Cinema 4D Tutorial - Model, Texture and Animate a Snake

hi guys Jamie here from JB motion in today's video we're gonna be creating the snake that you're looking at right now this tutorial is broken up into four parts so I'm part one we're gonna be modeling the snake then for part two we're gonna be unwrapping the UVs part three we're gonna focus on creating the snakes texture and lighting our scene and in part four we're gonna be animating our snake so let's get started on this we go so the first thing I did was I was kind of looking for some reference images for a model in the snake and I found some great reference for the snake's head I found this on Google Images I'll put this into the description so you'll be able to download it yourselves but I was unable to find like a body that was stretched out and I need it to be stretched out for you know obviously for the initial pose I need it to be stretched out but I couldn't actually find a stretched out snake so what I did was I just went into illustrator and I dragged in my snake head image and then I just kind of used the pen tool to you know just kind of trace well I say trace but I just kind of imagined what a snake body would look like so I kind of dipped down and went up a bit higher here near the middle then dipped down again and then kind of carved off at the end and then I just did the same for the head instead I used the pen tool and I just drew a straight line for the top part and then I just used the width of my stroke so I went up here and set the width up to whatever the width was at the end of the head and then I just went and used my width too and I said right so it's probably gonna be a bit skinnier here at the neck and it's gonna be a bit fatter here in the middle and skinnier then at the end and that was kind of how I went about creating the reference for my snake so what I'll do is I'll I'll M well I'm gonna be exporting this for my reference well I have already and I will put this reference image in the description below so I have it here as a JPEG so you'll be able to download that in the description below so let's hop into cinema 4d and what we can do is we can start modeling our head so I'm just gonna do a file save as and I'm just gonna call this snake model and I'm gonna create a cube and this is just going to be the head we're gonna model this up to look like the snake head so what I'm gonna do is I am going to go into my top view and go to options here and configure and now I'll be able to load in my reference image as long as back your back tab here is selected we can load in our reference image okay so we need to set the rotation here to minus 90 and let's bring it up along the Y and move it over we want to Center our reference image into our into our cube there so it's centered in our world so get it as get it close enough you know it doesn't have to be perfect and then hop into your right view and let's do the same again load in our reference image and let's bring it along the X here and Center it up and we want to bring it down along the way so that the body of our snake the the bottom of the body is touching our floor we haven't created on yet but if we did it would be here so make sure that the snake is just resting on the floor so if you accidentally go out of your viewport you can just or your configure options you can just hit shift V in your keyboard or go to options here and select it there and now we can bring it down along the way to minus 6 on my one anyway okay so we also want to bring the transparency up to 80% and do the same in our top view and now we've got a reference images rockins now we're ready to start modeling so let's jump into our right view first of all let's bring this cube down closer to our snake's head size okay so what we can do to make sure that our snake head cube I'm just going to call this snake head snake head to make sure that it's gonna be on the floor is we can first of all let's get a closer to our snake head size there and we can press C on our keyboard or just come over here and make it editable and now what we can do is we can use the axis Center tool here now if you can't see that you can press shift C and you can search for axis Center and it's right here now we want to set the axis here to be to be down at zero on our Y so let's just bring that down to minus 100 so that's gonna set our access here to be at the bottom of our cube and now what we're able to do is set our key our snakehead coordinates on the Y to be zero and that'll put it on the floor okay so let's go into our top view and let's kind of match up the width of our head okay I'm just gonna be jumping in and out of views here and if you don't know how to do that it's basically just middle mouse clicking anywhere in any of the screens and if I want to go into my perspective view on the middle mouse click it'll jump in there middle mouse click to jump in and out of screens so I'm just gonna start moving this cube scale in it and and moving it to get the shape of my snake head and now what I want to do is do some cutting so we're gonna cut use KL on your keyboard to select the loop path cut tool and let's with our edges mode selected let's figure out where we want to put in our cuts so let's put in 1 let's say here and one here and one here okay so again you don't have to be exact just more or less where the the peak of his head is kind of where his where his head kind of slopes down here just the right of his eyeball and another one to the left of his eyeball and then obviously yeah so that's all of them and I want to put one that goes across the middle but we'll do that actually later what we can do now is start moving points moving vertices so go into verts into points mode and let's go to rectangle selection and now we can start moving points to match up to our reference image so I'm gonna go ahead and move these points to match up and a cool way of switching between the previous tool and the corn too is using space so if I select scale now if I go space it's gonna go back to my rectangular selection tool so that's pretty handy when you're doing stuff like this okay now I'm going to jump into my top view and I'm gonna do the same now what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna select these points and instead of going like this selecting this one and doing it like that you're not gonna maintain the symmetry we can select both of these points these vertices here and go into the scale tool and then we can just scale these down and then they'll pull in to meet each other in the center so that's really handy so I'm going to do that there I'm using space to go back to my previous tool and I'm doing it here space again to go back to my rectangle selection tool and then space to go back to scale okay so let's have a look at our snakehead see what it's looking like so we're gonna be putting into a subdivision surface so select your snake had the object hold down alt and then add a subdivision surface holding down alt it automatically add the snakehead object as a child of the subdivision surface right now we got a you know you could argue that it's a snakehead but it's kind of could be a bullish as well or or a bred herb a troll or whatever so we got to do a bit more work on this so that's press em B on our keyboard to show our lines and let's see what we're gonna do so what we can do is it's just the activator subdivision surface for the Minish and let's go KL on our keyboard to open the loop path cut tool and