Low Poly Refraction In Cinema 4D Tutorial

in today's video you're gonna learn how to make a low poly refraction look inside a cinema 4d let's do it everybody its Nick here again from grayscale guerrilla bringing you the tools training and tutorials to help make you a better motion designer now we have a really fun tutorial today all about making a refracted glass look inside a cinema 4d but before we get started I wanted to make sure that you're subscribed to our YouTube channel where we have a ton more videos just like this and even a podcast that we record every week all about becoming a motion designer so please subscribe check that out and also if you're new to cinema 4d check out our intro to cinema 4d page it's a completely free way to learn the basics of cinema 4d and you can find that in the description below and I'll link it up here on YouTube as well alright let's get into today's tutorial so by the end of today's tutorial you're gonna be able to make these abstract refractive shapes inside a cinema 4d I'm going to show you how to make the shapes but also how to use some images to choose what colors go where in your final render these techniques I use in other renders all the time so stay tuned even if you're not trying to make this exact look many of the techniques I'm showing you i've used in other projects so please check it out and with that let's head on straight into today's tutorial so this is the site I came across that's by I think Justin mailer is the way to say it and it's called facets and it looked like he did one of those like a 1:1 image a day kind of thing it says one image per day 365 days I was like cool I love these projects let's look through them and I'm scrolling through I see some cool like you know pixelated things here and little like low poly things it's really cool and then I found these and then I was like whoa I got to figure out how to make these things oh look thanks Dropbox I don't need that um so I was looking at these and I go I'm gonna go try to make these this this will be awesome so I thought about of a way to do this and I was looking at it and I was like okay maybe some like abstract shape with refraction and then add some colors in the background and all this stuff so specifically this one actually this is the one that I was like wow these colors are rad like that shape is cool that little four color gradient in the back is nice so I figured out a kind of a way to try to make some of these things so let's head on into cinema 4d and play around and see if we can recreate something like this so here we are and the the first thing I tried was a sphere and then using like kind of a lower poly sphere to bend but I eventually ended up using a platonic cuz it's already kind of low poly it's got these facets already anyway but I added a few extra sides to it I made it a Bucky ball instead of the standard one and this just gave it a little bit more geometry when we deform it and then use refraction to pick up all those colors because the thing about the thing about this that I like is it's almost like and you know these may be vector they might be 3d I'm not actually sure but I like how there's kind of different colors everywhere right there's each little vector piece or whatever this is has its separate gradient and shape and I was like how am I gonna do that and instead of trying to color it directly I was like well let's let's add a bunch of colors behind it and then use refraction to let the to let the transparency kind of pick up a different color every time it bends around and picks up different parts of the light so that's how I approached it this is how I set it up I have a platonic set to Bucky and then I grabbed the displacer and I hold down shift as I have my Platonic selected and it automatically adds it as a child and then I could come into shading and say just noise just whatever noise works for now and then I just cranked it up right so I cranked up the noise I was like hey that's kind of a cool shape and if you don't like the shape right if you can't find a cool camera angle on it like this one actually turned out okay I kind of like this side of it this angle if you don't find one you like you actually come into shading go into noise and just pick a different seed right and then you can cycle through that maybe you have to add more geometry you know get a shape that you like I think we lucked out with a pretty cool shape here so let's move forward next thing I do as we start to do testing I don't want this wide angle screen here I don't want this kind of sixteen by nine ratio so I'm gonna go to my render settings go to output turn off lock ratio and just set this to something small for now so we could render fast 500 by 500 and let's do a quick render to the picture viewer and see how big that is for tutorial reasons here it's a little cropped because I squish my screen down so you guys could see everything but that might even be a little too big let's uh let's just go like 250 by 250 for now and and do a quick render and that'll be a little easier for everybody to see so let's let's go with that all right let's do min a little bit let's get our kind of camera set up just so we have it let's set up a camera and then how do we get the refraction well what I did was I looked around the room for some cool colors I was like hey we need some cool colors for this to refract and I was looking around the office and I ended up taking a photo of one of the pinball machines that's at the office here it's from a hotshot pinball machine from the from the 60s actually and as a game my neighbor kind of gave me a about a year ago once he figured out I was into pinball really really big so I'm high five to stand more you're the best buddy and it's working so anyway I took a photo of this because I liked the colors but the original turned out a little bit