Cinema 4D Tutorial - Intro to the Mograph Shader Effector

hey everybody its EJ from I am calm and today we're going to get a little intro to using the shader sector to create some nice cool HUD elements and learn why you should never use the random effector ever again let's learn how all right so this is what we're going to be creating along our journey of getting a little introduction to the shader effecter and why I think it's the best way to apply random noise generated movements to your clones versus using a random effector so we had to do a little bit of hating on the random effector here unfortunately but let's just go ahead let's create a new scene and we'll just rebuild that whole grid of spheres there so I got my cloner I am going to create my sphere I'm just going to place the sphere underneath that cloner so it's going to clone that sphere and then I'll go to my corner object change the mode from linear to grid array and let's just shrink the sphere down to like point 5 zoom in here so we actually see my little tiny spheres here and then we're just going to adjust the count in XY and z so I'll bring up the count in the X to 15 the Y I'll put 6 and then 15 on the Z and then I'll just shrink down the size in the x y&z as well so we got 155 and 150 and we have this nice little grid set up a little grid array set up so that's looking good and I'm not going to actually turn on render instances because for a lot of the effects that I'll be applying with my shader effector having render instances turned on will not allow us to see the effects of the shader effector on each of these clones so for the shader effect I'm going to keep the render instances turned off you know it will slow down my scene a little bit so we got our sphere grid here and we'll just go ahead and let's just do let's get the random effector out of the way and just want to highlight why I think it's very limiting and in compare it to the options that are in the shader affector so I'm going to apply the random effector we have it applied in our effectors menu on our corner and you can see that just kind of exploded out all of our clones randomly in X Y and V about 50 centimetres each and again random different strengths applied to each cloner and that's kind of the the strength of the random effector they're just applying random values and affecting clones quickly easily and let's just let's just have these affect our clones in the y-direction and then we can also go to the effector list here we have the random modes we also have this maximum and minimum so if we actually want we don't want negative values so like negative scale or negative position because again we have we have positions set to 50 centimeters positive in the positive direction but we're actually having those negative values so we're actually getting from positive 50 to negative 50 we actually clamp that but I just bring our minimum and just bring that to zero and you can see that we no longer have any clones in our negative Y value or negative y axis here so that's pretty handy let's just focus on this random mode here we only have a few different types of random noise that we can apply to our spheres here and that's kind of a downfall of the random effector number one this isn't an animated this this type of random mode sets a random does not animate Gaussian again is not an animated noise noise is a type of animated noise the the random mode set the noise we can adjust the animation speed here we can adjust the scale but those are the only two options we can really affect on that type of noise so that's a nice animated noise turbulence is also another animated random mode of noise for the random effector but that's basically it I mean sorted really doesn't do anything it's not animated so you only have these two different types of noises but we all know that in cinema4d we have a whole bunch of different noise types that we don't have access to using the random effector so let's just get rid of that get out of here random effector and I'm going to select the sphere grid cloner again I'm going to go to mow grass effector and we're going to bring in our shader effector here you're going to notice that our min and Max mode is automatically set to a minimum of zero so we won't have any negative random values unless we want them and bring that down to negative 100 or something like that but in the shading here we can actually load load up a noise shader and what I'll do is just going on to my parameters right now I only have scale being affected let's just bring that up to 3 and then again just like we had in our random effector I'll just have the have some random values being applied to the Y so we have random values that go up to 50 centimetres of being applied to all of our clones here and again this is not animated but by going to my shader vector here go to my shading menu go on to my noise option we have the very familiar just noise shader and it comes with all of these options that are not available in the random effector so this is a huge benefit of using the shader vector versus the random effector because we can choose not just not just noise and turbulence so we got turbulence and we have noise types but we have all this other type of noises here as well and you can actually click on this little arrow here to visually see what those look like so we don't have access to those in using the random effector so big benefit of using the shader effectors we have access to all these different types of noise another thing here is we also have the animation speed so if I put in an animation speed of 2 you can see that our noise is now animating if I right-click on my noise window window you can actually see the noise animating in our little window here as well so maybe 1.5 slowed that down a little bit but you can adjust the global scale of that noise as well another nice thing and you actually do this on the random effector as well let's just turn off this animate there is we can go