very particular type of normal map you might even find that if you download a texture set from an online material library you'll say oh that's a nice material i'll grab that you grab it you download it and you'll find that you've got two normal maps in there and that's because one is directx and the other is opengl now cinema uses opengl by default but it can use a directx as well now i know for a fact that when i created these textures i did it as a normal metal rough workflow so these normal maps are actually a direct text normal map so if you do plug in a directx normal map to your normal channel in cinema 4d you need to flip the y-axis so you need to check this on now these normal maps will behave correctly within cinema 4d moving on to displacement this is where the height map goes there's a difference between my unity scene here and my displacement because even though the height map is plugged into my materials in here they don't actually tessellate the surface of the geometry and push them out it's kind of like a faked effect you can do that in unity but you're going to have to use a different shader to the one that i'm using now but in cinema 4d this height map will actually determine what's displaced so if i turn this on in fact let's get a shot of this before displacement and after because displacement will only occur at render time unless um we put a displacement deformer on the object or something like that so that's what it looks like without and if i turn on the displacement and actually load our height map into this there we go our height map uh you can see that we got a height of 10 centimeters that's far too much and i think even one centimeter would be a bit extreme for you know a pretty flat material it's a it's a floor so i'm gonna put 0.5 in there and let's give this another render okay that's not bad there's a subtle difference between these two something else to take note of it as well is this intensity we've got the type intensity centered what that means is that anything on this map that is black will be pushed backwards into the object whereas anything that's y gets pushed out now you can actually turn this to intensity so what that means is anything that's black will basically be zero so it doesn't get pushed back in that's kind of its baseline so anything black will be the baseline and then it just deals with anything lighter than black gets pushed outward so you can choose whether you want it being pushed in and out in both directions or just outwards okay so that's all the maps dealt with all the all the easy to deal with maps something else i should note as well you may get more maps than i showed in my folder earlier you may also get an opacity map which deals with whether you can see through parts of the map or not and that would typically go in your alpha channel and you might even get a mission map and that would go in the luminance channel so there might be parts of your map that actually emits they light up in this case it's a floor so both of those things do not apply okay now onto the reflectance channel now this is where all the sort of action takes place really and this is how we're going to set it up i'm going to add a ggx and that's what you want to go for really and i'm going to rename this layer and you can see that it's completely changed the surface of our thing to this sort of metal and i'm going to say that this is my dielectric layer dielectric basically means non-conductor anything like plastic or wood or anything like that is considered a dielectric so first things first then with our dielectric layer um global reflection brightness can be left alone all of this stuff can be left alone we want ggx here the attenuation can be left alone as well leave it on average now roughness we can turn this right up because you can see actually by looking at the viewport that down here is very very smooth and we're getting some reflective details here and right up here it's very rough so the reflection is very diffused now we want our map our roughness map to determine whether this is rough or not and that's why we've got to turn it all the way up so let's go grab that map and open this up and we'll grab our roughness and now that's plugged in and you can see that nothing happened and this because this slide is down at zero we slide it all the way up and now our roughness map is actually determining uh what the surface of this object is like my reflection strength can be a hundred percent uh specular i'm going to bring all the way down because like i said before it's a fake reflection uh the bump strength there's nothing in there so this will actually have not much effect on the surface at all as far as i'm aware but we're going to leave that 100 anyway the layer color for the dielectric should always remain white so we can close that up as well mask we don't need one that could be left alone and the layer fresnel needs to be set to dielectric it's looking a bit more natural now we can close that back up layer sampling again we can leave that all alone now you might be thinking what about the index of refraction this can actually stay where it is this is actually an acceptable ior for the surface we're looking at and um yeah we can leave that alone so now let's have a let's have a look at our material now let's open our scene and come out the camera and uh see if we can get some uh it's a little bit hard because i'm just using a hdr to light this but if i were to create a light we probably wouldn't see a lot actually because i got rid of the specular but i'm just trying to see if we can see any of that roughness definition probably uh there we go yeah you can see some of it'll work here actually so it's definitely doing what it's meant to be doing if we go back into our camera view and give the scene a render i'd say that's pretty good we've picked out the details um it looks correct and that's great so you're probably thinking well what about the metal map at this point well we can actually set up a metal layer if you wanted to but with this material there's not much point because if i open up this and for argument's sake let's add another ggx and in the uh layer color let's have a look at the metal map here we go so this wooden floor metallic map it only contains information about whether something's metal or not and in this case it's a wooden floor so there is no metal and if you actually look at the map itself we can actually uh increase its size it's completely