let's make a cut directly along the center now don't worry about being exact where you put your cost because even if it's not on the center you can just click and then you can use this to this this button here that'll Center your cut I'm gonna do the same here so just click anywhere along one of these lines and then we can use this button here to Center our cut again so what I want to do with this new cut is with my edges mode selected and scale - I'm gonna press ul on my keyboard and I'm gonna select that edge that loop and then I'm gonna select my scale tool I'm just gonna drag this along the X kind of fatten out his cheeks so now if we go back in see that's looking a bit better turn back off our subdivision surface and what we can start do now is modeling our eyes so we need groove we need to cut out some eye sockets so let's go into our so you can see as we increase the width of that loop there so let me just undo it you can see what's happening so we need to fix that so back into your top view select your snake head object going to points mode and let's just use our at angular selection to rectangle selection tool to grab all of these points hold down shift and grab all of these points use your scale tool and let's scale those in I'm just turning on my subdivision surface so I can get a more accurate result so let's go back out okay so now that's fixed we can go back to modeling our eye sockets let's turn back off our subdivision surface and jump into the right view now the eye is here so we're gonna be working with this polygon so go into polygon mode select your snake head and we can press 9 on our keyboard to use our direct selection to just select that polygon let's go into perspective view and we're gonna select the direct opposition the adjacent polygon there so now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use my inner extrude tool which is on your keyboard and let's just hover over any of the selected polygons and click and drag or dragging in words not outwards we're going to go to a value you can see the offset is moving here so we can actually control it with the offset here so I'm going to set this to be 2 centimeters and I'm gonna do it again so I'm just gonna click and drag and I'm gonna go to 1.3 centimeters maybe 1.5 okay so next I'm gonna use my extrude tool so hit D in your keyboard I'll open up your extrude tool now you can just click and drag and we're gonna go inwards to a value of about 2 an offset of about minus 2.6 okay so now let's grab our scale tool and let's just scale that along the z axis so we don't want to scale too far cause it's actually not working out it's kind of pushing that outwards but still this little still work so the eye is gonna be deeper here but it's gonna be a bit more shallow here so that actually might work once we turn on our subdivision surface yeah so that doesn't look too bad at all and we can do it even a little bit more okay so now we got our eye sockets what we need to do now is we need to kind of create a brow like an eyebrow or a snake eye brow so it's gonna kind of you know we're gonna push out the geometry a bit so that it's gonna kind of cover over his eyeball of it so let's turn off the subdivision surface object and what I want to do now is now what I could do is I could go into my polygon mode and then grab this polygon on this one and same over here push this out a bit and bring it down a bit let's see what that looks like so let's push it out a bit more and bring it down a bit more so that's mmm no I'm not really not liking that so let's see maybe if we pull it up a bit first let's try dragging it out and then bringing it down let's see what that looks like it's looking a bit better we got some protruding brows there but his eyes are looking a bit thin so I might just select these two polygons and these two also an old mound shift to select several of the polygons there let's turn back on my subdivision and I'm just gonna drag this down a bit yeah okay so I'm happy with - now we need to create some eyeballs so let's see let's jump back yeah with newless in perspective I'm gonna create a sphere and I'm going to scale it down to about - about a radius of 5 centimeters for now and now let's just get this positioned okay so we can increase the segments to about 50 let's scale it down a bit so I'm actually gonna go for a radius of 3.5 and I want to get the position kind of I don't know I'm gonna eyeball this no pun intended there now at all so I wanted to be in a position where I feel it looks cool so I'm happy enough with that now we can use the symmetry object to just copy one over exactly to the opposite side there so with my sphere select let's actually read an a-list eyeball just gonna bring it down to the bottom there for no particular reason and I'm gonna create a symmetry object drag it down and then put my eyeball as a child of it so now let's create it another eyeball in the exact opposite position cool so maybe I could bring out these eyeballs even a little bit more select the eyeball I could actually bring that out a little bit more so kind of bulges out a bit more looks a bit cooler maybe maybe not okay no I like it mm yeah I'm gonna go for about there again this is all preference how are you how you want to look yourself so that's our snake head mmm one last thing we could do is turn off your subdivision surface go into the direct selection go into edge mode and let's make sure your snake head is selected let's grab these three edges here just bring it down a little bit now turn back on your subdivision bring it down even more to give it that kind of you know a bit more shape and it's a bit more snake-like kind of dips down just looks a bit cooler I think okay so that's looking pretty cool what we're gonna be doing as well is in our subdivision surface we're gonna be cranking this up to three so it's gonna be a lot smoother but for now we're leaving in two two and we need to create our snake body so let's go and turn off our subdivision surface we're gonna grab some polygons so we're gonna grab select your snake head object grab this one this one this one and this one used in your keyboard and then we can just extrude outwards so we're gonna set the initial extrusion here in the offset we can set it to 20 centimeters jump into our right view and now we want to repeat that process but we don't have to keep doing it and set in 20 so what we can do is we can just use the new transform button here and let's just do that a bunch of times until we get right to the end of our snake so I'm just gonna back into my perspective view here turn back on myself division surface object and this is what we got so far okay so now we need to start using our reference objects to you know push and pull the points around to get this matched up with our reference image so with snakeheads selected I'm gonna start working in my right view first you can do both of them at the same time if you want I like to just focus on one side at a time first for snakes in here so I'm gonna go into a rectangle selection make sure a point mode selected and my snake head object is selected and I'm going to just start dragging these points I'll also make sure that only select visible elements is turned off so I'm not gonna make you watch me do this cuz it's pretty basic and you guys might get a bit bored so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pause the video here and I will join you guys when you have reached the tail and then we can work on