Liron Ashkenaz-Eldar @ SIGGRAPH 2019 | Maxon Cinema 4D

so to my left is Lee roan aka Lyman as I know her or for some of you know where as Leroy Jenkins and for those of you who know who Leroy Jenkins is good for those of you don't leer on okay hear me okay hi I'm Lee Ron Ashkenazi Eldar which is a total mouthful so I go by Lee Rana and I'm a art director designer illustrator motion graphics artist and a cinema 4d enthusiast I have recently left a position at a creative agency called the artery there we did everything from motion graphics to branding and design helping on the VFX side in a very three dimensional pipeline so everything we did was basically touching upon cinema 4d in some in some way especially our branding work but as I said I just left so I'm starting my own little freelance practice I'm going to be focusing more on my own clients also my personal work which is more about sculpting in cinema 4d doing a little bit more product and illustration on my own as well and then that brings me to what I'm going to be sharing with you today as a part of my personal work I've also developed this sketch Intune shader that is a fine art shader the reason why I started working on a style like that is because I was always really fascinated with fine arts but I've never been formally educated in it so really wanted to create something that could bridge that gap between my inability to actually draw and paint and my ability to use cinema 4d and really create that really interesting intersection and then also because I am a motion graphics artist I usually work in 2d but when I do work in 3d I wanted to create some kind of a pipeline that could move this style that looks like it's hand drawn or hates painted in to animation and the only way to do that instead of you know doing a frame by frame is actually creating something that is more procedural so today what we're going to do I'm going to share that pipeline with you and it would be really interesting to see whatever can do with you know a 3d scene that we start and then we can create different styles within it so the first thing we're going to be doing is doing a very very basic shader we're going to create this pencil sketch and I'm going to show you how to set up the basic scene I'm going to show you how to load and textures how to play around with light and shadow and that's gonna give you the very basic of how to how to start then we're gonna be moving into a little bit of more of a complex scene we're gonna use a different style we're gonna do a watercolor scene and again we're starting with a very basic 3d scene and we can take it anywhere we want with that shader so we're going to be introduced to the color system in the hatch we're going to add a light stroke which is going to add us a third color then we're going to play around with cinema 4d layers in order to create more complexity in the shader so we don't get just stuck with three colors we can move and create more complexity and then we can play around with multiple lights in the scene because we're not just stuck to one light in one shadow we can actually create as complex of a scene as we want with the shader and everything corresponds the first the third scene is I'm going to show you a couple of tricks to go with in cinema 4d to create these post effects so we're going to use sketch and tune strokes to create these over shoot underline sketch Tunes and then we're going to play around with ambient occlusion to create these really nice shadows that are not necessarily coming from our light but actually are just contact shadow Ted again a little bit more complexity to the shader and then the fourth part is going to be all about animation so we're gonna start with a very basic scene I'm gonna show you what it's made of and then we're gonna render and see what the problems of using this sketch in tune shader arise from that and then I'm gonna show you a very very quick way to solve this okay so let's start let's go to cinema so what we're going to start doing is building the very basic scene we're gonna start with a disc from our objects here we're gonna create this floor and I go into my rotation segments and add a little bit to create a smoother sphere then we're going to add a little last fear we're gonna bring that up a bit using the move tool again smooth it out a bit with segments that's great now what we're going to do is add a camera so we can we can go ahead and position our view of where we want the scene to be that's nice and now we're going to add a light that's the first thing we're going to do so the light starts really low and we can like pull it out and in this view we can actually position approximately when where we want our light direction to be and then in a second where our shadows would be as well so if I go into my light and then I go down into shadows I can turn on shadows and I'm going to turn on shadow map soft and the way that I could actually look at where my shadows are in the scene instead of just rendering right I can go into option and turn on shadows and that would give me a little bit of a preview of where my shadows are when I'm working and here and I'm gonna turn it off because it's a little bit heavy on the computer so it doesn't really help when it's on but now I know where my shadows are that's fantastic okay so we're going to start by starting the shader double clicking in this window or going in to create new material will start us a material and what we want to be doing is we want to turn off color and reflectance and the reason why we want to do that