Decals, Stickers, and Overlays in Redshift

hey everyone in this tutorial i go over a couple ways i use to add paint or writing or stickers on top of objects that already have uv supplied let's go into cinema 4d and check it out alright so here we are in cinema 4d and i've brought in this asset that i've downloaded from exterior.com there's a link in the description below and i have it set up and i've got the diffuse the roughness and the normal map all set up along with a displacement map so when thinking about decals or overlays on top of 3d objects there's probably i don't know like a dozen different ways one could go about doing this so i just wanted to show some of the methods that i use and specifically how these methods apply to objects with uvs already applied so this object came in all nicely uv unwrapped and textured from exterior and if we wanted to visualize the uvs and how they're split up we can drop in a state node and set uvw coordinates to the output and just hit render so we can see how these are split up on this object so we've got the sort of patchwork going on here but with the material selected it is seamless so we need to figure out a way to apply our stickers or for instance like we wanted to paint over part of this like coat this rock object with some paint on only certain parts we need to do that separate from the uvs that are applied so there's a few different ways we can do that but mostly i've been utilizing a relatively new node in redshift this came out probably i don't know a handful at least of uh releases ago it's the uv projection node and so if i drop that on to the shader graph along with a ramp and i can just plug the ramp right into the texture color input on the uv projection node and select that to go to the surface so we get something but let's go back and check our ramp the ramp is set to vertical and we can sort of clamp this down we start to see that just like you'd expect the ramp is being applied top to bottom on our object but the nice thing about the uv projection node is that we have more control over this on our object so the first thing i'll do i'm going to set the coordinate space from world to object and we do our ramp here so we're gonna have to move that a little bit there we go just so we can see it um the reason why i'm doing that is if i were to take this back to world coordinates and i'll just leave it like it is and if i was going to rotate the object whoops we'll have that locked you can see the object sort of floats through this projection and i don't want that i want the ramp to stay stuck to the object now if i rotate this it is stuck great but the nice thing about the uv projection node is that i can come in here and rotate the projection and move it around and these are going to be really sensitive whoops do y so 0.1 you can see it jumps quite a bit um 0.01 you start to move this up and down and get a little bit more control over where we place uh the projection so right now it's just set to planar and that's what we want for the ramp because in this case i'm thinking let's sort of paint the far right side of this rock we're going to coat it in like some sort of shiny glossy paint so let's change the ramp from vertical to horizontal and i'm going to shift these over and [Music] reset the camera here so something like that for now because basically i'm going to use a material blender to blend between the rock material and our paint material and we want the paint material to show up on the right side of the rock so i've got the ramp set to white on that side uh black being zero white being one so off and on so we want the paint to be on where it's white so i'm gonna grab another material and very quickly set this up uh for right now i'll just make it like black and i'll take the roughness up a little bit here but also add some coating to it kind of another glossy element on top and if i set that to the output we can see what that looks like on top of the whole rock so because i have the displacement still on you can see it's quite textured also the model itself has some texture to it so all that is working as expected so now what we need to do is just take a material blender and we'll put the rock material into the base material and our paint material into layer one now we're going to use the uv projection black and white map as the blend color so all this is pretty straightforward but i did want to show you a couple things that i've been experimenting with to get a little bit more realistic paint material and transition pull this over a little bit more i'm gonna go into the ramp and i'm gonna take the noise frequency down quite a bit and the noise amount up slightly and i'm just going to adjust this a little bit in order to give that transition a little bit of a wobble it's not so uniform another thing we can do is drop in a color layer and put the projection to the base click off layer one for now so we can see it drop in a maxon noise and i'm going to set this to something like knocky but put the scale very low see no even lower 0.01 i'll up the contrast slightly and i'm going to set this to layer one color we'll enable layer one and see it just covers the whole thing but we'll set this to overlay and that way the noise is just going to show up in the transition between the black and the white between zero and one so we've got this nice sort of overspray effect and we can accentuate that by cranking up the contrast more and playing with the scale maybe 0.2 0.02 ah it's too much five maybe that's fine so that's subtle but it just gives that extra level of detail another thing we can do is instead of doing coding the whole thing we could uh drag in another node here for our ramp and do like a spray painted line and we still have control over this if we wanted to make this go yeah if we wanted to make this go across the rock and we could still go back and adjust this noise amount another thing