ahead and visually see how the noise is being applied to our clones by going to our shader going into the parameter here and making sure use alpha strength is turned off and what you're going to see is different grayscale values being applied to our clones here we can see this a lot more clearly if we go back and we're shader tab the shading tab here go into our noise and adjust the contrast so you can see that wherever the black values and light values are in our noise it's actually being applied to our clones here as well so you can see that the darker clones are barely getting affected they're getting a very low strength of that shader vector being applied to it and the lighter valued clones are having higher strength of that shader effector being are affecting and pushing those clones up and also scaling them up so they're pushing them up 50 centimeters and then they're also scaling them up to three times their original size so we can visually see what's going on and again you can do this with a random effector as well but I always like to see visually what's what's kind of happening here again we can go from our shader vector just choose a different type of noise so we can do over and just see what that looks like when that's animate it's a little bit more sharp of transition there we can do cell noise which is kind of cool we can also do mod noise which is more animated here we can adjust the contrast there as well so we can get some cool kind of like mechanical looking type of things and again these noise types are not available in the random effector there so that's kind of the that's what I'm kind of singing the praises of the shaders vector in this tutorial is because I've got so many other options there so let's go ahead and another benefit of using the shader vector here is we can actually layer up shaders so just like in a normal material but just bring the material here just like we can choose different effects here and apply them to a material we can do the same thing to our shader vector here and what I'll do to be able to layer up and stack up different effects I'm going to use a layer shader what that's going to allow us to do if I just click on the layer shader here it placed our noise inside of later shader and that allows us to then apply different types of effects so we can layer up different types of noise on top of one another but what I actually want to do is apply a gradient so the valley or so the cones on the bottom don't have a lot of strength of the shader factor being applied to the bottom and so they can kind of stay put right now they're all kind of moving up like let's first just go back to just normal noise here and what I'm going to do is go back into my layer shader go to shader and just grab a gradient and then what that's going to do again this is a later shader that works exactly like Photoshop so we have one layer stacked on top of the other we also have the blending modes here too so right now our gradients just blowing out the noise that's underneath it and we can see that it's actually applying the strength of the shader gradient out of horizontal gradient so again you can see that our darker clones here are not being affected at all and then slowly ramps up to the lighter grayscale values all the way to the white where our full shader effector strength is being applied so these have zero skate like a scale of one and it's at Y zero position and these have a scale of three times that and then it's moved up 50 centimeters in the Y so you can see how that works but what we can do instead of having this gradient applied horizontally we can apply this vertically using the 2d V and what that will do is then allow us to constrain and limit the shader effector from being applied to these bottom this bottom row of clones there so you can see that those clones are not being affected at all and then the top clones are being affected nicely so they're getting the full strength of that shader and what we can do is go back into our layer shader and right now our our gradients just blowing out the noise underneath it but if we choose a multiply blending mode you can see that with the combination of the gradient and the noise let's just hit play here we now have constrained the random movements from our shader effector to just the topmost rows of clones there which is really cool so you have a lot more control over that and again we can adjust the clones or the gradient here that and that will then affect how many of those clones are being affected so you can see now like the bottom four rows of clones are not moving at all but the ones on the top are and we can then even you know adjust this even more so our bottom row is stay put but then all the other rows of clones are happily dancing around there we go again just the the power of using the shader effector and being able to really have full control over how a gradients applied or how noise is applied different types of noise a lot of really cool stuff you can do here one other thing that's really really cool is we can actually use those grayscale values that are being applied by the shader and actually use it to drive colors of our clones so right now they're just shaded grayscale and you know doesn't want to - interesting right so what we can do is I'm just going to create this material I'm just going to name this color shader and basically what the color shader does you can load it in anywhere on your material I'm going to load it up in the luminance because I just want to have like a flatter kind of UI HUD effect kind of thing so there we go we just apply just white luminance to our cloner there but what I want to do is use that grayscale shader information and use it to color the luminance of this material so I can do this very easily by going to my texture menu here going to mow grass color shader and what you're going to notice is that is now applying those grayscale values that are coming from my shader effector and it's applying them to