is I don't want my shading and shadow to be actually interacting in a normal way in cinema 4d so I'm going to be only tagging on luminance so I'm going to have this white luminance object and I'm going to add it to my disk and to my sphere and now I'm also going to be adding a background over here and leave it be so let's turn on our interactive render region in order to see what we're doing the entire time I'll scale it up a bit and then using this little toggle here I'm going to make it high-res because the lower it is the less resolution this and the more I push it up it's going to give me these smooth nice edges so now we're going to start building the shader going into our mat Lumet we're going to add texture and instead of just a regular texture we're going to go all the way down to sketch in tune and had the hatch so the hash shader is actually built for you to be able to crosshatch strokes but instead of doing that what we're going to do is using textures so full-on large textures when I started working out in this in this shader I started with one stroke and saw how it looked and then slowly made my texture larger and then realize that the larger my textures are the more I can slap them onto each other and create complexity with them so it's not just a crosshatch it's actually now becoming to be a texture so now I'm gonna go into and load a texture over here going to my text and now I have a few that I made but we're gonna go with this crayon pencil sketch so I'm gonna open that up I'm gonna say no to move it around and you can start seeing that we have it tiled in a very bizarre way what I want to be doing in this window right now is I want to make sure the entire object is covered all of the objects are covers I'm going to do that by using all of these parameters so I want to stress that this little window here is really the sole of the shader and you want to be playing as much as possible with the variations of it I'm gonna go and show you how to cover it pretty fast but in general the more you play with it if you change the scale the texture would scale if you offset it the texture would offset and so in order to create a lot of different variations in the shader you want to play around with that but for now I'm gonna turn on tile UV so it would tile the texture on top of one another which is what I want cuz I want to cover it and then I'm going to turn on rotational UVs as well in order to create another way to rotate the texture on top of each other and also tile it in the rotation then I'm gonna add a little bit of a rotation here probably 50 nice and what I want to be doing now is eliminate the gaps that we're getting here as you can see we're pretty close with you know covering the entire thing up but I want to make sure that I don't have these weird wide gaps some go into spacing you and spacing fee and bring it down into the minuses move it on to one another approximately 20 here and then let's do a little bit more opa so this is starting to look cool everything is covered I get this really nice variation and the texture that's exactly what I want so you must be thinking okay this looks weird what's happening where's the light so now what we're going to do is we're going to go into the elimination tab and this is where all the magic begins basically we're going to be turning on lights which is going to create this interaction of the shader with lights and we're going to turn on shadow which will create an interaction of shadows in the scene so as you can see we don't have color turned on in here if we did it would actually mess up the entire thing and makes it look unrealistic we really want to be sticking into luminance at that point now I'm having two problems here first of all I want to I have a background and I want this background to be the same color of our floor so I'm going to open a new material put it on my background and have it again in luminance channel just completely white so two things that are happening in the shader that isn't really believable one we have this really really harsh light in here that doesn't create a really nice gradient between our shadows and our color and the second thing is that we have a floor which we need in order to have shadows but we're getting this really rough line over here with shadowing and it doesn't really look that great so we're going to tackle both of those things the first thing we're gonna do is I'm going to show you how to tackle the first problem which is this harshness of white we're going to go into the elimination tab again and now where we're going to be playing with is these colors here so right now my white is completely white basically it's going from black to white what I want it to be doing is not do that and I'm gonna go with a very low number just to show you how low you can go it's not gonna be the look that we're looking for but if I go 50 it's gonna be really gray and now we can start seeing how it still interact was right but it's not really revealing the likeness that we want so I'm gonna go in at about eighty and now we start getting this really nice movement between darks and lights and our shadow is a little bit too dark maybe so I can play around with this color over here and drop it down a bit and that would create a little bit of a less harsh shadow here and that's nice and now the second thing that we were talking about is actually solving this weird problem over here so I'm going to get snap out of my interactive render region and turn off my camera and I'm going to be looking at my scene from above let's