Cinema 4D Tutorial - Creating Blueprint Style Renders Using Sketch & Toon

hey everybody its EJ from iodine calm and today I got a really fun sketching tuned tutorial for you on how to use it to create really fun blueprint style renders I'm going to cover a lot of very very important sketching toon tricks and tips for how to prevent those pesky flickering lines that happen whenever you render an animation using sketching toon strokes so stay tuned to the end of the tutorial for that and let's just jump in and create some blueprints [Applause] [Music] all right so we're gonna begin by showing you how you can grab some really cool CAD models at a website go grab CAD totally free all you got to do is sign up for your free account and these CAD files are really deets it like highly detailed basically like product renders and these kind of 3d files are perfect for using in like blueprint renders and stuff like that so one important thing is you want to try to find your correct format that you want to do what that you'd want to use one new format that is brand new to cinema 4d r20 is this step I believe Sketchup is compatible with older versions of c4d but I just chose step and the term that I searched for was dexterous humanoid robot hand and if you put that in there give this soup or a detailed model of a hand robot hands so really cool stuff basically all you need to do is click on that go to download files and you'll download a zip file and if you downloaded this one particularly has a ste P or step file again supported in R 20 so if you want to download this hand and have it in c4d format I'll provide that file or you know with a lot of files if you ever need someone to save it out for you can always find someone with our 20 and have them save it out for you so with this step5 I'm just gonna bring this and open this in c4d and here we have the step import settings now one important thing is by default this instances is checked on and this means that when you import your step file it will actually use instances because instances are supported but the thing with sketch in tune that's very important is sketching tune will not render strokes on any instance object so what I'm gonna do is just uncheck instances so all we have is actual objects pieces of geometry that we can then apply strokes to okay so that's the only setting you really need to worry about there and then I'll just hit OK and you'll see the progress bar in the lower left corner there it's converting your file all that good stuff in here is our robot hand so really cool really highly detailed okay now one thing know about CAD files is they're built to scale so that means if I add a cube we have this massive cube in tiny little hand so what we're gonna do is delete that and just so we're not dealing with like super super small stroke settings and stuff in sketching too now I'm just gonna scale this on up so just like so so now we have you know this is our hand is as big as a cube and that's what we're looking for so now what I'm gonna do is just kind of rotate this in position and you can see this is kind of annoying because the axis centers off so I can go into axis modification mode and I'm just gonna you know eyeball this something like that just so I can have an easier time just gonna deactivate the axis for modification mode just so I can have a better easy easier time rotating this so maybe get this and we got our okay signal from our robot hands so we're all ready to rock and roll with sketching tunes so let's go ahead and apply sketch and tune lines to this robot model so first thing I'm gonna do is go into interactive render region and just make this bounding box big enough for all robot hand and I'm gonna bring up the quality slider this little triangle here all the way to the top so we got 100% quality in our interactive render region and now what I'm gonna do is just simply go to create and go to shader and create a sketch material now what this is gonna do is a bunch of things by default number one if I go to my render settings here you can see sketching 2 and render effect is already applied and we have three of the default types of lines already applied as well but one thing you're gonna notice is we have a lot of lines missing so we're losing a lot of the detail here so what what is going on there well typically this would be under the creases here so creases are basically where a polygon bends at an angle so if I get a cube here you can see this is a crease right here this little edge right there okay so basically we're missing something here so one thing to understand about when you import a step file so if I click on my fung tag which basically for polygon bends to a certain angle it's gonna create this fungal break or an edge break and that will be an edge so you can see that everything's kind of smoothed out and that's because we don't have this angle limit turned on now this is very important so what I'm gonna do is I just want to select all of the Phong tags in my scene for my object and just check them all on so what I'm gonna do is click on the eyeball poke the eyeball and go to tags and we're just gonna right click in first click on a Fong tag so we have it active and then I'm gonna right click on Fong and say select all Fong and what that's gonna do is select all 83 Fong tags in my scene and then I'm just gonna check on that angle limit now watch what happens we just added a whole bunch more lines due to the fact that we're now using this angle limit here so let's just show how important fog angles are as far as rendering creases because let me just go back