you notice here we'll need to grab another ramp before that we're going to make sure that we're actually using our color layer as the blend color also can sort of adjust these fall off i'm going to hold down the number two and zoom in on the on the ramp here and just get a little bit more detailed and maybe alt drag another white note out to thicken up the spray paint line and maybe something like that but we need to take care of the gloss fall off on this so can use a ramp to dial this in let's zoom back out here so i want to set this to reflection roughness and for this one take a look at this i think we need to reverse this because we want the paint to be shiny and the rock to be dull so we just want to invert this gradient and for the main roughness i don't want this to go completely glossy i want to kind of keep this a little bit more matte and i'm going to copy that ramp and make this one darker and use this for the coat roughness so that should be a little bit more accurate there so now the uh gloss is happening just on the glossy paint we can adjust that here as well maybe that's not so glossy all right so i'm just gonna go back and maybe just sort of remove this other section here so we just have uh the front part coded i'll go back to the uv projection and change the the location of this looks yeah like that and maybe we'll just make this i don't know a blue i do want to just take the uh overspray down a little bit all right so another thing we can do is let's say we really wanted to coat this in a thick layer of paint so what would happen is we would probably get a lot less detail in this section of the rock now this rock does have some detail quite a bit of detail actually you know in this scan so the geometry look here i mean it's very dense so we have this sort of rough texture on the surface of the rock but the displacement map is taking care of a lot more of that detail so another thing we can do if we wanted to really push the idea that this rock is being coated in like a thick layer of paint just make a little bit of room here i'm going to pull out a color layer node along with a color correct node so what i want to do is put the original displacement right into the base color and pull this into the input of the color correct node and let's just take a look at this so here's just what the displacement map looks like but what i want to do is decrease the contrast and brighten it up just slightly because what i want to do is use the projection as a mask let me do that right now actually set this to layer one mask and this to layer one color and when we pipe this in it should look exactly the same but when we start to change this so if i pull the contrast down you can see this side here has a lot less detail than this side and i can increase this visual sake here that's quite a bit i mean that's too much i'd probably just do like 1.1 and what that'll do is just kind of inflate that section just ever so slightly so it's a little bit brighter than the base brightness of the rest of the rock so now if we pipe this into the displacement and set our material blender to the output and get an even more smoothing out effect we can just pump this up so we can kind of see what's going on if i set this to five instead of one this is gonna kind of go nuts but should be able to see the effect a little bit better so if i take the contrast down you can see the details kind of fading away and if i pump this up to 1.8 you see this side kind of balloon out right so it's a subtle effect and you know depending on the model if a lot of the texture in your model is relying on that displacement map uh this will you know of course have a much greater effect than if the you know some of the the detail and the texture is already built into like a high-res scan which this is but i'll leave this back to a 1.1 and put this up a little bit more and reset our displacement right so of course that's one layer and you could paint over it again if you wanted add another line over it the same method it would just be adding another one of these basically make some room here adding another one of these to our material blender so real quick oops select the uv project and maybe do and let's make you like a little line and two to zoom in and try to even that out a little bit okay we got our sort of overspray with the noise and this let's make it black just go and make that line a little bit more pronounced there we go oops cool and if i wanted to rotate that of course i i could to move it up and down it's really sensitive but 0.05 have the control to change it and if you did want to like mask it out like if you didn't want you know this to be right here it's just as easy as adding it to your you know another ramp or something you just want to if we take a look at the color layer here that's making our mask for the material blender it would just be a matter of maybe putting another gradient in another one of these and then just multiplying it over this or a noise over this to let me just show you all right maybe something like that and just put this onto layer three whoops i skip one let's do layer two and layer two set to multiply so one thing you'll notice here is this is multiplying over our noise overspray and we really want that to be last so i'm going to move this down a little bit and i'm actually going to plug this into layer 7 and i'm just going to put this as layer 1 color so layer 1 is gonna be set to multiply and i'm gonna disable layer two and go all the way down to layer seven enable it and change it to overlay and that way if you're gonna add up and keep changing this you don't have to keep going in and reorganizing the layers i found that i've started to kind of go backwards in here because it's a pain to redo all these all the nodes and like reorder them and kind of going backwards but yeah if we go back and put the material blender back on got a faint line here yeah