the tail together oh no what I will do is I will join you guys when I'm almost at the tail and then we can work on the top view together so I'm going to pause the video right now okay so I'm getting fairly close now to the end here of my tail in my right view so almost there okay so I'm happy enough - don't mess around with it too much and now I'm gonna jump into my top view so middle mouse click and then top view middle mouse click again and now we're gonna do that all over again or for the top view so again I'll I'm actually gonna start the detail this time so I'm gonna use my rectangle selection to grab all those points go into the my scale tool and then we can just drag those in words like - now I'm gonna use spacebar to go to my previous select clean previously selected - spacebar again and I'm just gonna repeat that over and over again until I have reached the head and I will join you guys at the head okay so almost there guys at the head um it didn't take me long to get here took me like two seconds I swear how long did it take you but I almost there now I want to rush too much cuz I took my sweet-ass time just to get here so I'm not gonna rush it the last hurdle and mess it up okay so that's it okay so as you can see it's not an exact replica of my reference but it's gonna be symmetrical and it's gonna be fine so I'm gonna go back into my perspective view and let's see okay so we're snake is a bit skinny so we need to make him a bit fatter so to do that deactivate your subdivision surface object select snake head and this is now just snake and we're gonna select we're gonna press you on AR ùl on our keyboard to use our loop selection make sure edge mode is selected and let's just grab this loop here and hope when we scale it out it doesn't affect our eye too much let's just keep an eye on our eye scale tool and I'm just gonna drag that outwards so it is kind of affecting our eye so let's see if I dragged us out to about a hundred and forty percent turn back on my subdivision surface editor yeah it's it's not doing anything good for our eye so I might just make a compromise and bring it back in a little bit and I might grab the so I'm gonna go ul again and I'm gonna grab this Center loop here and I'm just gonna scale it down a bit okay so that is our snake he's a fine-looking snake he's eyeballs aren't as bulges they used to be so let's bulge them a little bit select eyeball object go into your move tool and let's just bring out those eyeballs yeah that's that's better okay that's it there's our snake guys so in the next video we're gonna need gonna be unwrapping him we're gonna be unwrapping the UVs so that we can apply our texture so now that we have our snake modelled up the next thing we need to do is unwrap the UVs and before we do that I just want to show you why we need to do that so let's create a new material and open it up go into the color Channel and let's add a tiles shader you can leave it as is red and white let's just apply that to our snake so straight away we're seeing a problem now when we model this snake we started off with a cube and then we extruded out now if we jump into our texture tag here you're seeing you can see we're using the UVW mapping projection mode now that's all very well and good to use on primitive objects but the minute you start editing those like we extruded out from it that's just not gonna work so we could say try flash projection mode and then we could go into our texture mode here hit R on your keyboard we could rotate this 90 degrees and then rotator a lot of 90 degrees so it's projecting down along the Y and that's given us a pretty good result so no problems there really but there is a problem yeah there will be a problem let's just try and move our snake so we move our snake all very well and good but as you know we intend to animate this snake so we want him kind of you know moving along in an S shape just like at our start video and the easiest way we're gonna be able to do that is by using a spline wrap deformer so I have an example spline already set up so I'm just gonna grab that and copy it into my snake model scene I'm gonna make the spline wrap a child of the snake object object and I'm going to drag this example spline down into the spline field here in my spline wrap deformer now our spline our snakes looking like a country now so we need to fix that so in your object tab just set the mode to keep length and set the access here to minus Z and our snakes upside down so we just need to go down and find rotation your own might be rolled upwards just click on the triangle to roll it down and set the banking to 180 degrees that'll flip our snake the right way up now you can see it's messed up our texture again and also if we try and animate this using the method we intend to use going forward which is going to be animating the offset you'll see that our snake is just passing through the texture our texture isn't actually sticking to our snake so that's the why so let's move on to the how so I'm just gonna remove this spline wrap from my snake object when we keep that for later and I'm gonna bring this example spline down to the bottom just to keep everything organized let's hide off those so the first thing we want to do is well if you haven't done so already create a new material make sure that you add a tiles shader into your color Channel and then apply that material to your snake object now I also want to make it so that when I move my snake my eyeballs are gonna follow and stay in the same position so what I need to do is make our symmetry object which is a parent of the eyeball a child of the snake object and then use my middle mouse click to select the snake object that will automatically select all of the children right click and go down to connect objects and delete now that's gonna make our snake body and our eyeballs one object so that's great but we need to separate them for texturing so let's go to our snake now you can see that after we hit connect objects and ilish it's created to selection tags so the first one if we go into polygon mode and click on restore selection make sure that the first selection tag is selected you'll see that it's just selecting all the polygons on our body so we can rename this to body and if we click on our second selection tag click on restore selection you'll see that this is just going to be selecting our eyeballs so we can rename this to eyes okay so now we can apply our let's delete these textures off for now let's grab our body selection tag click on restore selection make sure snake the snake object is selected and now we can just drag this material on to our selection okay and let's create a new material call it eyes select our eyes selection tag and click on restore selection make sure the snake is selected in your objects manager and now we can just drag our eyes material onto our eyes so now we have our eyes which have been separated from our body by selection tanks so now we can control the color of our eyes so we can set it to whatever color we like and we can also control our snakes body material separately okay so we're gonna move on to actually unwrapping the UVs now so first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna select our snake and then we're gonna select our body selection tag and let's click on restore selection now we want to select our texture tag which is applied to our body so let's just rename this body so our texture tag that's called body we want to right