into my render settings here because crease is this angle right here is very dependent on your Phong angle on individual objects so what this means is that if your polygons angled edge is 10 degrees and above its gonna render a line now if I go ahead and increase this minimum crease degrees you're gonna see we're gonna lose a lot more of that detail here so if I bring this all the way up we're slowly kind of bringing up the threshold as far as how many creases we see in our scene so I'm just gonna right click on these arrows to bring this back to its 10° default and get all these lines back but there we go but this is not looking like a blueprint just yet but I just really wanted to hit home on just how important falling angles are okay because creases are rendering those long angle edges and let's go ahead but basically what want to do is change this to a blueprint kind of look and how we can do that is by going into the sketching toon shading tab okay here's where we can choose this color this white background color - a custom color or just turn it off all together but what we're gonna do is just grab a blue hue like a buek blue color here for the background and what I want to do is reuse the same background color to shade my object so what's going on right now is it's just using the object shading which since our objects have no materials applied to it it's going to default to that bland gray material and it's just gonna quantize that shading so we're only getting a few shades of that gray so instead of using the object shading what I'm gonna do is just grab that same background color we chose here and that's gonna be applied to our object as well so now we're only seeing these black lines and that's about it okay so now what we can do is double click on our sketch material and let's just rename this to be outlines okay and if I go here I can change the color of my stroke so if I just give this you know just a slightly like maybe 95 percent gray there and now we've got these white lines here looking a lot closer to a blueprint there okay so basically what's going on is this sketch in tune render effect is a global effect so I can control what types of lines are showing up but if I want to go in and affect those strokes I'm gonna go into my sketch material here so this is where I'm affecting all of the stroke styles and stuff like that okay so right now I can go in here I can say adjust the thickness if I wanted to but I think I'm digging that amount of thickness there and now all I need to do is if you've seen a blueprint basically if you have a schematic you can see the wireframe view of an object so you can see like all the nuts and bolts inside of the object you know just for you know that's what a blueprint is is you know how to build a product and you're gonna see the x-ray view of all the details of that product so right now the only thing we're seeing is the outer edge we're not seeing anything inside the Saab so how we can actually go about in C lines or apply lines to the inner parts of an object is this option right here default hidden so right now we have no line type in this attribute here so all I need to do is because I know I'm gonna need to use like a dotted line or something like that I'm just gonna go command click and drag to duplicate this existing sketch material and I'm gonna rename this to dotted lines okay and now I'm just gonna go ahead and drag and drop this into the default hidden now check out what happens just gonna have this render here but we should see the wireframe view being stroked with this dotted line so really really awesome stuff you can see what's going on there let's go into our dotted line by double clicking on it and let's make this thickness a lot smaller so maybe 0.5 or something like that just to shrink it down a little bit so now we can really tell the difference between what's the your the main stroke and what are the inner x-ray strokes so you can see what's going on there and again with most blueprints this is a dotted line the inner bits are a dotted line dotted line so what we can do is to create a dotted line we're gonna go to strokes and just check on pattern and the default type is dashed lines we want dotted so I'm just gonna go and you can see the dotted lines here which actually looks pretty cool as well but we can go in here and let's get dotted where's dotted there's dotted and now I'll have dotted lines instead which is really cool okay so here is where we can adjust the overall scale of those dots or at least the spacing between those dots because this is not adjusting the thickness here this is the thickness setting here okay so this this scale here is actually just scaling up the spacing between dots so if I scale this up you can see that now we just have a lot more space between our dots okay and this should render an update and there we go so one thing that is important is if I shrink this down if I shrink down this view and just let this render look at how thick lines gone okay now this is something where the strokes will actually grow in size depending on the resolution of the view that you're looking at so since we're looking at a lower resolution this actually grew in size or actually stayed the same so it actually looks like the strokes are thicker but if we wanted to maintain the same amount of thickness no matter what the size what we can do is go ahead and this is a very important setting going to sketching tune settings go to render and check on resolution independent now what this is gonna do is if I shrink down this view you're gonna see if we just wait for it that