see it and I'm going to be turning on the interactive region again so right now as we can see everything is working in the scene but this part is really dark so what we're going to be doing is actually tackling this problem the same way that we tackle the first where the light is so we're just gonna add another light and now instead of turning on shadows we're just gonna keep it as is we're gonna grab this light and we're going to be moving it all the way to where the floor kind of ends and we're going to be eliminating and eliminating and illuminating this part of the floor basically making it white and basically creating this seamless transfer into the background and now if we move back into our camera we start getting the scene that we want and obviously we can move the light up a little bit more and that would create less of hair if we play around with the darkness of our gray color here it will create a cleaner scene otherwise this feels really good so this is really the beginning oops this is really the beginning of our shader here and we're gonna be moving into a little bit more of a complex scene and start dealing with another texture and also some colors okay so we have here a pretty simple scene yet a little bit more complex and have a torus a plan phase column floor our camera we have our light that's that has shadow and we have a background now if you render it out we're not really getting anything it's fantastic so double-clicking to create a new material I'm going to do the same thing I'm just gonna apply this material on everything right now and again when you create your pieces you'd probably want to create a different material for each object but for the sake of timing we're just gonna create one unanimous type of look as well as my background now again going into color reflectance turn on luminance and going in all the way down to sketch and tune hatch fantastic and now what we're going to do instead of taking a very very grainy kind of pencil sketch texture I'm gonna go and pick out a watercolor texture so what I want to be doing is taking a texture that has a lot of details in it and that for me is the best one that we can take right now it has some graininess in it it will overlap real nice and that's kind of where I want to be so I'm gonna turn on the interactive render region again and all of the sudden we have this really bizarre problem which is easily fixable if we're just gonna go into our plant and then into our projection map instead of UV mapping some materials will just you know act like that on on different models so we're gonna go into UV mapping and I'm gonna go with either a cubic or spatial cubic works right now so I'm gonna keep it as dad now as you can see our texture is a little bit too small so we want to go in and start playing around with this little baby so I'm gonna tile UV because I want everything to be overlapping on top of another and then I'm going to scale it up for about 200% and now I'm going to add crosses which is going to multiply the texture onto itself and that's already covering a lot of the work here as we can see we're still getting a lot of information lots of textures and that's what we want so again going into spacing you and spacing V going to bring that down until everything is covered usually numbers are interchangeable here and also it was every time you click on it it definitely changes the scene a lot so again play around in that mode it's really interesting once you start scattering once you start creating variation we can also create variation in I don't know the size of the texture and that's gonna create something completely different so what we really want to be doing is playing a lot in this place but for now I'm just gonna cover all of that a little bit more and okay then we have it covered that's fantastic I'm going to go into my background and setup using mapping let's just have that over here yeah I want to make sure that this is in a frontal position in order to get all the details here but as you can see we have a very grimy and grungy scene which doesn't look that great so we're gonna go because it doesn't really work with that texture we're gonna go into a new tab that we haven't talked about which is color and now what we have here is background color which is going to be our base color for a model light stroke color which is going to be our high light and dark stroke color and let's start coloring it up a little bit so I'm gonna go with because we're dealing with this watercolor scene like let's go with not a black shadow we can go with a brighter blue that would be fun okay that's good then for our background color let's go with something contrast II orange and nice and now for a light color maybe instead of white more of the smin tea color oh but we don't see it the reason why we're not saying it is because in the illumination tab there's a little bit of a Chuck here checkbox that's called show light strokes and what we're going to do is turn that on and we immediately huh oh sorry we will see it the second that we turn on lights and shadows and now our scene is receiving both lights and shadows and we can play around with this color maybe we want it to be a little bit blue and that's already looking kind of dope now as I told you we're in a really nice place but do we only want to stay with those three particular colors maybe but the next thing that we can do is we can create layers and start layering this on top of one another so the way to do that is to go into our luminance tab here and instead of going and adding another