Cinema 4D: Using Combined Metal / Rough Textures

[Music] hey guys it's sam for digital meet and in this cinema 4d video we're going to be taking a look at how we can use combined maps within cinema 4d combined metal rough maps now if you don't know what i mean by metal rough you should probably go back to a video i did previously it's this one and it goes through a metal rough material setup in cinema 4d so let's move on to talking about combined texture maps for metal rough and what i mean by that okay let's talk about the scene very quickly i've just got a box on a floor and it's been lit by a sky with a hdr on it and if i click render quickly i've got global illumination turned on so that's how my scene's been lit and this is the object we're going to texture so let's just put that up there so what do i mean by combined metal rough texture maps well if we have a look at the normal workflow for metal ruff you can see here we've got an ambient occlusion map a base color or albedo we've got a height map we've also got a metallic map and a normal map usually directx and a roughness map so that's your regular metal rough uh workflow those are the maps that you'd expect to see and that's what i used in my last video when plugging these maps into a material now not all programs use those base texture maps they use combined maps and the reason they do this is to save on space it might even be file size there could be a number of reasons so for instance if you were using something like unreal engine it may expect metal rough maps in a particular way in my case i'm using the unity engine and it does indeed expect its metal rough maps in a particular way so let's uh open up unity and have a look we've got that box with this crate material on it and if i select it and fold down the crate material you'll see that we've got an albedo slot which is where the albedo map goes obviously we've got metallic normal height and occlusion but you're probably thinking where's the where's the um roughness map and where would that go and it's because in unity the metallic map actually stores the roughness map in its alpha channel that's how unity expects those maps so unity will actually look at the alpha channel of the metallic map and say oh yeah there's the roughness and that's what defines the roughness of of the material uh it also does the same thing for albedo and uh transparency so opacity in this case there's no opaque regions on on this object or indeed on the map but if there was say there was a little window here that would be described in the alpha channel there wouldn't be a separate opacity map it would actually be embedded into the alpha channel of the albedo map so with that out the way is there a way that we can still utilize these maps in cinema 4d and why would you want to well a good reason for that would be saving space it'd be much better for us to be able to use the maps that you're going to be using in your unity engine in cinema 4d because then you don't have to have two separate sets of maps one for cinema 4d and one for unity it would be much better if we could use one set of maps in both programs so that's what we're going to look at so let's go back to cinema 4d and let's create a material create this material i'm going to call this a wooden crate just to keep things nice and tidy and we can start plugging our stuff in just like in my previous video this because this uh texture is going to be using metal and a dielectric we're going to change to turn the color off and we're just going to do it in the reflectance channel like i said before go back and view that other video if you no idea what i'm talking about and that will definitely help you out i'm going to remove the default specular i'm going to add ggx and we're going to call this our dye electric okay so let's do the easy maps first let's go into diffusion open this up and here are the maps that are being used in unity and you can see we've got an albedo transparency so if there was any transparency it'd be embedded in this we've got our ao our height map and you'll notice that we've got metallic smoothness here now i'll get to that when we start plugging those maps in let's get everything else out the way first so the ao first that goes in our diffusion that is now in there let's apply this to our box here and in fact let's turn off the um the line so we get a better view of our material so n a excellent so we've got something in our diffusion channel now that's fine we'll skip the reflectance channel for now let's go down to normal and open this up and load this in now something that should be noted here actually before i get into that let's go to editor and uh turn this to 2k get a bit more detail in the viewport that way so let's go back to our normal map in my other video when we're doing a normal metal rough pbr workflow i was flipping the green channel and the reason i was doing that is because the type of normal we were using was a directx normal and cinema 4d uses what is known as an opengl normal so we flip the green channel so they're displayed correctly now the maps that are used in unity are actually opengl as well so in this case because i'm using unity maps maps that were generated and made for unity i don't have to flip the green channel because it's already an opengl normal map so that's why i'm not doing that so let's move on to displacement turn this on and this is very much like the normal workflow we just got a height map so we can plug that in i'm going to turn on sub polygon displacement and i'm going to make the height maybe two or three centimeters and that should do us for now so that's all the maps that aren't going to be in the um reflectance channel so let's just check everything's working and give this a quick render yep it appears the height map's working and the normal map and all those other maps so let's close this and let's start working on our reflectance channel so we set up a layer called dielectric which is here so let's just go through this first of all i'm going to get rid of the specular strength the layer color is going to be left at white the layer mask we don't need one layer for now we're going to change to a dielectric there we go and uh that's pretty much it apart from the roughness this needs to be a hundred percent and then we're going to load a map in but if we actually take a look at our available maps you see there is no roughness map