our lines are still relatively the same size these aren't like super thick or anything like that so resolution independent we're gonna keep we're gonna try to maintain the same stroke thickness no matter what the resolution so you're not gonna deal with your strokes looking thicker depending on what resolution you're rendering out on so very important kind of stuff there alright so let's go into our dotted lines again and maybe you will just bring up the scale a little bit more cuz I think these are clustering a little bit too close together so we'll just have that render and now I think that's looking a lot better there so one important thing with the inner x-ray bits here is if I go into my render settings we're getting a lot of lines just from the folds creases in border line types and if you don't know what folds and borders increases and really everything in here be sure to check out some of my other sketching toon tutorials I have a whole playlist on it and really dive deep into a lot of these kind of line types but we're getting a lot of these a lot of bits of our geometry stroked just from these default types but one thing that can really add a lot more detail is actually stroking where two objects intersect and this is really going to help us as far as the inner bits go seeing the x-ray view so let me just turn this on and you can see that the objects are going to just if an object intersects itself it's going to show an intersection but if we actually want to show all the intersections of all of the objects in the scene what we can do is change this objects from self and change this to project and what this is gonna do is if an object is intersecting another object in this entire project we're gonna get a lot more lines so check this out it's gonna take a little bit longer to render because it's stroking a lot more pieces of geometry and you just see how much we got going on here so depending on the model you might want this but I just think this is overkill but maybe if you if you have a schematic and you need all this stuff maybe you just there's nothing you can do to get away from this like we need to show all this detail on the inside of this object so these line types can be very confusing and I'm using a CAD model in the other scene that is basically perfect there's not a lot of intersections it's built for 3d printing so there's not gonna be a lot of overlap and stuff like that so I just wanted to give another example of a scene it's very simple got a couple cubes and a figure just kind of chillin in between all of these cubes and basically what I want to do is grab all of our different lines so you can see that obviously we're missing the lines from where the figure is intersecting both of these cubes so I'm going to turn on intersections and by default this intersections again is set to self and you can see that we're still not getting those intersections and that's because the intersections are only checking on a object by object level so if the objects intersecting itself because it's that the self mode it will add an extra line but it's not taking into account any of the other objects in the scene these objects are not looking at each other to see if they're intersecting so to do that we're gonna change this from self and change this to project and what these what these line types are gonna do now or check against all of the objects in your project and create those intersecting lines as you can see right now we're getting all these dotted lines where we're getting intersected okay so again self intersection if you turn this on or off this is just checking to see if the objects themselves are intersecting themselves and you can either gain or lose lines this way okay and another very important expect of all this is you can see that this cube we're missing this corner right here where the torso area or the stomach area of our figure is so what's going on there is because of this calling okay so combing is basically hiding objects that are not viewable by our camera view okay so it just is a way to save processing time in 3d if something's not in the view of your camera why waste processing power calculating it when you can't even see it okay it's kind of like the default visible default hidden why show hidden lines when you're not when they're not visible unless you specifically want that look which is exactly what we're doing we want to see those hidden objects and Stroke them with this dotted line so same thing with this hidden call so right now we're not seeing all of the possible lines that we could see with all of these object kind of stacked up on top of one others so watch what happens look right in this area when I go and change this hidden call from self to project you're gonna see we gain that little edge back so what that's gonna do is again it's very similar to the intersections and changing this from self to project is that this is checking against all of the objects in the scene not just itself so that's why we can now see through this other figure to the underlying cube corner here because this hidden call is looking at our entire scene okay so two very important things again depending on your scene maybe you might even need to turn on outlines it's all dependent on your scene type but I just wanted to show another example of a super simple setup and kind of compare and contrast what works what doesn't because this scene isn't very complex but our other scene is pretty complex one thing that is gonna really help as far as these dots go so it's not so overwhelming is double-clicking on this dotted line material