click on - now before we do anything we need to actually set our projection mode here to flash and let's select our snake object go into texture mode and now let's rotate the projection so that it's facing downwards with your rotation tool just drag this around to minus 90 degrees and then drag it around here to be minus 90 so that our texture is gonna be projecting down now let's reselect all of our polygons so you can just go back into polygon mode and that re select your previous selection and now we can try that step again so right click on that the body texture tag and then go down to assign uvw coordinates ok so the next step is to select our seam so we need to use the go into edges mode and we're going to select the edges where we want our seem to be so let me just show you what I mean by that if I go into this unwrap you vehicle so let's just imagine this is our snake his head's been cut off and most of his body so when I say our same I mean this line here this is where i want my seam to be because it's gonna be underneath the snake so we're not gonna see it so the way we want to unwrap our snake is kind of like this this is how we want to unwrap our snakes UV just like that so jump back into our snake model scene and let's now select our edges that we want our scene to be on so a quick way to do this is just press your UL on your keyboard then we can select Loup then we can jump into top mode and we can use our rectangle selection tool and turn on only select visible elements now to deselect all of these edges along the top just hold down ctrl click and drag and that will deselect all of the top edges there we can jump back into perspective mode and now you can see that we just have the bottom edge selected so that's where we want our scene to be let's actually deselect this edge here go into your life selection mode and let's deselect that we don't want to see the same so as long as it's under our snake we're not gonna see it let's make sure that it's there there's no seam visible on the back of our snake as well so let's turn that off okay so we have our seam selected now we need to select the points on our snake that we don't want to move while we're unwrapping the UV so I'll jump back into my unwrap you vehicle scene and again this is our snake now we don't want the top part of our snake to move when we unwrap the you v's we just want to unwrap obviously along the seam and we want it to unwrap like this so the top part of the map doesn't need to move it on it's just the sides and the bottom that's gonna unwrap like that so we need select we need a way to select the top part of the snake so that when it comes to unwrapping the UV we can tell it that these parts should stay in the same position so we can jump back into our snake model and go into point mode and now we can jump into our top view and select our rectangle selection make sure only select visible elements is turned on and let's just click and drag now that's gonna select all of our vertices along the top of our snake but it's also gonna select some vertices that we don't want so let's grab our live selection too and let's hold down control to deselect all these points here that we don't want to be selected here so I'm using my square brackets on my keyboard to increase the size of my direct selection circle there and we have all these points along this along the edge that we have selected that we don't want so press ul on your keyboard and then we can hold down ctrl + click now to deselect all of those points along that loop so now that we have all these points selected along the top of our snake we're ready to unwrap the UVs and again the reason we're selecting these points is because we're telling the we're telling cinema 4d that when we unwrap the you've ease these are the points that shouldn't move at all they should be fixed in place the unwrapping is gonna occur along the bottom and along the side of our snake but all of these selected points here are gonna remain in the same position just like in our unwrap example here this is our seam and our unwrapping is gonna happen along here and along the side of our snake but the selected vertices a lot on the top aren't gonna move at all so it's gonna be something like that let's go back into our snake model scene and we are ready to unwrap this so let's go into our UV edit layout and what we need to do is go into UV go into the UV mapping tab here and you need to make sure the pin border points is deselected and pin to neighbors is also deselected make sure the pin point selection is selected so that's what's gonna tell our versus our selected vertices to be pinned to not move and cut selected edges should also be ticked and that's what's gonna tell our edges that we have selected along the bottom of our snake that's what's gonna tell the cut to be along here that's where our seam is gonna be so just before we click on apply just select polygon mode so that's gonna select all the polygons and now watch what happens over here and our UV map click apply and you can see it at that unwraps nicely there so now we can jump back into our standard layout and now if we turn back on our spline wrap and our example spline make the spline wrap a child of the snake and then drag the example spline down into the spline field while it was already there and let's set the banking back to let's see I know the snake is an upside down the banking is already set to 180 so now you can see that we have a nice UV map set up for our snake and the seam is hidden away underneath so we're not even gonna see that when it comes to animating this there's gonna be a floor the only part of the snake we're gonna see is the top part here and lastly we're able to animate the offset and our texture is going to be stuck to our snake okay guys so next part of this is we want to create a material for our snake and we're also gonna light up our scene so first of all I want to bring our snake back into our shot and let's just get rid of this camera and let's find a nice a nice vantage point so that we can texture up our snake screen new camera make it active and I'm gonna use a protection tag so that we can't move that around cool now I want to create a floor so it's gonna be a plane it's gonna increase the scale of that right up so we can't see the the edge of it and you can see there are snake isn't actually on the floor so we're gonna be moving our spline because remember that our spline wrap is wrapping our snake around this spline which are gonna rename to spline and we can control the position of our snake with the spline so so make sure model mode is selected now I can drag this up and down so I'm gonna hop into my right view shift V so I can turn off my picture there don't need that anymore and let's make sure that our snake is flush with our floor okay so let's grab our snake or our spline I should say let's just drag this down to line up with our floor now you can see there are snakes body kind of raises up it rises up there in the center but we're not gonna see that so we we don't need to worry about that so that's kind of flush that's nice and flush back into perspective view and let's start editing our body material so let's jump into it and I'm going to turn on first of all I want to get rid of our tiles we don't need those anymore and now let's load in our snake skin to image so this you'll be able to download this from the description below it's basically a vector that I found online and I export it as a JPEG