dark it was just shot with my just shot with my iPhone and because it was backlit like there's little lights under here to light it up because it was backlit I like the colors but is a little dark so I brought it in a Photoshop brightened it up and kind of really cranked up the gamma to bring out some of some more of these colors you got this kind of pale green we got this cool pinky mag magenta kind of thing yellows and we even have some dark areas and I like the way that those look in in the final render but maybe you have to crop it down so look around for a photo maybe I'll look through your photos find some cool color maybe an old sign or something to to kind of use as a base so this is what we're gonna use so let's head on in a cinema let's go to textures let's create a new material and going in the material I'm gonna use the luminance channel and I'm gonna go to add a texture so it's gonna pop up into the folder where I'm saving this stuff I'm just gonna grab the pinball PSD if you grab the Photoshop document you could actually make changes on the fly in the Photoshop document and then go to cinema and it'll auto update so I like using a Photoshop document instead of JPEG so let's open that it's not in the search path what what I should do is save this and then that'll automatically add it to the search path if I say no it's just gonna keep it where it is so just be careful of that if you keep it where it is it always has to be where it is if you open this up later right okay so here's our image let's blur it right I don't want any of these hard edges so let's like blur it 10% maybe 20 and this is just gonna give us colors right random colors instead of have all that you know specific lines and stuff in there we just need the color D no really so let's grab a cube and let's scale this thing way up like past the camera there we go alright so now we're gonna drag that texture to the cube and it's gonna map around the cube and this is going to be kind of what this object picks up in refraction so next thing we have to do is set up our refractive material to add to this so we need a transparent material new material let's drag it directly onto our shape here let's come in and turn off color turn on transparency and then this is the key here refraction lets go like 1.4 let's add a lot of refraction now this is gonna pull from different parts of the background and then refract the colors and refract the image and then kind of point it towards the camera after that right let's also turn off the specular we don't need that and do a render all right this is already getting closer so now you can see we have little little colors coming in it's actually refracting off of each object and popping in but what you're seeing is what you're seeing are these black areas and there there really isn't any pure black in the photo so where did these come from I was struggling with this for a while and I was actually I was asking Chris because he's so dang smart said Chris wet why there's no black in this photo why do I have little black spots and what he said was in your render settings in your options you have this reflection depth which is set relatively low and I think we talked about this in other tutorials but what the reflection depth does is it limits the amount of reflections and refractions basically that cinema will calculate before it stops right so if you have two shiny objects next to each other and they refract in them and they reflect each other in in theory they kind of go back and forth forever right they can they can like if you put two mirrors you're been in one of those hallways with two mirrors on either side of you you could look through and see like a hundred copies of yourself right so the reflections will keep going and keep going but to calculate that far can take a long time so cinema cinema 4d by default turns this down to five and you can basically crank it up if you need to so let's go lower so we can really see what's going on see as we go lower we're getting even more black parts and that's where it basically we're looking at this part of the object and it's not reflecting enough or refracting enough inside of this object to come out the other side and pick up a color it just bounces twice and then says nope that's it I can't calculate any further we're done what we're gonna do is instead turn this up okay so let's turn this up until we either get rid of all the black which here it is or if you like you know if you like the look you could turn it down but that's how you get rid of that so now we are refracting all the way through we're catching all those things and I'm not sure if you can see this on my screen but we're starting to get some pretty bad like aliasing around the edges here like really stair-steppy kind of stuff and it used to be that I'd go into render settings and turn up the anti-aliasing to best you know and you could do that but if you have the physical renderer the new physical renderer is rendering so fast especially if we're not using global illumination or anything it's just really really a great renderer I've been learning a lot more about it and it's just my go-to now so I turn on physical renderer and now that even the default adaptive low settings we're gonna get much cleaner edges now it took a little bit longer to render but we don't have anything fancy going on here so I already lost all my kind of Jaggi edges here and that's looking pretty good now it's a little noisy I kind of want it less noisy so we can actually either turn down our display mint or try one of these other shapes right so we could grab like a shape with less with less geometry in it and see what that looks like this actually looks a lot better I don't like the way that shape is so we could just turn our camera or again we can go into our displacer go to noise and just change the seed