and changing this color to not white but maybe if we just sample a blue here and maybe make this a lighter blue so it kind of fades into the background more and is less pronounced and kind of fades back into the background and really lets that outline stroke really show a little bit more contrast so let's just let this run so you can see it helps a little bit just adding a little bit of bluish hue there another thing that can help you here is going to the opacity and maybe using a distance modifier so what this is gonna do if I click on the distance and let's just let this update here but you can see the range is the object so whatever part of the object is closely facing the camera is gonna have more opacity and whatever is further away back you can see we just faded away some of the back parts of our object the odd parts of the object that are further away from our object kind of fades into the background so this is a good way if you have way too much detail to kind of fade back some of these dotted lines so we can see more of that detail of the main strokes and it's not just so cluttered as far as all these different stroke types so you can do that or you can just go in here and just turn off intersections all together and we have a more simplified kind of scene so you can see we have a lot less detail but actually I don't know I think that's just way too few way less detail than I want so what I'm gonna do is turn out on intersections and leave that opacity distance scale on and just to get more of that detail back I don't think it's too overwhelming I think that's looking okay so again if we want to remove some of these strokes we can up the creases maybe remove some of the details here you know all over the place there so you can see we removed a lot of those strokes so this is really handy as far as you know decluttering how many lines are being stroked or how many strokes are showing up on your geometry really important stuff one setting that's pretty handy is if you want to apply just creases to maybe V the the default visible objects versus the hidden we can go in here and change this line materials to both and we can actually drag and drop outlines in each of the folds the creases whatever line types are active here we can actually just say you know what just have the outlines on all of these and just have the dotted on the intersections okay so that means that we won't have dotted lines on the border creases or folds so this is just another level of control where you can actually have line types show up on individual either default hidden or too far too far default of visible and hidden lines there so a lot of control there I'm just gonna change this back to defaults and what that's gonna do is apply all these line types to both be hidden in visible stroke types here so looking good so now let's go into some of these settings here on the strokes I'm just gonna select both of them so we can edit both of these types and just go into these stroke tabs here and just cover a few important settings a lot of people I know this pain quite a bit but when you animate an object sometimes you'll have flickering lines okay and I feel like that's that's just a problem sometimes you can't even get around it sometimes at all but sometimes it helps to just check off this filter strokes because what this filter strokes does is remove certain types of strokes depending on what mode you have here so in this case the default mode is overlay so it will actually remove strokes if stroke overlaps and others so what that can what that can do is have flickering strokes on your screen so I've found that just deactivating this filter strokes if you have an object animated really helps prevent those flickering strokes now just a rule of thumb the type of movements that is really going to contribute to a lot of stroke flickering is rotation so when you're animating an object don't rotate it if you don't need to it if you do rotate it then this is kind of a tricky area rotate it slow or if it just kind of flickers for a frame or so maybe just cut out that frame or make it super quick rotation there's just really interesting ways to try to get around flickering strokes and stuff like that another thing that is going to help a little bit is this join limit so basically what's going on here is you're you're kind of determining how to connect two points together and I like to use this flat mode and what this does is basically treats your object as a flat piece and doesn't try to connect things based on depth which is what the default was so basically what this joint limit is is when a stroke ends and another stroke starts so this joint limit is basically when a angle is over 60 degrees it's gonna create and break off a totally new stroke and what happens is if this joint limits too high is you'll have a super long stroke connecting things and again if you're rotating your object what can happen is that whatever is in your view like if we rotate just like this that angle can change and it could snap to somewhere else and you'll see a little glitch so what I like to do is keep this join limit fairly small like maybe 30 degrees so what that means is you'll have a lot more strokes individual strokes that will then connect closer to the initial stroke and have less tendency for it to jump around and have that kind of flickering so try that and it's just like all these little little finicky things you can do to help prevent all that so one thing to note is that the shorter the joint length the speedier the render so not only does this help prevent flickering but it also