and it's basically black and white and you got some scales and it looks kind of like bricks right now so we don't want this to look like bricks it's looking like bricks because these each scale is way too big to be a slake scale so what we need to do is we need to go into our UV editor select our snake and then go to UV polygons let's try and find this okay so how I found that there wasn't visible so just like in the viewport you can use one two and three to zoom in and out and rotate the camera and so the same applies over here you can use to to zoom in and out and you can use one to pad around so just find your UV map and once you have it found let's actually turn off our camera for a second so then we can actually move around our viewport and we can move around our or uv-map area also so we want to grab our scale too and we want to increase the size of our UV map and in doing so we're gonna reduce the size of these scales you can see they're getting smaller so let's go and drag it up now I'm not telling you how much to drag it up by you just have to drag it up until these scales start looking like scales now over here you can see that we got these really small scales and over here you got these really big scales so what we want is for the small scales to be on the bottom of our snake I'm gonna turn off my floor I'm gonna make it invisible we want these small scales to be running along the bottom of our snake so what we need to do is we need to move our UV map up and then you'll see that we're able to move our small scales down to the bottom of our snake and we're still getting a lot of small scales up on the side so we might need to do a bit more scaling with this so what we can do is go to our scale tool and go to non-uniform scale then if we click right about here and start dragging downwards dragging down our small scales are gonna squish down to the bottom area of our snake I hope this is making sense cuz it actually doesn't make much sense to me right or I just kind of move the UV map around I you I moved the UV map around a nice scale until I am happy with the position of my image which is in this case my snake material so I hope that you can make sense of it and then you can follow along with what I'm doing so I need to scale this a bit more and I think I'm happy enough with how that's looking there's still a bit more you can see the small scales are like pushing up along half of the snake body and on the other side of the snake they're kind of only going up about a third of the snake's body so what we can do is use our move - and again just move our UV map up until we're getting nice and symmetrical so maybe down a bit further let's have a look okay so that's looking pretty good I do not want to mess around with that anymore so let's leave it as is let's jump back into our standard layout and now we have our snake he's all scaled up and he's ready to go and I scaled up I don't mean increased in size I mean he has scales that actually don't look like bricks we can turn back on our floor and okay that's looking pretty good now I want to create some lights for our scene so we create a light and I'm going to go make sure that model mode is selected and I want to just move this back along the X and up along the Y and over along the Zed I want to make sure this light type is set area and I'm gonna hit R on my keyboard so that I can rotate this 90 degrees I'm gonna drag this orange circle up so I can reduce the height of this area light and I'm gonna drag this orange circle out to increase the width so if I go into my life go into the details tab you can see that we've got the size x set to about 371 the size Y is set to about 75 or 76 in the coordinates tab it's got the following position values and I also want to rotate it so the kind of points towards our snake okay cool so move it back just a little bit okay and I'm gonna duplicate this life and before I do that I'm gonna turn on shadow area and yeah okay now I'm gonna duplicate it I want to click hold down control click and drag now I don't want it to go in that direction towards the ground I want to change the coordinate system to world by clicking on this button and now if I hold a ctrl and drag it's gonna go straight across so now if I hit on my keyboard I can rotate this about two or a hundred and thirty degrees so that it is also pointing at our snake hit a on my keyboard so that I can move it back a bit and just back at it actually and make sure that the shadows are turned off for this second life like two point one as it's called okay so now do we have two lights set up we're just gonna have actually one more so let's grab this one hold down control drag it up along the Y we just want this to be pointing down at our snake so I'm just gonna move it kind of above our snake in our my keyboard I'm gonna rotate that roughly about minus sixty three point five degrees and just just make sure that it's pointing down pointing downwards towards your snake there okay so bear with me two seconds while I drink some tea right okay so we have our light setup so now let's hop back into our camera and let's do a render render of this so this is what we have so far not much but we're gonna work with it this is what we're gonna work on so we're gonna jump into our body material and we are going to clear this because we don't want this anymore go into your displacement channel turn it on click on this little triangle here and let's load in our snakeskin image so that's going to create some displacements in our geometry but what it's gonna do is it's gonna raise the white areas so everywhere there's white yep the geometries rate gotta raise so I'm gonna actually show you there so we don't want this obviously we want our geometry to raise along the scales so we need to invert this a quick way of doing that is just setting the black point to one and the white point to zero now you can see they're scales are actually being raised so we need to fix this obviously so we can turn on subpar league on displacement and turn on round geometry and let's set the blur offset here to three percent let's set the strength to fifty and the height to three so look at that okay so that's looking much better already we could even turn that in the height down to two centimeters see what that looks like okay cool so next we're gonna turn on our well our reflectance channels already turned on but we want to create a Beckman let's turn off the default specular and now we turn on our interactive render region let's bring up the quality here up to the max let's just let this render for a second so now you can see that our snake is fully reflect if it kind of looks like tinfoil with scales so the scales are reflective and so are the cracks or the grooves between the scales now the only thing we want to be reflective are the scales we don't want the the grooves between the scales to be reflective so we can turn off reflection in those groups and how do we do that we can basically just go into our displacement channel and copy this image or shader as it's called go into a reflectance channel and then we can create a layer mask so go down here to layer mask make sure that layer want to select it that's the Beckman that we created and go into your layer mask here and let's load or paste our shader so if we jump in here we can see that the white areas will be reflective and the dark areas will not now the black areas are kind of now the dark areas I should say black areas whatever they're a bit