hatch we're going to create a layer so that would take my hatch and put it in a layer I'm going to do the same thing that I did but right now I'm just gonna copy this shader and that's right click copy shader and then go into shader and then I'm going to click a pest shape paste shader now I'll put it about let's say 50% in soft lights and what we're gonna be getting is a lot more of a contrast II seen that's because we haven't really changed anything but what we want to be doing is going inside the hatch again and then now maybe playing a little bit with colors again maybe making our base color you know purple so we start getting a movement here and then what we want to be doing is actually scattering around or offset our texture so instead of being the same exact texture we can go and move it around and now we're getting more complexity more colors and we can do that as many times as we possibly want we can use more rotation so that would like rotate the texture on top completely and that starts to show you how deep we can go and obviously we don't have to stay around in soft light we can do multiply we can overlay depending on the contrast that you want I found that soft light with some opacity over here really works well with layering stuff out so that's basically it we're going to add another light right now because I just want to show you how quickly the scene would change the moment that we have another light and another so I snapped out of my camera so I can look around and let's move that over here for example and as you can see immediately by just adding more shadows into the scene and creating more interactions in the shader we're going to create a different kind of look and that does a lot so you can add more shadows to create more interactions in the scene and we can make that as complex as we want but for now I'm feeling pretty good about this so I think we should be moving into our post effect and our post effect is going to be done on a different scene just because I wanted to show you variations so this is a scene that I created as a part of my personal work and it's an illustration that's kind of like crayon Eeyore like colored pencils I guess and what I'm using is another kind of texture here I'm gonna show you that texture because it's really interesting I locate the image so this texture actually has a ton of details it's very light but it's really good to stack on top of one another so the lighter texture you get and the more you stack the more variation in the texture you'll get so I really like that it has these light strokes and then really dark strokes as well and then also it's very grainy so that's basically why we're getting this kind of grainy sketchy looking thing and now two ways to upgrade the scene a little bit one would be to add a mean occlusion and I'm just not adding regular ambient occlusion because that for me is a big tell in cinema 4d so the second I look at something and I see ambient occlusion I feel like I know exactly where it's been done and why so for me that's a big tell so what I want to be doing is actually downgrading Dhanbad occlusion a ton to make it grainy to make it look nothing like ambient occlusion but still getting these really nice contact shadows and all so right now we're getting contact shadows but not enough so first I'm going to go into accuracy and lower that down way down because it's going to help my computer think and that's what we want and we don't really need this to be high-res it's fine now minimum and maximum simples the higher will go here the better and less grainy our contact shadow would be but I want to go into five and five which would make it super grainy you'll see that in a second and then in my just as you can see really really grainy this is kind of what I want now in my dispersion I don't want it to go everywhere in such a dispersed way I actually want to bring it down to about I don't know 70 and now we start getting the contact shadow that I want that feels more stylized that feel a cinema that's adding a little bit more content to my scene the next thing I want to do is I don't want these dark shadows my entire scene is based on these really nice red kind of warm shadows and that's exactly what I want to be doing I want to go and put a nice pink light pink over here and see what that gives us yeah so now I'm adding a little bit more of the vibe of the scene back into my scene I can go a little bit darker and a little bit less saturated if I want to create more of this contact shadow over here which is exactly what I want to be doing and then I can go ahead and play around with the contrast if I want it to be less contrast because I am seeing quite a lot of it can go into minus 20 maybe and that will chill it out a little bit more but as you see when I turn it off and on it creates another layer that I wouldn't be able to do without ambient occlusion here so I think it's it adds a lot to the complexity of the scene now the second thing we're going to add is sketch in tune and what this is going to do is ruining our scene immediately so I'm going to go into shading and I'm going to turn off color and I'm going to turn off shading on the object because I don't want my shader to be affected at all by it all I want to do is create some strokes so I'm gonna turn off shadows here background should be changing at all and now what I'm getting is strokes on top of my original drawing which is fantastic now if I go into my main line I'm going to open this little triangle which is basically just connecting to this sketch material