How to Use Layer Shader and Layer RGBA in Cinema 4D and Arnold (2021)

this tutorial will be in two parts and is a beginner level tutorial in part one i'll show you how to use the layer shader and in part two i'll show you how to use images and layer rgba to make more complex textures here i have a basic scene setup with a camera a studio object and a cube for my lighting i have a sky dome light with an hdri image and a quad light light in my scene let's go ahead and create a standard surface we'll add that to our cube and since it is a cube i'll choose a projection method of cubic double click and open up the network editor so now select your so now select your standard surface and choose a color i'm going to choose a blue right mouse click and we'll rename that and call it blue [Music] i'm going to go ahead and add a layer shader take the output and we'll connect that to our arnold beauty and take our blue standard surface output and we're going to connect that into our layer 1 input and i'm gonna go ahead and create a new standard surface [Music] this time i'm gonna choose a red color go ahead and rename that and take the output from our red standard surface and this time i'm going to put that to the layer 2 input and go ahead and click render and you should have a red cube if you're new to working with layers i have an animation here that better explains what's going on we have our two nodes with two colors red and blue what the layer shader does is it takes the topmost layer and stacks it on top of the layer underneath so when we rendered and only saw a red cube this makes sense since the red colored node is lying on top of the blue colored node this is where the layer's mix value comes into play if you've used programs like photoshop the mix here will work similar to adjusting the opacity of a layer you can see as we drag the mix value closer to a value of zero more of the blue color begins to come through and we no longer see layer two what makes the layer share great for creating materials is the mix doesn't have to be a percent we can attach any black and white image or noise to control the shader's mix value i'm gonna go ahead and add a checkerboard [Music] and we'll drag the output of the checkerboard to our arnold beauty i'm going to change my u frequency to 2 and the v frequency to 2 and go ahead and click render the reason i did this is to see where the black and white values are mapped on our cube now go ahead and reconnect our layer shader back to our arnold beauty and this time i'm going to take the checkerboard output and i'm going to put that to our layer 2 mix and go ahead and click render [Music] if we compare the two images we have a better idea of how the black and white image affects the mix we know that layer two or the topmost layer is red and the bottom layer or layer one is blue we now see that when we attach a black and white image that the color black allows the underlying layer to come through while a white color hides the layer underneath here i have an animation to illustrate this principle let's assume instead of a checker board i add a perfectly white image connected to the layer 2 mix as i change the white value and get closer to black we see the different gray scale values work just like adjusting the mixed percent allowing more of the second layer to come through depending on the value so now knowing that the grayscale value controls the mix we can attach any black and white noise or image to achieve a variety of results now i'll show you how to make a little more advanced texture using the layer rgba i have a scene here with a platonic with a bevel deformer attached around the corners and the same lighting setup as the last example i'm going to go ahead and create a new standard surface we'll add that to our platonic set our projection method to cubic and open up the network editor and i'm going to make a green color and this time i'm going to use a coat turn that up to 1. go ahead and rename this call it green and i'll create a new standard surface [Music] and i'm going to choose a metal and under my presets i'm going to choose iron rename this [Music] and just like the previous example i had a layer shader connect the output to arnold beauty and our chrome material will be our layer 1 input and the green will be our layer 2 input and if you click render you'll see we just have a green platonic now i'm going to go ahead and want to add my images so go ahead and type it image add image node this is gunmetal go ahead and rename that [Music] i'll adjust this so i can read them add another image and i'm going to add this smudge and we'll add a third image [Music] if you look at my three images you'll notice that two of them have a black background and the smudge's image has a white background so i want them to all be the same so i'm going to go ahead and invert that drag our smudge's output to our main input and if we look here now let's change it to a black background so now all three images now have a black background so with the previous example we used the checkerboard to attach to our mix to blend our two shaders we'll now combine these three images using the layer rgba so come over here type layer and this time we're going to use layer rgba layer rgba similar to the layer shader but gives us a little more control for blending layer rgba differs by giving us the operation field if you're familiar with photoshop the operation field works just like blend modes now i'm gonna go ahead and add these three images to the layer rgba so i'm gonna grab the gunmetal output i'll make this my layer one input next i'll grab the scratches we'll make that layer two and come from the complement output and make that layer three so if you're not familiar with blend modes it works by using these confusing calculations and blending the images together based on that calculations to keep things simple because this is too much math for me the easy answer is to start with two images and scroll through the blend modes and see how it combines your two images and gives you a result you're happy with and then begin adding additional layers as needed but for this tutorial i know that a screen blend mode will take the bright areas and begin combining just the bright values with the bottom most layer in our case layer one gunmetal if you go ahead and click render you'll notice the only thing we see is the topmost layer smudges at this point i should mention why i'm showing you in stages how the render should look if for some reason when you're adding images to your model and things don't look right it may be your projection method the scale or maybe the rotation of the texture i have two renders one with a cubic projection and one in spherical and you can see what a huge difference those two projection methods make also adjusting length u and length v or offset will dramatically change your projection as well so a good practice is to enable the ipr click use texture mode and notice in the window the cube around our object this is how our projection is currently positioned if i change a spherical change to a sphere you can also use transform rotation and move tool to get the placement or scale just right so i'm happy with the way the projection looks so i know i want to combine all the bright areas from layer three and layer two with layer one so if we click on our layer two and look at our operation as stated before i know i need a screen blend mode and i'll do the same for layer 3. you can see how this effect is adding the brighter values together with each layer so next i'm going to disconnect the output of the layer rgba and we're going to connect that into our layer shader into our layer to mix and we'll drag that to our arnold beauty and go ahead and click render if we look at the results we have more chrome than paint maybe this is the look you want but i want more paint in chrome as if the paint had been scratched off so just like when we inverted our smudges texture i want to invert the whole layer rgba so again we'll type invert [Music] and we'll connect layer rgba to the main input and we'll output that now back into our layer 2 mix and go ahead and click render and now we have more paint than chrome i'll show you one more example of using the layer rgba so we'll come over here we'll add another layer rgba and i'm going to reuse the gun metal so i'm going to command click to duplicate that and i'm going to use another image this time i'm going to use this dust image go ahead and rename connect my dust to my layer 1 input and my gun metal will be my layer 2 input and like we did before i want to combine them so i'm going to change my operation of layer 2 to screen and instead of connecting to a mix this time i'm going to go and connect it to the specular roughness use that also on the chrome and we have a coat on the green standard surface and i'm going to use it here as well and go ahead and click render the great thing about these is we can stack as many layers together as we want to make really complex shaders and this workflow can be used throughout the texture building process

Channel: MPHILLIPS PHOTOGRAPHY

Views: 3,541

Keywords: cinema 4d, arnold, c4d, layer shader, layer_shader, layer rgba, layer_rgba, how to use layer shader, beginner, easy, autodesk arnold, arnold render, motion graphics, tut, tutorial, 3d, how to use layer rgba, beginner node tutorial, nodes, make my own texture, how to add scratches, scratches, grundge, add scratches to texure, layers, how to mix shaders, mix, operation, operation layer_rgba, c4dtoa

Id: S8aFSWYSTLw

Length: 11min 41sec (701 seconds)

Published: Mon May 03 2021