black so we know there's no metal in there it'd be pointless using it so as far as this materials goes we can not worry about metallic layer and if we open up our picture viewer and have a look at that and then compare it to our actual wooden floor material in uni i can honestly say that's pretty much spot on something else we should probably talk about while we're doing this at this stage as well is the fact that we're using the color channel now if you've watched my previous tutorial on setting up pbr materials for use in say pro render something like that what we did there was we went create materials new pbr material now you don't this is just a preset um maximum have nicely set up for us but you can actually just double click and create your own uh pbr pbr material if you wanted to but this is just a nice quick way of doing it and if we look in here in the reflectance channel well first of all you can see that the color channel is not even on it's not even being used if you go into the reflectance channel you can see that you've got a default diffuse which has been set to lambertian diffuse which is basically what the color channel is but instead of using the color channel which again is kind of like a quick i don't want to say fake but it's not physically accurate because it's not based on actual reflection where this one is so if you actually wanted to set up your metal rough workflow for use in a pbr setup you could do so i'll show you how to do that quickly we can turn off this color channel completely and we can create our own color channel in the reflectance layer so we can add we can go down to lamb version diffuse and then all we have to do in here is actually add into the layer color but first of all let's just call this diffuse so we know what we're dealing with and drag it down to the bottom as well your color usually sits at the bottom so in layer color let's just add our color channel in and now give it a render and you'll see that it's a bit more lighter and there's a good reason for that actually at present this checkerboard material down here we've got something in the color channel this checkerboard now if i turn that off i've also set this up with a reflectance channel as well which has got checkerboard in it so i'll turn that on now our studio floor is using a lambertian diffuse in the reflectance channel and our wooden floor is also a reflectance-based material now the upshot of this is and this is something that i'll probably make a video on in the future this global illumination is no longer needed because the workflow you're using is completely reflectance based you well i was about to say you get it for free but it ain't free um it could cause increased render times and all the rest of it but it's uh unlike the global illumination effect it doesn't use samples to approximate global illumination and then sort of blend these samples together it actually uses reflectance to do it so if i give this a render now even though this is turned off we should still get global illumination to some degree even in the physical renderer and as you can see it's taking longer and it's slightly more grainy we still have shadow that's been generated from the the bright areas of the sky map and we're still getting everything illuminated now you notice things are a little bit brighter so you'll probably have to adjust things to get the result you want okay so let's get this back to what it was using the color channel and this wooden floor let's get rid of the diffuse in the there and turn our color back on turn our global illumination on and we should be getting a very quick result now because we're back to what we were there we go so that's our first material let's get rid of this and let's move on to our next one let's open unity backup which is this material which is kind of like metallic panels if you like and it's good that i've set this scene up in uni because we can see what this should actually look like and what his surface behavior is when we set up the material in cinema 4d we'll know whether it looks correct or not because we've got something to compare it to so let's just go through this let's uh set up our new material let's open this bad boy up and uh again i'm gonna go to the editor and choose 2k because i know that's how big my maps are first things first let's go to the color channel let's go back one and go into metal panels and base color so here's our base color let's put that on here diffusion that'll be our ambient occlusion yeah we can see that it's added a little bit detail into the those bits there all of this we don't need to worry about yet let's remove that specular as well while we're at it let's go down to normal map and again we'll select that and again it is a direct text normal map in fact this shows it a lot better there's something not quite right here and actually if we create a um light you can see that it probably behaves a little bit weirdly yes it does actually so let's drag this light if i can grab it there we go that's what i'm trying to do grab this section of it now you see that the light is above this area but it's actually dark on top which is backwards and we'll see the underneath bit here he's actually been lit and that's why we need to flip the y direction in here so this behaves correctly and now you can see that it's darker underneath let's get rid of that light so our normal map is now correct next on our little list we've got a bit of displacement so let's load this up now i'm actually going to keep the intensity centered on this i think so let's grab the height map you can see it being pushed out there and i think that's a bit a little bit of overkill so i'm gonna say three centimeters because it should make these look like a sort of puffy little pillows maybe even more subtle than that two centimeters and let's give that a quick render to see what we've got yeah you can see things have been pushed out now this is what i was talking about the intensity centered or not so this is intensely centered and we've seen around the edges some trouble areas and this doesn't quite look right so it might be worth to actually deal with that in the displacement and say okay let's just go for intensity and see how that looks i'd say that's a little bit more subtle a little bit better but again now we've got it set to just intensity we can probably push these out a little bit more maybe four centimeters and see if we get a nice yeah there we go the middle bits