helps speed up the render because the sketching tune is not calculating these long strokes that it has to try to calculate and connect together okay so really cool stuff one thing I'm seeing here is just you know just to fine-tune this a little bit let's just close out here and if I select this little bit of finger tip you can see we have these lines right here and again I can delete those and remove those by selecting all these objects and again going to their Phong tags here so if I select that Phong tag select this phone tag here and this one what I can do is just raise this fungal limit and that will should remove some of those weird lines there let me just see if this works so you can see by raising that Fong angle we are creating less of those breaks and raising that tolerance so there you can see we can really find again long angles so important when dealing with the creased line type and really removing some unwanted lines and stuff like that so again this is looking pretty good I think I am digging it let's just go back into our render settings for one final time and go over some important settings here so one being anti-aliasing you want to set this to best and use a sharper filter the animation filter kind of blurs out some of the detail of your object and this prevents flickering as far as animation go goes but if you especially if your rendering is still you want to use this cubic still image and really for sketching tune work or any 2d work you want sharper edges so this is gonna be the best kind of filter to use and you can even up the min and Max level as far as the anti-aliasing sampling goes okay so sharper edges always good when dealing with lines and if we go into the sketch in tune render settings here if you wanted to render out individual lines you can always go in here and check on the multi pass here and you can separate the line types and you can even split the visible and hit it to render at as separate passes so you can do your own compositing there which is really cool to have this multi pass stuff show up in your render you're gonna need to add the post effects render pass here okay so just check that on post effects that will render out your sketch in toon lines so very important stuff again make sure that you're rendering at this resolution independent here one other thing is if you just think your strokes overall are a little bit too thick this global thickness scale can scale down or scale up all of your strokes in your scene depending on the percentage value you have here so I'm just removing 20% so everything is going down to 80% of the original scale and there you go I think it was super subtle what happened there but one last thing let's go in select both of our objects both of our stroke types here and go to render here if you're animating and this is really important as far as trying to remove a lot of line flickering is if you have an object animating on to screen what's gonna happen is that if we have this clip strokes to screen checked on is its kind of clip let me get out of interactive render region here but if we have a stroke it's gonna clip and try to reconnect right here okay instead of going all the way around and connecting whoops and connecting here okay so that means that as an object comes or comes on to screen or leave screen you're gonna have flaking flickering edges because the start in the end of the stroke is always changing so if we have this clipped off here the start of the stroke is here and the end of the stroke is there but if we check uncheck this clip stroke to screen it's always gonna maintain that same stroke starting in so if the stroke starts and ends about here it's always gonna end right there and it's not gonna bounce around and redraw itself each frame as it goes off screen so very very important stuff as far as trying to prevent flickering when animating your strokes and all that good stuff so just one final render here hopefully you found this tutorial not only interesting as far as getting blue print type of looks but hopefully it gives you a few tips as far as preventing flickering and really fine-tuning how your sketch in tune looks as far as strokes goes in stuff like that all right so there you go some really fun sketching toon blueprint style renders and hope you have a lot more insight as to what could be going wrong when you have glitchy line renders so hopefully that helps you out there if you have any questions on anything I covered please leave them in the comments section below and if you make any blueprint style renders please be sure to tag me on instagram love seeing what everyone's doing love liking love commenting so be sure to tag me so I can see it same thing on Twitter and Facebook I'm active on there as well and if you liked this video please hit that like button really would appreciate it and if you like what I'm doing on my channel please subscribe would mean so much to me and ding the bell you always got a ding the bell so you can be the first to know when I upload a new tutorial so thank you guys so much for your support hope you enjoy the sketching tuned renderer and I'll see you in the next tutorial bye everybody

Channel: eyedesyn

Views: 79,521

Keywords: sketch and toon, sketch & toon, sketch n toon, blueprint, 3d blueprint, blueprint render, cinema 4d sketch & toon, cartoon render, 3d toon, sketch and toon tutorial, sketch & toon tutorial, cinema 4d tutorial, c4d tutorial, c4d tut, cinema4d tutorial, eyedesyn, learn c4d, toon render

Id: BRRkDA6hgAE

Length: 30min 28sec (1828 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 18 2019