Cinema 4D - Shading Tutorial

hello everyone and welcome to this quick start tutorial for redshift in cinema 4d in this video we're going to be covering the basics of creating materials and applying these materials to objects in your scene using redshift this video does presume that you have at least some basic working knowledge of cinema 4d and 3d software in general including some of the basic concepts of shading and lighting also this assumes that you have at least some basic working knowledge of inif just entry level of redshift including how to add redshift lights to a scene how to add a redshift camera how to use the redshift render view to preview your scene and how to apply certain redshift settings so that you can get a cleaner or a clean final render we're not going to be covering any of those topics so if you need a refresher I recommend that you visit the redshift youtube channel where you'll find a lot of very good tutorials about these more basic topics again we will not be getting too complicated here but it just helps to know these basics Before we jump into it so let's go ahead and get this going as you can see we have our scene here very basic on like dinner table setting we already have a redshift camera setup we already have a redshift dome light using an HDR eye to light our scene so all we have to do is just add materials to these default flat gray objects so we can get some realism going so let's go ahead and create some materials I think we already know how to do this but just to refresh your memory we can go down here to our create button in our material palette or we can equally go to our redshift menu here and go down to materials either way is fine so we'll go ahead and go into the redshift submenu in materials and you'll see that there's a long list of material types that you can use we won't have the time to cover them all but you can see that we have dedicated car paint hair scan volume materials incandescent etc however we are going to stick to the most essential red material and it's the one that you'll be using 95% of the time if not more which is your standard RS material okay and this is analogous to the standard PBR uber shader that you see in many other shading systems so it's the same concept right this will give you all of the base properties and get all to it all I'm doing is clicking on my material is showing up here and my attributes manager but you have all these options or all these properties such as diffuse properties reflection properties refraction properties subsurface or scattering properties multiple subsurface scattering coating overall properties such as opacity emission etc and some other more advanced features that will not be covering here so again let's go ahead and add this materials to some of the objects in our scene in this case I want to start out with the knife and fork because I want to create a metallic material to apply to these now in order to see these changes being reflected you see that I added the material to these objects I have to start my IPR you can see how quickly the IPR updates to show me that change so let's go ahead and change this to a metallic material I can do that manually or I could go ahead and choose a preset from one of the many presets that redshift offers within the rs material based properties in this case I know that I want something that kind of looks like platinum or silver so I'll choose platinum and I can see right away that this is looking pretty good one thing that I might want to do is take the roughness of my reflections again I'm just I'll just close a lot of these tabs so you can see right so you have the base properties being divided in so you diffuse reflection and refraction so let's just open up the little reflections sub tab here and we'll just take down the roughness so we have some sharper reflections to make it look more like a polished platinum type of silverware set this is great let's go ahead and create a material for a plate now I'll create another redshift RS material I should probably rename these cutlery and then I'll rename this to plate and add the second material to my plate and presuming that our plate is maybe like a ceramic material there's not really a lot that we have to do here maybe just change the diffuse color to something brighter maybe just give it a little bit of an off-white tint and maybe just add a little bit of roughness to our reflections so it's a little less polished but you can still see some sharpish reflections so it looks like a clean plate either way okay that's great let's just move on very quickly to our next object which will be the candle so we'll create another redshift RS material call this candle and apply it to our candle object here if we wanted to get a candle like something more of a natural or raw wax candle what we can do is change our diffuse color to something that's kind of like yellowish change our reflections to be a little rougher and in this case we may want to browse away briefly from the base properties tab and into our multiple subsurface scattering tab source of subsurface scattering basically as the name implies simulates the scattering of light under the surface so wax is one of those materials that does exhibit this kind of behavior where light moves under the surface so in order to make this candle look more realistic and not just like a like a big solid hunk of plastic we do want to add some subsurface scattering so we'll go ahead and turn up the subsurface scattering amount you can see now that it's translucent it's more translucent which is again simulating light going through however this is a little too much because subsurface scattering is dependent on scale so by