are being pushed out a little bit more also something else that you should notice about the displacement as well and i didn't mention it on the last material because it wasn't really relevant whereas it is on this even though this box is subdivided there might not be enough detail to get like smooth edges when it pushes this geometry out so you get an option in displacement called sub polygon displacement and you can choose what the subdivision level is be careful with this because that is sort of exponential so a level of one it will subdivide this once a level of two it will look at the previous level and then subdivide that so you know don't go too mad with this but i'm gonna leave it at four and we'll do it again you can see that this is probably a lot smoother a lot more detail in there as well now all of that detail there just from maps um it's great so let's close this and let's deal with the big boy reflectance now we're going to deal with this one a little bit different to how we dealt with the last material and i'll get into the reasons why in a minute but you're probably thinking okay you add layer you make it dielectric and blah blah and all the rest of it so it's had a layer let's make it ggx again the type ggx the attenuation i've seen that a lot of people have got have the temptation of changing this to metal because it's a metal don't don't do that at all just leave this alone and let's have a look at our roughness map so again we turn the roughness all the way up because our roughness map is going to determine that and we'll open this up now while we've got this open i want to point out something here we could make a dielectric layer but in this case it would be absolutely pointless because if we look at these large and go to our metal map so metal panels this is our metallic map remember what i'm saying before something that's black is not on a metal it's a dielectric and something that's white is metallic you can see that the entire map is metal so there'd be absolutely no point in this case making a dielectric layer because none of it is dielectric so let's just load our roughness map into our roughness channel and also let's uh get our view back so we can see what's going on and also let's get rid of this missing material now okay so back to our material so i'm actually going to name this layer metallic so like i said ggx average roughness is 100 with a map in it and there it is we can fold that back up the reflection strength is 100 the specular strength again i'm going to bring down the bump strap to just leave it where it is now with the metal there's something else that we've got to do around here as well but before i do it i just want to go down to the fresnel actually the fresnel should be a conductor let's fold that back up so the layer sampling we can leave alone the layer mask we would need if we had a dielectric and again we're going to come to this in a minute on our third material because that actually incorporates aspects of a metal and a dielectric on the same map and that's where the layer mask would come in now looking at this you'll go well it doesn't look correct and you'd be 100 right if i rendered this now as you can see it doesn't look very metallic but it certainly doesn't look like this in uni you know that actually looks like a metal so what is going on here definitely not the same and there's a good reason for that it's because of this color channel this color channel when used with a reflectance layer it's more of an additive has been placed over this this is not the way to go about this so what we're going to do is actually turn this color channel off and you can see that we've actually got it looking more metallic already but what it should be taking its color from is the layer color in the metallic layer so if we actually load the same map this that was in here into this layer color we should get a much more accurate representation of what's meant to be going on so there we go our base color there you go we've got all the struts in there now that are the right color and we've got the surface of the metal looking correct as well so let's just give that a render there we go that's much much closer to what we've got here obviously these aren't pushed out as much there may be even a bit of darkness into in cinema 4d but that may be due to the fact that our lights not as intense all that kind of thing will play a part but that is how it's meant to look so let's close this let's delete this material and start from scratch we've got a new map we'll put that on there open it up and we'll just go through as we did before let's get rid of this specular as well so color let's open the color channel and move to our wooden crate here we go so this is our wooden crate base color lovely in our diffusion we're going to want our ambient occlusion and we don't have to worry about any of them we can forget reflections for now we'll just go down here normal let's open that up turn that on flip our y direction there we go that's correct also while i'm at it and i remember let's put this up to 2k because it's 2k maps that i'm using and the last thing will be the displacement and i think we'll do it very subtle um where is it height there we go lovely this is way too much i'm going to say one centimeter and we can give that a test let's do some sub polygon displacement as well just to round the edges off a little bit more so before we start working on our reflectance let's um give this a little render and see what it looks like i love this it's so great um this is essentially a box but look all the detail we've got on this just just from maps it's absolutely great okay let's open this back up then and have a look at what we've got okay this is where it's going to get interesting because we're using a dielectric and and a metal so let's do our dielectric first ggx average our roughness is going to be 100 we're going to plug our roughness map into the roughness there we go there's our roughness map and there we go we can see that the corners are very shiny and this not so much and specular strength can come down everything else can remain the same as i said this because this is our dielectric in fact let me uh change this die electric name it properly and our layer color is white like i said before we leave that there and we don't really need anything else going on in the mask and layer sampling the only thing we need to do is go to fresnel and say it's a dielectric and that is