Cinema 4D Tutorial - Arnold + Hair - Texture based threads for rug

hey guys welcome back to another cinema 4d tutorial i know i've been gone for a while but i've recently been working on a personal project uh if you'd like to check that out you can go over to my instagram and check it out there that's where i've been sharing a lot of the progress on that and i've been trying to figure out how to create some throw rugs with some long threads using arnold and the hair object you would think that this would be pretty simple to do but there's not a lot of information about it online so i had to dig around and it took me a couple of hours to get it all worked out so i thought i would put together a little tutorial to share this with you guys now some of you may know this some of you may not but regardless i'm going to go ahead and just put this out there anyway just in case anybody is wanting to know how to do this so what i've got here is pretty simple it's a plain object that i put a cloth tag on and simulated it falling to the ground just to get some crumples into it as if someone threw it on the ground i put that in a subdivision surface object to smooth it out and for lighting i'm using an arnold skydome light with an hdr image in there now before we jump into this there's something important we need to go over what we're going to be doing in this tutorial is we're going to be applying a material in this case it's going to be i believe a png image onto the plain object and we're going to be using that color information to color the threads or the strands that's going to be coming out of the rug so in order to do this you want to make sure that your object is properly uv mapped now in this case because i'm using a plane object it was not manipulated in any way prior to using the cloth tag so there's really no reason to have to go into the uv editor and mess around with the uvs however in your case you might have something a little different it might not be a rug or something as simple as a plane you may have modeled something else that you're going to put hair on or threads and in that case you want to make sure that your object is properly uv mapped you don't want to have messy uvs so perhaps in another tutorial we'll talk about body paint and how to get into the uv editor and whatnot but just make sure that you don't have messy uvs you want to make sure they're nice and clean okay so i'm going to turn the subdivision surface object off select the plane i'm gonna go up here to simulate hair objects add hair now these are way too long so i'm gonna take the segments down to five and we'll take the length down to i think eight should be enough for us all right so by default whenever you create a hair object it's automatically going to put the default cinema 4d hair material onto that object and you might be thinking that you probably want to delete it but in this case you don't want to delete it you want to leave that on there what we want to do is add an arnold hair material tag to it as well so that way we're going to have two hair materials on it so arnold surface standard hair and we will drag that one on there as well all right now a couple of things we need to go over for the hair material now in this case we're not generating hair on this rug hair is different than you know strands or threads on a rug it's going to be different so we're not actually creating hair we're creating threads so we want to open up the standard hair material and whenever you're using arnold and hair together the color channel here and the specular channel will be ignored those two channels are not going to be used here however thickness and things like maybe frizz and kink and so on those channels will be taken into consideration and arnold will see that but the color and the specular will not those two channels will be ignored so for thickness because we're creating a rug and not hair the root and the tip are going to be the same you know they're going to have the same thickness so what i'm going to do is just change both of these to something like maybe 0.5 because this is a thread and not a human hair all right so we could probably add in some maybe some frizz and maybe a little kink in there just to kind of mess it up a little bit and that's fine now if we wanted to apply a material to this rug and pull the color information off of that you would do that by using the color channel here and you could go into the root you can add in a texture there or you could go down here to surface and turn this on and then that will pull the color information off of the surface that way those threads coming up will have the color of wherever the root is touching but in this case because the color channel is being ignored by arnold we're going to have to do it with the arnold hair material so let's go over here and start the ipr up alright so you can see it's coming in all black that's to be expected so we want to open up the arnold hair material and because we're not creating hair everything here in the base which is weight color melanin melanin redness randomness we just want to zero all of these out okay because we're not creating hair we're creating threads the specular roughness we could probably take that up a little bit and what we want to do is activate the diffuse so we'll take this and pull that all the way up and now you can see now we're getting threads rather than black hair all right now currently all of these threads are kind of standing straight up if we were to zoom into this you can see they're all just standing straight up they're rather thick we should probably take that down a little bit but for the time being we'll just assume this is one of those really thick threaded rugs all right so now what we want to do is apply the color to these threads so we'll open up the arnold standard hair because remember um the default cinema 4d material the color and specular are ignored so you're not going to load any type of image into those channels so we'll open up the standard hair for arnold we'll open up the network editor and i'm going to look for an image node because we're going to open up our image all right so this is just a really simple black and white snowflake image that i have here something you might see on a rug for the winter time so i'm going to take this and drop this down into the diffuse color now it's still not looking right and the reason for that is because we need to go over here to hair give it an arnold parameters tag and down here we need to enable the export uvs and as soon as we do that now the image information in this case the color information is coming through on those threads that's basically all you have to do so i suppose what we could do is just let's turn this off for the moment and we'll go up here to let's see where is the brush tool there's the brush and what i'm going to do is just kind of brush some of these hairs just to make them a little messy i say hairs but it's really threads all right so just add a little bit in there and one thing you want to be careful of is that notice how we have these strands that are going below the ground object if we were to try to pull them up from the top it's not going to work so you have to go below the object and then push those back up otherwise you're going to have something that looks like a bald spot all right so we'll turn the ipr back on there we go now it looks a little more messy and that's pretty much all you have to do for that the part that i was missing was that you have to give the arnold parameters tag and enable the export uvs because arnold is not going to automatically see the uv information so you have to give it the parameters tag and activate that little option there for for the color information to be seen so that's pretty much it we could probably play around with the thickness of the strands we can make them a little thinner we could brush it out a little bit more whatever you want to do but in this case i think that pretty much wraps up what i wanted to go over just make sure that you have both the standard cinema 4d hair material and the arnold hair material on the hair object along with the parameters tag make sure export uvs is enabled and then you can load in your image into the diffuse color channel which is under the standard hair material and you can load that in the color space make sure that's set to auto sometimes by default when it comes in it's set to disabled but for rgb 8-bit images like i'm using here just make sure auto is enabled which i believe automatically will select srgb all right guys so i think i'm going to go ahead and wrap up this tutorial if you want to see anything else like this that i've been working on feel free to head over to my instagram and check that out i haven't used it in a while but i've started using it here recently and adding things to my story over there things i've been doing here in arnold and whatnot so if you'd like to go follow me on instagram check it out i'm going to try to stay active on there if i can if you have any comments or questions feel free to comment below and as always guys thank you for watching and i will see you in the next tutorial

Channel: ShepperdOneill

Views: 7,481

Keywords: C4D, Cinema 4D, Arnold, C4DtoA, tutorial, hair, rendering, 3D

Id: QbwN7OK0tc4

Length: 10min 2sec (602 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 15 2022