that I have here but I like to control it over in this window so the first thing I want to do is these lines are way too perfect I want to make sure that I it up a little bit so it looks you know more realistic the way that I do that okay yeah I'm gonna go to adjust and I'm going to start by overshooting the lines and I'm going to 3d transform this line so I'm going to go into overshoot and I'm gonna click relative so we would take the length of the line and overshoot it and I'll add about 20 degrees in both ends let's see how that looks okay interesting now I'm going to be adding a little bit of variation so we don't have this unanimous movement and I'm gonna go pretty high with that nice now it still feels a bit too much let's downgrade this into 10 okay we're getting there now what we want to be doing is we want to make sure our lines that we drew before we painted this piece was not you know perfectly aligning to where we drew because we're not you know trying to draw that way so I'm gonna turn on transform and what I'm going to do is just rotate it a little bit basically just make it a little bit imperfect so I'm gonna move it once maybe twice and then and then another movement in our P here again everything that we can do to make it a little bit imperfect I can a you know scale it up a bit to bring it into position come on and that would up my overshoot apparently so let's keep that as zero but then maybe add another rotation here nice so right now we're getting these lines that aren't perfect that aren't really matching which is exactly what we want to be doing it played around with our overshoot as well so we're not getting these lines going everywhere because of that playing around with the 3d transform and now what we want to be doing is really you know make this a little bit less intense because that's not how it would look so the first thing we want to do and very easily it will go into thickness and we just turn on join angle it's going to create an angle in our stroke so already by just clicking join angle we're already getting a little bit more of a realistic sketch line that's one and then if we're going to opacity we want to do the same thing because if we drew a line pretty hard then we'll be getting the same kind of opacity change in the line as much as a thickness change so again gonna join angle and on top of that I'll add noise as well so make it even more random and now after that we have this we can go ahead and you know change a little bit about like how much strength it is are we seeing enough of it it's a taste thing like I like to keep it there but just really minimalist but if you want like you can play around with how much of this joint angle strength we have if you go over down here and that would bring back a little bit of that opacity back and it would be a little bit stronger but I like to keep it as that now another way to think about is that we do have these strokes that were drawn before our design was made but we can also do something that's more stylized and I like to play around with the color of the stroke so if we go we have this like nice red scene warm scene if we go and we add warmer strokes that are light that would also give us a completely different kind of look that's more stylized and again it's it's a decision and there's so much to play around with all of these but for me just those three steps already bring it into a completely place than it was when we started which is a little bit more flat a little bit less details once this is gonna work you're gonna see it okay yeah so we can start with a very clean scene we can stay on it but I really like to add those little notes of I was there before sketching it with a pencil kind of world so this is the end of our 3/3 part and what we're going to be doing now is we're going to go into our animation stage so what I have here is just a rotating rock I built that rock and then I added a really nice bevel to it because details with the shader is really important so I'm going to go into an interactive render region now and you can see our scene here what we have is three different textures we have the stone that's using the same texture that we used before that I just showed you which is this one again this is a very different look and it's all done by just using different colors and like what color our light stroke is changes a lot about the design so if we go inside you'll be able to see that I have it's really light light stroke and a very bright orange and then my shadow is really contrasty blue and that gives it that look now on the floor I actually combine two different sketching Tunes to create this more pastel look and again just having two different hatches one in hardlight the other one is normal tracking on to each other changing the colors a bit creates that texture here that has a lot more color in the shading so basically if I go in and I turn that off what I'm going to get is a very similar shadow but we're gonna have a lot less detail in it so by turning it on I'm just creating another layer of complexity into my shadow here so if we had all the time in the world I'll render it out for you right now but because we don't I'm going to show you what I've pre rendered so we can examine our work here where is that okay so I'm going to bring it into After Effects and we're going to be looking at this so as you can see the texture is you know reacting to light everything is happening within a way that I wanted but it's not really believable because if we were to do this frame by frame in Photoshop the