of it until we get like a cooler kind of shape okay so again this is all abstract stuff we were just playing until it looks good you know there's no there's no official rules here other than that we're trying to you know recreate this kind of look and so that that's looking pretty cool but the background is visible right so let's get rid of the background we don't want the background to render but we still want it to calculate through the refraction right so we want the refraction to work but not see it in the background and so what I did was I went to the cube and I added a cinema 4d tags compositing tag compositing tag is really powerful it allows you to turn on different ways to see objects and textures and all this stuff here's all the checkboxes the only one I turned off was seen by camera so now when we render that's all we get we only get the shape and we don't get the cube around it but what we're missing is that cool gradient in the background so there's a couple of things you could do from here you could render this out with an alpha you can go to let's see save alpha Channel save that out bring it into Photoshop or After Effects or whatever you want and then add the gradient there and that's probably the most powerful way or like you know most flexible way to do it but since we're playing in cinema let's see how we can do it in cinema let's add a background object so let's go to here we go backgrounds and let's go to create new material and pull that in there and let's also turn off let's see what you do this if we turn down the bottom nope I always get it confused the top one okay it worked so the top radio button turns it off in the scene but doesn't turn it off when you render okay so keep that in mind I just wanted to hide it so it wasn't hanging out here the background so here we go hide it now I have a background object and let's color it let's add some some gradients to it so let's I'm gonna double click on it it should pop up there it is again let's go to luminance let's turn off specular and go to gradients so gradient by defaults going kind of left to right and we can do a few things we could color pick from the original photo so it's kind of similar colors but let's just guess alright let's pick some kind of you know and this is again more experimentation but I don't want to get really saturated I want to kind of have it a little bit faded out color somewhere around here I like and just kind of grab some colors so this one's gonna be kind of a weird ready peach thing to a light blue this may be ugly right but we could fix it easily so that's good so now we need a second gradient let's go luminance let's back out and go to layer what layer does is it grabs the gradient throws it in like this layer thing almost like a Photoshop kind of thing we could layer things up and multiply them and screen them and do all that stuff let's do another shader and let's go to gradient again there it is and then this time let's go into the gradient and flip it to V so it's going up and down so we're just kind of making our own 4 color gradient in this case let's pick I don't know there's like a pink in there is like a magenta so let's pick one of those colors and let's also grab a greeny yellow color okay that's kind of cool so let's back out again and now we can kind of multiply or screen or do whatever we want of these together so let's go color first let's try that one no color screws up the middle what if we turn it down that's that's a little better we can still get this weird line in the middle so let's go with screen screen works pretty well so here's just one here's just the other well no that's combined here's just the other but combined we're starting to get this kind of faded for color gradient we could just dial these in other thing you know play with all these but I I try to like multiply screen you know and just dial it in until it till it looks right I liked it when it was right here that's that's digging it so let's see if that looks good with our other background not and not bad what's the ugliest one here maybe the maybe the yellow is a little strong maybe the whole things a little strong a little faded out so we can come in here and what could we do to just fade this out so if you have a layer you could just add another layer on top of it so what if you had it what if you have like a shade or color and use the color the color mode to just fade out all the colors but now we could just dial it up so this white thing is just removing the color if you set this to color mode it's replacing the colors with with this right which is no color but we could dial it down so now we're just pulling out some of the saturation you could also put this into like what do they call that well they call that mode they call it a filter you know you can put this into a filter and then have all the dials for the filter but I think this does what we need it to do is just fade it out a little bit make it a little bit more pastel and that is that is not bad okay so play around try out different ones and the last thing I want to show you guys was heading into Photoshop real quick and doing kind of a glow look then read the examples are on the blog some of the other renders that I've done have kind of these shiny elements so let me show you how to make the shiny elements first of all let's go to our transparent material let's add specular and add a really nice big sharp specular let's grab a light and kind of position it up and in front of our object okay we're just trying to catch some kind of highlights and now as you see now we're starting to get some little white parts here here here we're getting like pure white areas where we didn't before we could even exaggerate this if we open up the inner width and do that again you know that might be a little too much so let's make it a little bit more sharp