so maybe something like that so when it comes to doing something like a sticker uh there are a few ways to go about this you know one we can do sort of a similar thing here we do it within the texture or we can do it with geometry on top of our base geometry so one of the things that i found worked relatively well was to make a plane and i'll just set that to z plus and scale it down and just move it in front of our rock here and just sort of scale this down in to a relatively similar shape to the sticker i had in mind if it was like a circle sticker or like you know a long rectangle i'd probably want to approximate that with this plane shape but just leave it a square maybe a little bit smaller and move this over here a little bit closer to our geometry i'm going to increase the segments quite a bit for this like 80 by 80. and i'm going to use a shrink wrap deformer put that right under the plane and then i'm going to drag the rock into the target object and you can kind of see it let me just make this big here so you can kind of see this here it is sort of embedded inside the rocket so sort of matching a little bit too perfectly and if i hit render here we probably won't be able to see this yeah can't see it couple reasons it's probably a little bit too exact on our geometry but we also have displacement enabled on our on our texture so it's sort of pushing out away from this surface so what we need to do is take our plane and i will hold down alt and drop a nope backwards plane effector hold down shift i'm going to put the plane effector after the shrink wrap under deformer i'm going to set the deformation to point and maybe like 0.5 let's try that negative 0.5 yeah okay so you can see this is pushing out it's quite a bit so it looks like kind of a lot here on this view but let's take a look in our render and see how close we are so i'm gonna have to push it even further to counteract that displacement yeah not enough oh 0.65 and this gets tricky with the displacement because the displacement texture may not be evenly displacing this in all areas so you could get areas that where the rock pokes through the sticker in this case and floating pretty far off the surface in another so i can try to maybe get this a little bit closer yeah you can see it's still kind of floating away here but we're getting some intersections up top so maybe five seven seven seems to be pretty good and depending on how close you are to the model how zoomed in you are uh this might be fine so i want to take that noise down even smaller yeah cool so the nice thing about this is that it's just using the shrink wrap deformer now we can the plane selected we can rotate it and move it around it'll stay on the surface you know so that's nice and that you know if we you can put a texture on there without you know your opacity um and that's one way to go so i can just do that real quick just make a new material so i have a psd file that i made i'm just gonna use a color splitter and take the alpha and set that to opacity color and use a ramp to color it something more interesting than black and white and because we have this so heavily subdivided we're still getting a lot of the texture of the rock and that does allow us to sort of keep it as close to the surface as possible if we had less subdivisions we probably wouldn't be getting this level of detail in here that's following the contour so that's nice i think i feel like that's a good way to do it and in some situations because we do have control later on and we can just visually see this uh you know this shape and we have uh pretty good control over how it is placed on the object so you could get this sort of tearing effect if you push the object up above the surface so you're sort of like projecting it up and it doesn't know where to go but i think we can sort of reset this if we just sort of rotate it towards the object a little bit better just want to get that projection to kind of match the contour of the surface it should work a little bit better something like that all right so another way to add this on would be a similar method to the paint overlay i'm just going to try to clean this up a little bit and make a little bit more room so what i'm going to do is stop this here and grab another material out and i'm going to pull in a different sticker type in the same deal i'm going to do another color splitter i want to separate the alpha channel the alpha goes into overall opacity color yes maybe do like a blue sticker just put that on to the diffuse color okay so what i'm actually going to do is i'm going to make a regular old standard cinema 4d material and open up the other window here turn off reflectance don't need it in the color channel just want to go down to surfaces and just do checkerboard and i'm going to apply this checkerboard material right to our rock and now we have this update and you can see the uvs here and how they're kind of chopped up here in the this patchwork and you know if we wanted the sticker right here we could be fine but if we wanted to move it up here that's not going to work we've got a seam there so the sticker would disappear so what we want to do is on this material we don't want to use the standard uvs that are you know this uv mapped from the rock we want to make our own so i'm going to go down to flat projection and you can see just head on but what i want to do is right click on this section do fit to object and now if i select my texture tool you can see here i've got this fit exactly to this rock now my sticker is a square so i'm actually going to pull this in and make sure that my texture is actually in the shape of a square you know for right now that is really lagging so for right now i am going to turn off the shrink wrap sticker but if i'm happy with this what i can do is just you know right click on this and do current state to object and now i can disable these and just hide them and