my clones through the luminance channel so we have these flat grayscale values being applied there but what if we don't want those grayscale values what if we want to change them to different colors well we can do that as well very simply by going to colorizer and basically colorizer is the cinema 4d version of After Effects Colorama where if we apply that it basically uses a gradient and remaps those grayscale values to these colors so now we have this really cool black to red to yellow gradient being applied to my clones and I just recently discovered that this default gradient is actually the colors of the German flag so a little Jeopardy useless jeopardy knowledge there for you because Maxon creates cinema 4d maximum is in Germany nice little easter egg from the Germans over there so that's the gradient that we have applied we can actually go in here change this to like a light blue move the color chip there then have like a darker blue over here something like that you can see that we just remap those grayscale values to these different types of blue here which is really really cool looking good again we can adjust how these are being mapped vertically by just moving our color chip so you can see that more of that darker blue is being applied to our clones here so everything is looking really really good and again this is all animated and the final thing that I think is really really cool about using the shader effector and one of really handy uses is again we have access to all the options in our noise shader here one of those being the loop period so we can actually create looping noise super super easy so how the loop period works is it's based off of how many seconds your animation is or how many seconds you want the noise to animate before it actually loops so some people might think that oh it's maybe it's by frame so my animation is 90 frames but actually no it's actually by second so sort of 90 frames we actually have a our animation 9 frames pong it's 30 frames/second so our animation is actually 3 seconds long so I have this play out you'll see that we actually now have a seamless looped noise by using that loop period there so super super useful again I just want to reiterate that the random effector has no way of looping noise whatsoever so if you need looping noise if you're working on cool animated gif that you want to loop shader effectors the way to go because we can then loop any type of noise that are that's in our noise shader here so really really cool really awesome again you can adjust the contrast and all that good stuff as well adjust the size it's really really cool looks there so one last thing I want to share about the shader effect err because we're really only scratching the surface of what the shader effector can do so what I'm going to do is just go ahead and delete this layer shader here and instead of using custom shader I'm going to use something completely different and the one thing I'm going to do I'm just going to delete that material as well and what I'm going to do is go ahead and we're going to use an image to actually drive an effect clone so I have just my snow Lotus and the luminance channel have a little image of my eye design logo here you can see that we have it's just white in this light teal and I'm going to apply that to my shader vector now what I can do is use the luminance channel because that's the actual channel of my material that I apply that image to I can use that to affect in manipulate the clones on my corner here so go to my shader vector instead of custom shader like we used before we want to say you use the luminance channel of a texture and then we just define the texture tab you want to use and that will be this one that we just applied you're going to notice that it's not looking correct because we have this applied with UVW mapping now the mapping that you'll want to use for clones here is just flat and what we'll do is figure out what's going on here so what I will do is I've got my shader effectors selected I got my material tags selected I'm going to go into texture mode and you'll see that brings up a grid and you can see that it's actually facing the wrong direction we actually need this to lay flat so what I'll do is with the texture mode enabled I can just hit R to bring up the rotation bands and just constrain this by hitting by holding the shift key down to increments of 10 and just have that lay down flat there and then what I'll do is enable the axis modification tool and hit key and I can scale this down you can see that it's actually a little bit bigger than I want it to be and the importance of having that enable access modification too long so if I turn that off and I try to scale down it's not going to scale proportionally so that's kind of the key there I'm just going to do that if I have a enable access modification on I can scale that proportionally all right so right now I think we need to add more clones so we can actually see and make out our logo so I'll go out of my access modification mode go back to model mode here and I'll just adjust my sphere grid here so let's just add more clones let's do 50 by 50 and now you can see that actually our logo is there but we actually have a child so I'll just turn that off and we can actually probably probably want to go ahead and scale this up again so I'll go back on my texture tag go back into my texture mode and go and enable modification there and do that and I think once we scale that up enough we actually turn tiling back on because it won't it's only have issue of Eiling we scaled a super-low but there we go I think we're good there and you'll notice that all the clones that are to have this lighter color from that image applied to it is pushed up in having the full strength of that shader effector applied to it and then the blue values which are more along the middle gray value is kind of being like it's in the middle value here and the reason for that is is that the shader effector