and again we're just playing around that looks pretty cool we got a nice little highlight here we can maybe try to get rid of some of that well that's that's even more than it was but again move the light around move the object around that okay we're good don't move anything awesome sweet okay so now we have some highlights that we didn't have before and let's bring that into Photoshop and I'll show you how to kind of bling these out a little bit let's go to render settings let's go to output and I don't know let's do a five we'll keep this small for tutorial sake 5 400 just want to make sure it fits on the screen guys you could do much higher res on this all right I'm gonna render the picture viewer that is it alright let's save that out save as and I'm gonna say this out as a 16-bit TIFF I'm gonna add more colors more more than eight because we're gonna color correct this and add more stuff to it anytime you do and post on any odd on anything really try to do more than eight bits you're gonna not get as much banding and all that stuff so just you know hard drives are cheap these days folks sixteen bits and let's save this out let's save it in that same folder we'll call this let's call it facets test one TIFF boom all right so here's Photoshop here's the user original image let's open up facets test open perfect size good job Nick alright so let's let's fix this dude up so first of all we can do general color correction right we could just kind of like darken it a little bit kind of bling up the colors or desaturate it more or you know like add blue to the shadows and kind of fade out some of those colors a little bit kind of like that look you know so dial in what that is and then for the blinged out stuff let's copy the main layer so background copy and then on this one we're going to add a levels and we're going to clip everything except for the ultimate kind of bright whites right so we're just getting the high stuff we're just clipping all the way up right so let's get this there we go okay and now what we do with this is we blur it we're also going to maybe add another levels and see how kind of how cranked we can get this cuz we can really make it kind of mangy we're just trying to get out some of those really really we OB we basically only want the bright parts right okay so there we go so there are the brightest parts here here here here here and here and here right so what do we do this we blur it so let's go to filter blur directional is a directional blur I always forget it's different here motion blur alright there we go motion blur is kind of blinged out that way so now we got some angles there and then we hit OK and then we screen it or add it on top of our previous one right so and it's a little it's a little subtle right now right so we can actually just bling this more we can add more to this we can also take the original background duplicate it all and then grab some more levels I'm kind of rushing through this a little bit but then really just get the highlights really cranked it down again there we go just get the highlights that's kind of a cool look anyway right there and then blur it but not as much right so let's get a let's get a gun with y'all blah and I love saying that turn it down and we're just getting a little bit of like a glow right let's do the same thing again let's screen that on top so now really subtle a little effects here but see we're getting those little blings on our objects if you want more of that you could duplicate it OOP so now we're getting little shines and little things so here's the original and now here's like the little blings out on it let's do one more and then really do a big motion blur on it uh just to see what we got motion blur let's really go crazy and we don't want to get it away we just want it there we go okay screamed really subtle but now it's kind of fading into that okay so that is the general idea so obviously we use just like a simple shape here and it's you know really honestly nowhere near as cool as this what I noticed on this is yeah it actually has some like shapes within a shape so I think some of this is actually you know vector if not all of it and so there's some things obviously like these you know geometric like animals and whatever that would be fun this this would actually be pretty fun this like diamond shape to try so if you have like you know model a diamond or try something simple like that but these are the ones I really dug you know see see there here's an example of like the glow kind of effect that's going on on some of them I think there's one more that was like that some of these darker ones are really cool but the the ones that grabbed me we're just kind of like this row right here thanks again for watching everybody I hope you enjoyed that tutorial and if you want to see more tutorials for cinema 4d and how to become a motion designer please subscribe to this channel we have plenty more videos already on YouTube and a lot more to come this year and into the future so please check it out and also if you're just starting with cinema 4d check out our intro to cinema 4d series I will link it up down in the description along with some other show notes down below and with that I hope to see you in another tutorial really soon happy rendering and have a good one everybody bye bye clean those glass better by the way this is what I clean my glasses with it in my pocket every day thanks cinema 4d

Channel: Greyscalegorilla

Views: 32,941

Keywords: cinema 4d, c4d, tuts, motion graphics, greyscalegorilla, Cinema 4D, Cinema 4D Refraction, Cinema 4D tutorial, Cinema 4d Tutorials, Low Poly C4D, C4D Low Poly, Cinema 4D Low Poly Look, Cinema 4D Low Poly Tutorial, C4D Refraction, Justin Maller, Cinema 4D Abstract

Id: UkQPBPNYtb4

Length: 23min 21sec (1401 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 22 2016