default the radius scale is set to 100 and our candle object is only 8 by 12 by 8 centimeters so what we should probably do is take down this radius scale to something that makes sense so how about we try 10 which is literally the number between 8 and 12 and voila you can see now that this looks a lot more like wax so again there's some light going through but you can still see the diffuse color properties of it so it's a nice perfect balance between a nice solid object but also an object that does allow some light going through it so that's yeah that's pretty wax like so I think we're pretty happy and we can move on to the next next thing we'll take care of is our glass of wine and the wine inside of it so we'll create two new redshift RS materials we'll call one of them wine and we'll call the other one glass so I'll make sure to apply the glass material to our glass and we'll start out with that so this is one of those cases where we can actually use one of the redshift presets under the base properties tab so I'll go ahead and choose the glass preset and you can see how immediately now our IPR shows that our wine glass is made of glass and this is great as before I'm going to just add a little bit of roughness to our reflection because in real life there's no such thing as a perfectly smooth surface it's a good thing to bear in mind whenever you're working with materials also we don't really need to see the diffuse tab or sub tab in this case because a glass is mainly just comprised of roughly and refraction we don't really have to do a lot here so I think we can just move on to the next object which is our wine inside of the glass so I'll go ahead and apply the wine material to our wine and we will work on this let's actually make this one from scratch so again we know that like a refractive or transparent object doesn't really have any diffuse coloring so you can turn down the weight of the diffuse color and we can close that next we'll look at reflections of course yes it is a liquid so it is somewhat reflective but we probably again want to turn up the roughness just a bit and also we want to think about the index of refraction by default is set to 1.5 which is more like glass we may want to take it down to like 1.3 which is closer to water okay this is great but right now it just looks like it like a more like ink like a solid blob of ink in the glass so let's look at refractions and transmission now so the first thing we want to do of course is turn up the refraction wait so now we have a transparent object now it's kind of getting lost in the glass now but we'll take care of that momentarily so the first thing that you may want to do is give it give you our object or your refraction a little bit of some some kind of reddish tint so that's one step however one other thing that you may want to do is give your materials a little bit of what's called absorption because in real life liquids especially the liquids are not just of water and even water have some level of absorption meaning they they eat up light as it goes through it so right now it's like perfectly non-absorbent so all light is going through it equally you want to add some absorption so so as you know depending on the annual that you look at it light is absorbed and it'll just look a lot more real so we'll go ahead and first of all give the absorb in some kind of color again maybe something like guess and then we'll take the absorption scale up until we reach a level that we're happy with I think this might be good this is something that again we could continue to tweak endlessly but we really kind of want to keep it simple and not spend a lot of time working on it but right away you can see that it it does look pretty close to wine for the purposes of this I think I'm happy with it and I want to move on the next thing I want to take care of is my table so let's go ahead and instead of creating a redshift RS material I want to show how redshift does to an extent take cinema 4d native materials and translate them into something that can be read by redshift and rendered out so I'll go ahead let's say that I want to have more of a like a marble table so I can go into my content browser here and I had actually searched for this before so I'll go ahead and this marble danby material I'll grab it and I'll drag it onto my tabletop and again this is a native cinema 4d material it has no relation to redshift at all however redshift is taking some of the information like the color reflectance and others and translating it to the best of its abilities so that you can at the very least like preview it or if you need to in a rush render it out you can even if it's not the exact recommended workflow so again you can see then in this case what's happening is in the color channel I have a cinema 4d layer shader using a variety of cinema 4d noises with which the red shift again supports it's just taking all of this information from that layer shader and these noise shaders and turning it into baked textures so if I work on this on these values a bit just to bring in some of the darker elements here because of the lighting is looking a little bit blown out and washed then you can see now how redshift is taking this noise all of these noise patterns in this later shader and actually turning them into something that redshift can read and of course redshift also a base texture tags so we could even change the mapping to something like cubic and maybe change the scaling and you can see that it's reflected in redshift again again you'll see some tiling of course this is to be expected but again depending on the size of your textures and other things you can definitely make it a fairly seamless again