small or faint or hard to see we can increase the Billy Loes by turn the exposure to one and now you can see that's gonna turn off reflection completely in our grooves the areas between our scales and now we can actually affect the color of these so if we said that's red we're gonna get some red gaps between our scales but we just want to set it to a nice dark color so that they're gonna be pretty much invisible and that is already looking pretty cool so the next thing we're gonna do is create a material for our floor so let's double click in a materials panel and let's rename this to floor we can close this down and let's add our floor material to our floor object so it's white right now but we don't want it to be white we want it to be black and we want it to be reflective so go into your reflections channel and let's turn off default specular let's add in a Beckman let's increase the roughness to be 20% and let's see what we got here okay so we're getting a lot of grain here so don't worry about that because that'll disappear the minute we turn on anti-aliasing it's set to geometry right now set that to best you're gonna get rid of all this grain yes but it's just gonna take longer to render out so or just leave that to the end you can see it's actually reducing our graininess quite a bit but we're gonna go back to geometry for now while we're working on our textures okay so we have our floor setup and you can see that it's you know we can see our lights in our floor we don't want to see our lights in our floor we don't want our lights to be reflected by our floor so what we can do is select all of our lights I held down control there to click on each one of them and select them all go into project the project tab and let's just drag the floor object down here into objects that's gonna exclude our floor from the basically our lights are no longer gonna be reflected by our floor that's kind of what we're looking for that's exactly what we're looking for and again the graininess is going to be reduced once we have anti-aliasing turned on so I just wanna hit alt or my keyboards turn off my interactive render region I'm gonna select my camera delete this protection tag and I want to find a better angle for this okay so let's go for this let's do a quick render see what that looks like okay okay so I'm happy enough for that angle of camera so I'm gonna set a add a protection tag on there cool so let's open up our body material and see what else we can do for this to make it look nice and nice so let's see we'll turn back on our interactive render region alt on your keyboard and let's see what we got okay so we need to set up some reflective boards and I don't know if you know what a reflective board is I actually didn't know what they were well I knew what they were in cinema for a but I didn't know what they were called so reflective board is kind of like things that photographers use to make the like kind of bounce in the way that photographers want the light to bounce that makes sense so you can kind of get the idea you know so we're gonna create some of these in cinema 4d so basically we're gonna create let's just deactivate our camera all to our turnoff your interactive render region we're gonna create some reflective boards and they're basically just gonna be planes basically basically um so we got our plane we call this reflective board and we're gonna create one material and call it our board material leave it at the default color and reflectance and let's just apply that to our reflective board object let's bring down the height here and Ian your keyboard so we can move it over and up our on your keyboard to rotate it around so it's pointing at our snake and let's actually hop into the object into the object tab and then we can decrease the height or the width actually is what we're looking at that's lying little put our snake so in your keyboard let's move it over you want to make it about the same length as our snake so I can just drag it out here with the circle they are in circle so if you want to replicate it exactly the width is 95.3 and the height is five to one we can turn down the width segments and the height segments to one and that is our first reflective board so that's gonna create some nice reflections along the body of our snake also this light is gonna bounce light off our reflective forward and bounce it back towards our snake as well so let's jump back into our camera now we don't want to see this so what we can do is we can go and right-click on a reflective board go to cinema 4d tags and create a compositing tag and then if we click on the tag object we can turn off seeing my camera and also we can hide it from the viewport if we just double click on this visibility tag here at the top of them and then we won't see it in our viewport so let's do a quick render to picture viewer here and see what we got so this is a last render without a reflective board and now this is our new one so you can see the differences that is making um again we still have our grain in us anti-aliasing is turned off let's just turn it on so we can see what it's looking like set it to best and four by we'll go two by two for now we're eventually gonna bring it up to four by four but for now we'll just go two by two just save a bit of time and now you can see the difference that that is making so you can see where a snake body is actually intersecting our floor so we will fix that right now so let's go and select our spline remember that our spline controls the position of our snake let's jump into our front alright view let's just drag this up a little bit so it looks like our floor is here actually it doesn't look like there was any intersection there so I'm just gonna jump back in and I'm gonna leave it as it is for now let's try and find a better camera view to link my protection tag and I'm gonna find a nice camera so let's try this one let's do a render preview or rendered picture viewer here see what that looks like this is our last render the camera angle wasn't the best and this is our latest one so that's looking pretty cool now again a lot graininess it will be solved once anti-aliasing is set to four by four and also we need to get some nice rim along the edge of our snake to kind of separate it from the background so what we can do is we can create another reflective borders let's make this visible again and let's just hold down control now make sure that your world or your coordinate system is set to world you can turn that on and off and then hold down control and let's just drag this over gonna rotate this around two pointers take and make sure that it's behind your life otherwise it's gonna block the life and yeah pretty good so let's activate our camera again and we'll just do a render to picture viewer on that and see what it looks like so our anti-aliasing has turned up again so well it's set two by two so that's why the renders taking a bit longer now what we can see is we're getting this white reflection of our reflective board on our floor so we don't want that so we're gonna turn that off and and to do that I'm just let this render out so we need to exclude our reflective boards from our floor so what we can do is we can create a compositing tag on our floor and if we jump into exclusion we can then drag our reflective boards into our floor compositing tags exclusion tab just let the two of them drag them in there so now if we do another render on that that should have solved our