now i've got this sticker on here um you know obviously i won't be able to move it and have it stick to the surface but if i'm happy with that location then i can turn that off and uh my viewport should be much faster now that's one of the downsides to using that method the shrink wrap deformer is a bit slow so this should be there we go it's much better now more responsive so i'm going to scale this down so you can kind of see about the size that i want this sticker you can kind of see this into a little bit smaller and yeah let's say that's good actually let's um if i didn't want it straight on let's say i wanted it up a little bit more i could rotate this so that it is sort of even with my viewport here so that way i can put this rock kind of on that you know i was talking about that seam in the uv now i've got this angled in a way that should be fine but what i need to do now in order to use this is right click on this material and generate uvw coordinates and i immediately want to go over here and go to basic and i'm going to rename this sticker two uvs i'm gonna pull this texture back and you can see now our original texture is utilizing this uv but we want to make sure it's using the old uv she needs to be first just needed a refresh i guess so let's just make sure that's working we're okay great so now for this texture i can use this uv channel here and drag in our sticker to uv and if i put this directly on the output see this is now repeating all over the surface and it is from this viewpoint here so we see some stretching down here at the bottom where this is sort of uh you know breaking but we really only want one sticker so we need to do is turn off repu and wrap v and we've got our one sticker but we don't it's going right through so no problem so now what we need to do is basically create a mask and there's a few different ways to do this we can paint it on we can use a vertex map and use that as a mask but i've just been sort of utilizing the same ramp with uv projections if i take this down here and pipe this in don't need any noise there we go so basically we just want a white part up here so sort of crunch this down and we can move this up and rotate it so if we rotate this along the x we should be sort of rolling this up and now i can move it either with this oops move it in the y direction there we go and a little bit more so now we've got a mask here where it's black on the back so now we can sort of delete that other double sticker on the back if we didn't want it so let's pipe this into layer three and layer three blend color right so skip the step there which i'm glad i did because we need to the alpha is what we need combined with the uv projection so we need a color layer here right so we need the alpha as the base then we need to multiply this on top of it so if we set this to multiply and take a look at this now it's going to be just this shape right yes so now we just have this shape whereas before we just had all of this so we were sort of deleting all of this from the geometry this is all gone right now this goes into blend color three right so with this i mean we do have a little bit of leeway to move this around um we can use the offset here and i think we need to just go very subtly let's sort of push and pull this around but as we go further down here those uvs it's going to start to stretch and we would have to readjust our mask if we wanted to move it around but um you know we set the uvs up at this this angle up here so this is where this is going to be sort of projected uh more square but as we move this down we're sort of stretching out you know those uvs are stretching out so we're going to start to elongate this sticker so another thing we can do here is just add a bump and use the alpha it's a bump probably want to add this to the bump of the rock let's do a bump blender and do the regular as the base and we're gonna add the bump sticker to that and set it to one let's see if we can get a little bit better bump out of it yeah seems like it's okay yeah a little bit more separation there's a little bit of a little bit of shadow and that way give the effect that it's sitting up off the surface yeah all right let's say i've moved that down a little bit too far probably needs to go up a little bit okay you know another thing that we can do here is pretty much the same method is adding scratches or writing onto a surface so it's pretty much the same method so i'll kind of walk through how i prep that in photoshop and just sort of make a custom map where i've written as though i was writing on the surface of this this rock all right so here i am in photoshop and i just got a 2048 by 2048 square comp here and i've got a charcoal or chalk brush selected i've just decided that's the look i'm going to go for like a chalk drawing on this rock and i guess first thing i'm going to just paint this black so i'm going to do white on black chalk so i don't know um so let me just save this i'm going to say this as a jpeg all right so we're back in cinema and i'm just going to make a little bit more room all right so i've got the uh this writing texture in here and i'm thinking i'm gonna put it like right here like right on the front it's gonna go like right in this area here so i'm gonna do is pull that checkerboard pattern texture back out on top and i'm going to set it back again to flat and i'm going to adjust my squares here the angle of this so that looks pretty good straight on and i'm actually going to scale this up slightly i want this a little bit bigger yeah all right and i'm going to select the tag and generate uvw coordinates and just rename that chalk uvs i'm going to put the checkerboard texture back behind our rock texture and immediately go back to our chalk writing and drag in our new chalk uvs and i can turn off wrap u wrap v just preview that okay i can just offset this maybe scale it up even more 0.7 i just need