texture would never have looked like that it would never have just tiled and not move at all and that's for me as a big tell so even though it it looks good when we're in still mode the second we render it out it gets unbelievable and just you know I want to be fixing that right now so the way that I figure out how to do that is using animated gifts instead of a regular texture so I'm going to show you an animated gif that I created and then I'm going to show you very quickly how to create an animated gif from a very very simple one texture so I created an animated gif from this texture and this is our result and I'm going to show you exactly how I did that in three seconds if I go into After Effects again I'm going to take this texture in and I'm going to bring it into a new composition nothing's happening right now so I'm gonna go to frames ahead using command and the move tool and cut this cut this layer out using option and bracket and then I'm going to use command D to duplicate it and create four different textures and this is basically going to be our texture so now I'm clicking in to close my render region here I'm gonna go and trim at my comp area and this is our texture now you can do that if you draw in Photoshop you can draw different textures and then create a gift for a man I'll be the same but if you have one texture that you found online and it's really nice and you want to be using that I just wanted to show you what a really cool what a really quick way sorry well okay what a really quick way to create a gif is so the first frame is going to stay the same the second one we're going to open up scale and we're gonna click s and now we're going to toggle this little key like chain off and going to first my ex and clicking - so that's going to be flipping my texture once then I'm going to go to the third one do the same thing click s going unchaining it and then put - in our Y and that's gonna be flipping it the other way and now I'm going to go into my fourth one click s and no I don't need to and chain that and now I want both of them to be - and now it's going to be flipping it both way so what I'm getting here is actually an animated texture made out of one texture so now we will open up cinema again and we need to go into each and every one of these and change the texture we're going to start with the stone so opening up our layer going inside instead of the light sketch jpg I'm going to be loading my animated gifts that I exported so the way to export it is either exported into Photoshop save it from there or use an amazing plugin called gift gun that's a lifesaver that I think everyone should use always so it's really easy to render out from after-effects so now I brought that in super simple all I need to do is click on my texture going to my animation tab here and make sure that my mode is in loop or ping pong but particularly loop now my animation my gift will be rendering out looping so now I'll go in here into my shader and I'm just gonna copy this entire entire texture so when I go into the next shaders I can just paste it and it's going to still have the loop turned on in there okay and now imagine that we're rendering this out again you won't be seeing anything rendering from here but now when we render it out again now we're starting to get a much more believable moving image of sketching tune that's mimicking a stop-motion animation but it's not the end here so if we were to create a stop-motion animation we would never use 30 frames per second this is why this is looking so smooth and weird and you know uncannily graphic so what we want to be doing is going into effects and presets and going into posterized time which I love and now instead of 24 frames per second I'm gonna go all the way down to 8 and I realized that the combination between eight in the frame rate and using two in two frames in creating a gif is actually a really nice balance I tried a lot and for that it was sitting the best way possible and now when we render this out we are starting to get a more believable you know stop-motion animation that we can play around with it we can use you know a longer gift would give you a little bit more variation but that's just the beginning and as I said I really do think the people should play around a lot in this window and see what they can do with a lot of different textures and a lot of different grips so that was me I'll go back to my presentation hi my own time nice so this is me and please contact me with any questions I really want everyone to try this and see what you guys come up with because it's kind of just the beginning of the path for me and and I would love to see what more could be done with it I'm gonna continue exploring this shader but please email me with results if anyone's doing it thank you you [Applause]

Channel: Maxon

Views: 68,617

Keywords: c4d, cinema 4d, r20, release 20, sculpting, bodypaint 3d, maxon, modeling, modelling, 3d, animation, rendering

Id: y8tq0tDh7mU

Length: 37min 33sec (2253 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 20 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/ldotchopz]

Sure, it would just be a matter of creating the right textures

[u/_akira]

Did ya watch the video chief

[u/_akira]

You'll have trouble with the shadows, sketch and toon hasn't been released yet for redshift

[u/blood_farts69]

I love this tutorial, one of the best! But you should stick to standard renderer for this

[u/NudelXIII]

Yes and no. Definitely not in the way she created it. But you can create similar textures for redshift.