problem and it hasn't of course okay so there is another way of doing this I'm just gonna undo what I have done and I'm gonna go into my reflective boards compositing tags and let's try and exclude the floor from our reflective boards so actually this is the way I should have done it so this is gonna exclude this is a symbol for reflection so it's gonna exclude our floor from reflecting our reflective boards so if we render that again that should have done us yep that's done it all right okay cool so now you can see that our reflective boards are no longer being reflected by our floor and that is some happy days so we're getting close to the look we're going for we need to turn we need to crank up anti-aliasing because that graininess is gonna get annoying after a while I'll do another render to picture of you see how this looks so look at the difference in that graininess already I'm thinking maybe one more reflective board just above our snake possibly could look good I mean it's looking pretty good as it is to be fair but maybe one more reflective board above our snake let's just try that if we don't like it you know we can just get rid of it so let's grab this one hold down control drag it up along the Y try it here along the X and I'm just gonna make sure it's above our life so that doesn't lock it let's just rotate that so that it's pointing down towards our snake let's go into our active let's make our camera active again and let's just see what that looks like so hopefully that looks a bit better cuz our last render it's looking good it's looking good but you know I think that new reflective board isn't actually making much of a difference to be fair it doesn't need you making any of a difference but I'm gonna leave it there anyway because it's not hurt nursing so we can move on I want to create a bit of bump so jump into your body material turn on bump let's create a layer shader and let's jump into it create a noise let's set it to I don't know hammer no not Hannah will go for electric and we'll set the global scale to about 60 let's bring up the contrast and bring down the high clip now let's jump back and we need to create a layer mask just so that so the segura can't not create noise along the body of our snake so wherever there's white there's gonna be noise and we don't want there to be this you know continuous pattern of noise I'll just do a quick render to picture viewer here while that's loading we don't want to continuous pattern the noise we just want this noise to be in certain areas kind of on and off so we need to create another noise shader and drag it beneath our noise that we just created and set this blending mode here to the layer mask now we can control with this mask where our noise shader that we just created is gonna be applied so let's set this to wavy turbulence maybe displaced gaseous yeah that seems good let's crank up the scale to 600 maybe 300 maybe 400 so the black areas is gonna turn off the bump and let's make sure that we have a bit more black areas by cranking up the contrast there let's reduce the high clip so that where our bump is applied it's really visible crank up the contrast a bit more let's go back and back again and let's set the strength of this to be 10% now let's see what we got render to picture viewer on that that is still Calculon well okay so this yeah so I hit the render to picture viewer so he could see what the bump looks like if it's just turned on without that layer mask so now if we render this with the layer mask turned on you'll see that it makes a huge difference so give it time because you know Beauty beauty takes time I don't know does it yeah maybe it does but you can see the difference that that's making straightaway we got some bumpiness in some of the areas as opposed to bumpiness cover in our whole snake so it's looking more realistic and just cool basically we're almost at the end of this we just need to turn on our diffusion I'm wondering if I even should because we're 34 minutes and this is already looking pretty damn cool let's see okay let's turn it on we're gonna turn on diffusion and we're gonna add a noise and we're gonna set it to gaseous let's crank up the contrast reduce the or increase the low clip so now where there's white areas there's gonna be a bit as diffusion happen happening that's looking pretty cool already to be fair so let's do a render to pick review on this so we can see the difference that the diffusion channel is making and we'll see if it's worth adding or not so as I'm flicking between the last render and the current one you can kind of see what diffusion is doing it's kind of making some irregularities in our in our reflections we'll say it's adding to the overall realism of it I mean look at this scale here this is without diffusion I'm sorry without diffusion and with diffusion without and with so you can see that you know I don't know if I like it or not but I'm gonna leave it turned out actually yeah no I'm leaving it turned on it's it's stained up and that is pretty much it that's our snake textured up and our our scene is lish and it's good to go we just need to animate this we're not gonna do it right now we're doing that in the next video we didn't actually do anything over with our eyes so we need to texture up our eyes so let's jump into our eyes material let's turn on turn off the default specular inside the reflectance Channel let's add a Heckman let's turn on the reflection strength just a tad and we can set the roughness to be 15% and let's set the attenuation here to additive let's bring the color to a kind of a reddish color just to kind of make the snake look really evil and also to get a bit of cool contrast between the body of our snake and its eyeball so let's see what this is looking like did we even turn up anti-aliasing to form I think we did we didn't yeah we did okay because if we didn't all Matt we begin some serious serious render quality we did in the next part we're going to be out snake and then we're going to be done so that's it for this one guys and hopefully I will see you in the next video okay guys so before we move on I just want to make a couple of changes to the lighting setup and just some minor adjustments I want to grab my reflective board one and I want to grab my life one I'm just gonna bring these down and kind of closer to my snake and I also want to move it up closer to the head of my snake and I'm going to hit are my keyboard and rotate - just a little bit actually just the tiniest bit so by minus three degrees okay and I want to grab my light - and my reflective board and I'm holding down shift to select two objects at once like to and my reflective board - and just drag it down we're gonna go closer to our snake we're gonna bring it over to the front of our snake and I'm just gonna hit R to rotate that to point it towards our snake so this is the kind of setup we're dealing with and I want to make some adjustments to the floor I'm gonna go into the reflectance here and I'm going to set the roughness to 10% and let's actually do a quick render to see what it looks like so you can see the difference that that those movements to our lights and reflective boards have made to our scene so basically lighting is quite a big deal and also reducing the roughness of the floor has also actually helped a lot the air lighting has made a huge difference there to our scene I want to also reduce the so the scales and the bottom of our snake I want to reduce the height