to make a new material chalk material let's make it pretty rough probably want to add a bump to this it's like a max on noise we'll just do like a pretty detailed bump or maybe fbm yeah maybe something like that yeah okay that's got a nice rough look to maybe even crank the bump up even more just exaggerate it and i purposely saved this out as a jpeg because we can set this to the overall opacity and that still works but we are still getting saw that same problem where it's being projected right through so the luminance of this texture um is being used for the opacity i kind of thought we had to check that on i really thought that wasn't going to work until alpha is luminance was checked but it looks like it's handling that just fine so the only other thing we need to do is actually we may need to we may need to do that let's see so we need a color layer so we just need to grab a mask from our ramp and uv projection node so i'm just going to copy that down here whoops come on there we go and let's solo this and basically we just want white on this side and black on this side okay so let's just zero these out and i think we just need to rotate on the x-axis to bring the white from the top to the front so let's see here which way do we need to go looks like that is pretty good see if we've got it we just want white on the front and black on the back that's it all right so we just need to multiply that on top of our opacity map so we'll set layer 1 to multiply okay so this is interesting it's a little bit not what i was expecting to be honest so this is alpha is luminance uh does matter here in terms of the color layer i don't believe it matters in terms of using it in just this texture but what i'm not understanding here is the multiplication of i would think that we shouldn't be getting this white on top it would just be the black on the bottom but let's try this a different way let's put this into layer one and this is set to add and we should still have the this on both sides yes we don't want that so now this is going to be the mask for layer one now it should only be allowing the front to be visible let's just double check this yes so that works it's probably a little bit more straightforward than this other way of utilizing the make sure this works either way no yeah same thing so utilizing the jpeg here as um you know trying to pull the um you know alpha channel out of the luminance uh can cause some issues so i would just set it up this way as a layer with a mask rather than um the base layer with a multiplication on top of it so i think that opacity would uh kind of affect the way this is uh being applied so now that we have this we can just plug this in as layer 4 and this is layer 4 blend color and i think we might want to pull the bump and add it on to the other one but let's take a look and see oh that is barely coming through see if we can [Music] just that a little bit i'm going to lower that again a little bit just to pull that up just so it's coming through a little bit clearer and i'm going to pull this bump map up and add it to our bump blender of the rock texture i don't know if i can do this oh man so many nodes there we go and just add this 100 so we get a really chunky chalk edition oh that seems to not be working and that could be because so i use the noise oops back down we go so we just need to add another color layer here for this so let's do it this way let's add this noise to layer one we're gonna use the writing itself as a mask layer one mask and we'll make a new bump up here and that way we can just control it separately yeah that seems better so now here's where we'd probably want to reorganize the layers of this because i would think that we really want the chalk to be first and then the stickers on top and then the sticker and paint on top of it so that's sort of where you know we can just reorganize our material blender and move them move the chalk up in the stack so i'm gonna do that and speed it up and take a look all right yeah i think that's uh working looking pretty good another thing here since we did make this sticker here editable we just call this sticker we do want to make that a child of the rock that way we rotate this we'll stick with it perfect there we go i guess i was rotating the sticker and not the rock all right i think that pretty much wraps it up it's basically the same sort of ideas either way if you're applying a sticker or some writing you'd just be setting the uvs for that specific item that you wanted and then masking out the projection from the opposite side and you know i showed here the the ramp and uv projection node to do that you could also go in and use a vertex map and paint it by hand adrian from redshift has some examples of doing a similar thing showing that method i've been finding that the uv projection node has been pretty useful it does take a little bit of getting used to to understand exactly how you know we're modifying the ramp or whatever we're plugging into it a texture whatever for me now that i've gotten sort of a handle on it that has become sort of the quickest way for me so of course if you have any questions or comments or if you know of a better simpler way to do this definitely leave a message for me in the comments below i will be checking those pretty frequently thank you so much everybody for watching and liking and subscribing it's been really great to see how many people have been interacting with the tutorials so i really appreciate it so thanks so much and until next time [Music] you

Channel: i_go_by_zak

Views: 3,570

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Redshift Tutorial, Redshift, Tutorial, Cinema 4D Tutorial, c4d tutorial, c4d, Cinema 4D, Stickers, Decals, Mutliple Textures Redshift, Transparent Textures Redshift, Overlay Textures Redshift

Id: _7DFZ16oH68

Length: 49min 34sec (2974 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 25 2021