and as i explained before it's because the roughness map is actually embedded in the metallic map in the alpha of the metallic map but you'll notice here that it says metallic smoothness the reason for that is because of unity basically if i go back to unity and have a look at our metallic map you'll notice there's a slider underneath for smoothness and this slider basically says how much of the alpha channel do we want to use to inform us of our smoothness in fact underneath you can see the source says metallic alpha so if i put this right up it's used in the metallic alpha to to determine the roughness or in this case smoothness now this is what i wanted to talk about this actually isn't a metal rough workflow it's actually a metal smoothness workflow so normally with a roughness map of a black value zero would be very very smooth and a value of one being white would be very very rough but in unity for god knows what reason instead of going the standard route of metal rough they've gone metal smooth so in this case black bean 0 actually equals super rough and a value of 1 being white is super smooth so it's basically the inverse of a roughness map there's actually a smoothness map now you're probably thinking that's going to present some problems in cinema 4d because it's asking for a roughness map so let's go back to cinema 4d and see how we can deal with that so we'll go back and i think we were plugging it into the right place yet this roughness channel here so let's actually choose our metallic smoothness map and as you can see you look at that and go well it just looks like the metal map that is not going to help us and you'd be correct that isn't going to help us at all but if we actually click on the map itself and go into here we can make some changes first of all we've got this button for layer set and if we select it it allows us to select which element of the texture we want to use and in our case we know that the roughness or in this case smoothness is actually stored in the alpha channel so if we go and click alpha channel and then click this alpha and press ok you'll see that now we've extracted the alpha channel so let's close this for a minute and just give this a quick render and see what we get okay so it's a little bit hard to tell from this image but the roughness map or smoothness in this case is actually inverted what should be rough is actually quite shiny and what should be quite shiny these metal corners is actually quite rough so we need to invert this and in cinema 4d you can actually do this so not only can we let's get back to our roughness so not only can we actually extract this texture from the alpha but we we can also invert it so if we go down to this uh space here this black point and white point and just take note of what this map looks like we can actually invert these so we can make the pla black point one and the white point zero and now we've inverted this map so now you can see that these corners are actually very shiny and the wood is rough so let's give this another render okay perfect so that's how you would use combined maps in cinema 4d i'm just going to go through the rest of the material so we can get the entire thing set up i don't think i've got anything else to do in the dielectric layer i think we're all done here and let's add another layer i'm going to make a lambertian diffuse and i'm going to call this diffuse and all i have to do here is turn the specular strength down and load in a texture to the color channel and that'll be our albedo and there we go and now i've just got to create another layer which is a ggx and i'm going to call this metallic if i could spell that out there we go in fact let's just go through from the top so specular bring it all the way down roughness all the way up open this up wrong button here we go load in the texture which will be our metallic smooth obviously that's not right so again we've got to invert it go in select the layer set which is going to be alpha channel alpha okay and then we're going to invert that so the black point is one and the white point is zero and there we go so going back to the reflectance so that's our roughness sorted out close this up down to layer color which is just gonna be our uh color map don't worry i know it looks strange but don't worry uh layer mask obviously we're gonna need this and that is gonna be our metallic map so we're using this as a mask and obviously we don't need to access the alpha channel for this we just need the regular rgb so that's fine and the layer for now is obviously a conductor and you notice the corners of this don't exactly match what we've got in unity these are a lot darker and just like my last tutorial for the metallic layer we need to say this is opaque so we don't get any bleeding up from the diffuse and dielectric up the stack into the metallic layer one thing i do want to do actually before i render is uh go into the dielectric layer and temper this reflection strength down something like 25 and we'll give that a render so that's it guys that's how you use this weird metallic uh metallic smooth workflow especially with combined textures and this will work for any other program that use uses combined textures as well in in my case i'm using unity you but you might be using something that expects pbr metal rough textures in another way but that's how you'd use them in cinema 4d that's how you'd extract those textures um out of the alpha channel and uh be able to utilize them properly okay so i hope this was useful and i'll see you in the next one if you're watching on youtube please like and subscribe and don't forget to hit that bell to be notified of new tutorials you can follow me on social media at facebook twitter linkedin and instagram and make sure to visit me at digitalmeat.uk where you can vote for upcoming tutorials thanks for watching [Music] bye [Music] you

Channel: DIGITAL MEAT

Views: 1,601

Keywords: Digitalmeat.uk, Cinema 4D, C4D, Cinema4D, Digitalmeat, Greyscale Gorilla, GreyscaleGorilla, 3D, Workflow, Cinema 4D Workflow, C4D Workflow, Tutorial, Tutorials, Cinema 4D Tutorial, Cinema 4d Tutorials, C4D Tutorial, C4D Tutorials, Mograph, Motion Design, 3D Motion Design, 3D Animation, 3D Modelling, Metal / Rough, Metal Rough, Combined Textures, Metal / Smooth, Metallic / Smoothness

Id: FGhg1TJvVU4

Length: 14min 59sec (899 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 02 2021