at which the geometry is pushed up here at the bottom so I want to basically flatten the scales on the bottom of our snake because in real life the belly of the snake is kind of flash whereas the top of the snake is kind of like what we have it here so we're just gonna reduce the displacement just along the belly here of the snake so to do that open up the body material and go into your displacement Channel we want to put this into a layer shader so just click on this triangle here and click on layer that'll automatically put our displacement map into this layer shader now we can add a gradient shader and just bring it underneath our bitmap set it to layer mask so we want to turn our we want to set the smaller scales to be black so that will basically reduce the displacement or turn it off completely so we need to make sure that if we just jump into our gradient here set the type to 2d V and let's bring the white into the middle and hold down ctrl R naught 1 and just click and drag now if we right-click in here and go to distribute nuts that'll put the white in the middle and even even everything else so now you can see that our display since being turned off here and here we can actually just bring these points closer to the white area to actually turn it off even closer to turn off more of these smaller scales okay so let's do a render on that actually let's set up our camera to where we want it to be for our animation so our camera is gonna go let's say about here this is where our starting point is gonna be and we'll do a render to picture viewer on that okay so that's looking pretty good you can see that the belly of the snake now has actually been flattened compared to the previous image where it's way too bumpy so that's looking good so now we're gonna set up our animation so we want to animate our snake we want to animate the spline wraps offset so select display jump into your object tab and we're gonna set this to so this is what we're gonna be animating basically so our snake is gonna have a match across like that so we need to first of all increase the size of our of our spline so jump into your top view middle mouse click and then go into your top view and let's just add onto this spline so what's your spline select you can then grab your spline our two and we want to just kind of follow this pattern as best we can so just click on the end point here and now I'm just gonna create some more arcs now with the with the arcs spline - you can't just click you have to kind of click and drag just a little bit otherwise it's not gonna work same again click and drag just a little bit and again click and I'm just gonna go for another couple of them because it's better to have more then have less okay so that should be enough so let's jump up back into perspective go into our supply wrap - let's set a keyframe here at - 14% on frame 0 let's increase our frame range to 300 frames write that out let's go to the last frame and let's bring our offset it's gonna deactivate my camera for now bring our offset up to about let's say 30% and let's add another keyframe so now this is what we got now our animation is easing in and we don't want to - so hit shift f3 the keyboard and that is going to show us our dope sheet so what we want to do is just hit L on our keyboard and then we can set our interpolation here to linear alternatively you can just click on this linear button here and outer is gonna be no easing in or out so that snake is moving a bit too slowly so what I want to do is shift f3 on my keyboard just gonna bring this drag these end frames down to about 150 let's see what that looks like so let's go on a bit faster let's also hover over this icon here hold down your click and turn off all frames that's gonna give us an exact idea of how fast our snake is actually moving because cinema 4d isn't gonna try and play every single frame so we're gonna get more accurate playback of timing so that's too fast now so if I actually go back up to 300 I should have done that at the start yeah so that's actually exactly what we're looking for that speed maybe even a bit slower so it might go to 400 frames and let's just drag that last frame up to 400 let's have a look at that yeah so that speed is about what I'm going from - okay so now we need to add them in our camera so let's make it active and we want it to we want our snake to be in our shot for our first frame so let's drag it along the Z until your snake head is in the center of your shot so that's gonna be - 3 3 5 centimeters and let's add a keyframe there and also as our cameras follow in our snake head we also want our whole lighting setup to follow our camera so we need to make our lighting setup a child of the camera so it'll follow our camera wherever it goes so let's just grab everything in our lighting setup hit alt G that'll have everything into a null we can just call that like teen and let's just make it a child of the camera so now that wherever our camera goes our lighting will follow so we will set a keyframe here in our camera also it's already set on frame zero we've set a keyframe here 1 3 5 centimeters and now we're gonna go to frame 400 wherever our last keyframe of our spline wrap is so that's 400 and then we're going to find our snake head again make sure that it's in the center of our shot and then add another keyframe so now if we play that so now you can see our snake actually takes off before our camera does because our camera animation is easing in so hit shift f3 in your keyboard and just hit the linear interpolation button there and that will remove the easing in and out of your camera's animation now let's try that again so you can see the lighting setup is following the snake while it's following the camera and the camera is following the snake so that is good to go what we can do now is just do a quick test render on a random frame we're going to go for 2 5 4 just to make sure that everything is still looking good before you send this out to render so that's looking really really cool I'm really happy with the style um so this is ready to go guys I mean let's see if we just play this out it goes to frame 400 and and that's your animation so all you have to do is make sure your save your scene ctrl s I'm going to do a save as and I'm gonna call this animation and I want to go into my output here set it to 1920 by 1080 I want to render all frames anti-aliasing is set to one by one four by four and we need to save this to a PNG sequence to a location of your choice I'm just gonna put this on my desktop and I'm gonna college sequence and that is ish okay so I'm gonna save that again control s and I'm gonna go to render queue and I want to add this to the regular queue and hit start rendering and that's it guys hope you learned a lot and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: JB MOCEAN

Views: 27,601

Rating: 4.9617429 out of 5

Keywords: Cinema 4D, C4D, Best, Tutorial, After Effects, Animation, 3D, Render, Cool, Learn, How to, Create, model a snake, snake skin material, snake skin texture, snake material, snake texture, UV mapping, Unwrapping UV, UV's, Seam, texture not sticking, make texture stick, animate snake, splie wrap, American Horror Story, american horror story snake, snake intro, siggraph snake, siggraph snake tutorial, Bhakti Patel, cineversity, light a scene, how to unwrap UV, uv map, modelling snake

Id: DQyRnO59wFs

Length: 101min 8sec (6068 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 29 2020