this is not really the recommended way of working though I would always recommend to stick to using redshift materials whenever possible and one way of doing this let's say that we have this cinema 4d material and I really do like this nice pattern that's giving me this kind of marble surface and I want to use it within a redshift material context it's actually not very difficult all I have to do is first of all I'll create a new RS material and I'll apply it to my tabletop and again we'll see that of course it's replaced the previous material and now we're back to the default glossy gray however if I click on my on this new material I'll call it tabletop and I will go ahead and in the material properties I want to click on this button that says added shader graph I can see now that this launches a redshift shader graph for this material the tabletop and you can see that it's a node based system one of the benefits to using a node based system is that well you can more clearly see the relationship between what one node does to the other and also you can have one node for example connected to multiple other nodes which gives it a more procedural nature and you can have changes being applied more automatically across the board and this is gonna save you a lot of time and as you can see it's also expressed so based so if you're already familiar with cinema 4d and you have use expresso for anything before you'll see that this is extremely familiar and one benefit of that is also that you can combine it with expresso nodes so you could have something like a time node completely expresso based and you know sending time information to some kind of change and in the redshift node system for some really interesting effects so this is great and this is gonna save you a lot of time it can seem a little intimidating at first but after some time it won't be it'll actually make a lot more sense I don't see that it'll be a lot faster than working with channels anyways what I want to do is I want to keep this shader graph open here for a second and I'm gonna click on my cinema 4d material so that I can click and drag this texture onto my redshift shader graph and you can see by just clicking and dragging the texture redshift created the necessary nodes right so again what's happening redshift is using this first node to bake the cinema 4d layer shader into its own texturing language let's just call it that then being sent to a redshift texture node which then parses all this information into color values which can then in turn if I click and drag here again this is a very familiar expressive way of working clicking and dragging from this output I will drag it onto this little blue icon here or the blue tab until it turns green and I let go and then I'll show me the list of available inputs and I'll go ahead and choose in my diffuse the diffuse color and again you can see now that the shader color or sorry should I say the cinema 4d layer fader color is being sent now and see my diffuse color and I can now continue to work completely in this and the redshift she being system taken advantage of all these other things that I wouldn't be able to if I just kept using the cinema4d native material so I can go ahead and actually and now delete the cinema4d material because I don't need it I can just keep working in this redshift material system and that's gonna be great it's gonna be very advantageous okay and of course as before the cinema 4d or should I say sorry the redshift shader does obey the cinema 4d texture tags so again I can change the mapping to cubic and change the scaling of my UVs and there you go again looks a little tiled because this is simply just a texture that's being Malta tiled across the surface of this table I've wanted to have something more seamless one thing that I could do is actually use one of redshifts built-in noises as opposed to these cinema 4d noses so I'll just quickly do this I'll go ahead and delete the cinema 4d layer shader and the texture shader again we're back to our default and in my redshift node browser here I can either look look for a noise shader or I can just type it in and then drag it and drop it into my graph of course just dragging and dropping something until the graph doesn't really do much until you connect it to something in this case I'll connect the out color of my noise into the diffuse color of my material and again we have a black and white noise pattern and of course we can go into our noise now and play around with some of the parameters until we get a shader that we're happy with and then of course go back to our RS material now and in the base properties maybe adjust the reflections so they're a little rougher and because marble can be a little bit translucent maybe we do want to add some subsurface scattering maybe again the default is a little too much but if we go back to say 10 as we did before with our candle this looks a lot more like real marble and again I believe that's all the time we have to go through this but you can see how in a very short amount of time we got to a point where we have some fairly realistic objects in a scene and future tutorials will go into more advanced ways of creating objects sorry or creating materials to add to your objects and getting some really interesting experimental and like grunge grungy more real materials right so again at least I hope that this quick introduction was somewhat helpful keep an eye out for more in the meantime enjoy learning redshift

Channel: Redshift3D

Views: 26,390

Keywords: redshift, gpu, rendering, cinema4d, c4d, shading, tutorial

Id: aV8vsYZN85s

Length: 21min 9sec (1269 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 16 2018