fine and now we're seeing the color coming through from our color channel now on top of this and it's important that it's on top it's our metallic layer metallic or metal layer and in this is ggx i'm going to leave the attenuation at average put the roughness right up because the sections of this map that are going to be defined as metal are also going to need information from the roughness map so you have to load it into both dielectric and metallic so in the roughness we load that in again reflection strength is all the way up speculum we get rid of again and remember what i'm saying about the color in the last material we did that we put the layer color here instead of using this well i'm going to do the same thing again but i'm going to show you what it looks like without that in a minute so i'm going to leave that alone for now but we will come back to this layer mask we're going to utilize that as well and we're going to need the layer fresnel so let's do that first this is obviously a conductor this layer layer mask let's deal with this first right we want to mask what's metal and what's not metal using the metallic map actually if we open this up and look at our metallic map let's make this bigger we can see that there's stuff on there there's white there's metal and there's stuff on there that's black that's dielectric so let's load that in now you can see that it's masked it out only apply this metallic layer to where things are white on this map so let's just give this a render now and see what kind of result we get okay not bad i mean these corners definitely look like metal and they're definitely uh separate from this area here and these definitely look like uh metal nails in the side there we're getting some weird stuff going on here uh with the wood very reflective and i'm gonna get on to that in a minute but let's just compare it to our scene in unity let's have a look at this well the metal corners of this box are definitely not looking like what we've got in cinema 4d much darker so what is going on here well like i said before with our other material we have that problem when we use the color channel that color channel is like an additive over the top so let's open this up and get rid of that let's say goodbye color channel and in our reflectance for metallic this is where the color map goes so let's put the color in there but we've got a problem even though we got our layer color loaded into here now in our metallic we've got the rest of it messed up and that's because we've got no color channel informing the rest of this now so what we do is we create a color channel so let's add a lambertian diffuse put this to the bottom of the stack call this diffuse and now we just load in our color so now we've got our diffuse we've just uh this in there we don't need to worry about the fresnel or anything like that because it's a lamborghini diffuse anyway so let's give this another render now and see what's happening okay well we definitely get some color back into our object itself but now these corners aren't correct when compared to this and that's why i wanted to do this because i wanted to bring up this opaque setting if we go to our metallic fold this up and go down to our finale and go down to that opaque setting and turn that on oh look and the reason it does that is if this isn't opaque it takes information from below it stuff bleeds up the stack but if you say no this layer is opaque it will block anything underneath from coming up so let's give this a quick render much much closer much closer but you can see there's something going on with the top of this wood it doesn't look very wood like and it certainly doesn't look like what it does in the unity scene now first of all we're getting some speckling and that's actually in the render sense if you go to render physical that'll be to do with this blurriness subdivision this deals specifically with reflections so if we crank this up to say five which is probably overkill but let's give it a go you can see that a lot of that's cleaned up and we'll do a comparison to the render before and this one so that's cleaned it up a lot but there's some weird highlighting going on in the wood here i thought about it for a bit and i thought right what's going on in the unity scene that isn't going on here and i thought okay well i'm getting to define what the layer reflection is and i thought maybe the ior's not correct so i actually looked up the ior of wood and it was actually within range it was like yeah so i thought i should probably leave that alone then see the only other thing that i could come to was the actual reflection strength and that actually makes sense because wood isn't that reflective i mean obviously it has a diffused reflection or as you wouldn't be able to see it but our diffuse layer is dealing with that our diffuse layer is giving off the diffuse reflection of this colour of this wood so i thought okay well then what if i just pull the reflection strength of the diffuse layer all the way down but then i thought well what's the point of having a dielectric layer whatsoever if i've got this at zero what happens when i turn this off okay we're getting a little bit of difference there but not by much so i thought maybe i just uh need to tweak this then so maybe 25 so let's give this a go well that's much much better it's a lot more natural and it definitely looks way closer to what we got here anyway so that's as far as i can figure out the correct way to apply a metal rough workflow in cinema 4d i hope it helps someone and i'll see you in the next video if you're watching on youtube please like and subscribe and don't forget to hit that bell to be notified of new tutorials you can follow me on social media at facebook twitter linkedin and instagram and make sure to visit me at digitalmeat.uk where you can vote for upcoming tutorials thanks for watching [Music] bye [Music] you

Channel: DIGITAL MEAT

Views: 2,108

Rating: 4.96 out of 5

Keywords: Digitalmeat.uk, Cinema 4D, C4D, Cinema4D, Digitalmeat, Greyscale Gorilla, GreyscaleGorilla, 3D, Workflow, Cinema 4D Workflow, C4D Workflow, Tutorial, Tutorials, Cinema 4D Tutorial, Cinema 4d Tutorials, C4D Tutorial, C4D Tutorials, Mograph, Motion Design, 3D Motion Design, 3D Animation, 3D Modelling, Metal / Rough, Metal Rough, Metallic / Roughness, Metallic Roughness, Material Setup

Id: iCmRoYVrZIo

Length: 36min 41sec (2201 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 03 2021