is actually pulling the grayscale information from that image to then affect those clones so we can go and maybe just bring this down a little bit maybe we don't even want position maybe want to actually scale down on the clones that are the lighter value I'll do is I'll just increase the scale of my actual sphere here you can see that we have this cool like dot matrix II kind of effect here let's get the way just the three should work there we go and we can render that out you can see that we can now make kind of make out our logo here but those clones are now scaled down from our shader effects because using those grayscale values to then affect those lighter clones more than the blue clones there and so what we can now do is you can see that if i zoom in here we have some specular happen in there what if we just want to apply that flat luminance material to this all these clones here as well what we can do is again use the color shader so what I'll do is go ahead apply this new material to my clone grid go to lumen turn that on again we're going to use the color shader and since our shader effector is using and outputting the colors from that image it's now applying those colors through the luminance channel of this new material that we created so this color this logo shader basically there we go so we got some nice effects using an image to apply colors and shrink and effect the clones from our corner using the shader effector as well so let's actually just go back to our original file here and we'll just do some finishing touches with our little cool UI HUD grid speery singing going on here so let's go ahead let's add our camera and I'll just look through it by clicking the little viewport and then change the focal length to like 35 and the sensor size to 50 so we got a little bit of some lens distortion there and then what I'm going to do is I want to have some depth of field so what I'll do is I'll change this to physical renderer which will allow us to enable depth of field through our camera so the first thing I need to do is actually choose my focal point so I need just bring in the focal point of my camera a little bit closer to the grid here something like that and then I'll just say we'll just render that and see what this looks like and you can see that really no depth of field blur is really happening at this point that's because we have to bring down our f-stop just like an actual real life camera we'd bring that to like f1 and see a little bit of blurring we can even make this a little bit lower so you like point five we can really start to see the blood I think that's a pretty cool effect there so what we can do as well is maybe add a little bit more lens distortion so we can add some quadratic lens distortion by bringing that to like 50% and you can see that that kind of warps our image a little bit we can even go like a negative value like negative 50 so it kind of warps it the towards us which is kind of cool but I'll just leave that at positive 50 and we can then add like some chromatic aberrations so we have some like blurring it like some distortion of our RGB fields here which adds this really really cool effect let's go ahead and let's just add some glow on top of this as well so I'm just going to go add some glow and I'll just bring up the intensity of s and maybe save 50 see what looks like it's probably a little bit too much let's bring the size down to two that's looking a little bit better area I think that's looking pretty cool so you can see that we actually have some grain that is happening along our depth of depth of field there so if we go to our physical settings and just increase the sampling to say medium that should help out and try to smooth out that depth of field actually I actually think I think I prefer just a little bit of grain some like film grain from our depth of field there I think it adds a really cool aesthetic to to this render here so that's basically how I applied and made this cool little hood element here so hopefully through this tutorial you understand you know the benefits of using the shader factor versus the random effector and hopefully this will just allow you to just basically never use the random effector ever again I don't see why you would unless you just are super lazy and just want to apply some random stuff to it without much control at all but the shader effector just has so much more to give versus the random effector so hopefully this opened your eyes to the shader sector and has you using this in your projects in the future all right so there's your intro to using the shader effector in Y if you've been using a random effector it's almost like you've been driving a car stuck in first gear the whole entire time and that shader effector is just so much more versatile so much more powerful than a random effector hopefully you'll be using the written a shader effector in your workflow from here on out so if you have any questions about the shader effector be sure to leave them in the comments section if you make anything cool using the shader vector I'd love to see it show me on Facebook Instagram on Twitter I love to see what you guys are making out there and if you liked this tutorial be sure to hit the like button I'd appreciate that and I appreciate all of you out there watching this tutorial I'll see you all in the next one bye everybody

Channel: eyedesyn

Views: 137,342

Keywords: shader effector cinema 4d, shader effector c4d, c4d shader effector, cinema 4d shader effector, cinema 4d mograph module, cinema 4d effector, c4d effector, cinema 4d tutorial, c4d tutorial, learn c4d, learn cinema 4d, beginner cinema 4d, cinema 4d beginner, cinema 4d shader effector tutorial, c4d shader effector tutorial, cinema 4d shader effector color, color shader, mograph color shader, color mograph clones, cinema 4d hud, c4d tut, cinema 4d tut, eyedesyn, tutorial

Id: 97AcZAGcCDE

Length: 26min 32sec (1592 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 18 2017