Making a Spiderverse-Inspired Shader in Arnold | Greyscalegorilla

hey what's up everybody Chad here from grayscale guerrilla comm I recently watched spider-man into the spider verse and was completely blown away by that movie the shading the lighting the the techniques with halftone patterns and whatnot just really blew me away so when I got home I immediately started thinking of ways I could emulate shaders like this in my work so in today's video I'm gonna show you how to create a very spider-verse looking material in Arnold for cinema 4d with some cool halftone patterns and cross-hatching let's dive in [Music] okay so before we jump into how I created the halftone spider-verse looking shader here we need to start with some reference and I always use pure ref when I'm putting together reference and I've got some reference here I'm just gonna hold down the Z button and my left mouse button and we're just gonna look at some of the reference imagery here this movie was so freakin fantastic but the whole time I was watching it I was just completely blown away by the shading that they chose to do and where they choose to chose to do it and how they how they did highlights mid-tones shadows that sort of thing it was very interesting and I just thought it was so inspirational that I wanted to come back and try to make a shader like that myself one of the characters that I really loved was kingpin kingpins had this great highlight that would always go on his shoulder that had this halftone pattern that I was like oh man that's great and then in spider-man sort of the the drunk the drunk loser spider-man had a great highlight halftone as well but he also had like a mid-tone halftone and then he had some cross hatching and some other shots this one has some of the great halftone patterns happening in the highlights and in the mid-tones here as well and then this one there's not a whole lot of it in this shop but you can sort of see some of these crosshatch patterns coming in which I thought was really interesting so I wanted to figure out if I could build this in ah in Arnold so I went ahead and I made this shader let's just go ahead and like get out of this camera for a minute so you can sort of see what's going on it is gonna be camera dependent because I am doing some camera projections here but I just wanted to move a camera around just a little bit so you could see what's going on we have a pretty pretty interesting shader here and I'm going to start you we're gonna do a quick tour of the shader and then I'm going to break out a new shader and we're gonna build this from scratch alright what do we have here first of all first of all the very left-hand side of our tree I'm just gonna isolate that we have what's driving this entire shader which is going to be a Lambert utility a utility an Arnold utility set in shade mode to Lambert what this is going to do is it's going to give us a 0 to 1 value on the shading jump back out to our camera it's little bit easier to see here so what is that doing that's giving me every word that it's it's it's hitting light it's turning white and everywhere it's in shadow it'll turn black it's pretty self-explanatory but what this does is gives us a value a value from light to dark on the model right and we're gonna use that to drive a lot of things that we're gonna make so what is this going out to well this very top row right here this is my highlight section I decided you know after looking at the reference a lot of cool reference I decided that I wanted to make a shader that had a mid-tone halftone pattern a shadow halftone pattern and then also a mid-tone halftone pattern but I think the shadow pattern I ended up doing like a crosshatch thing so it's not really a halftone pattern I guess but we'll go ahead and take a look at that in a minute all right so let's just keep rolling here let's go to our first ramp so I'm taking this utility noted I'm Matt putting it out to a ramp and you can see that I've got this ramp pretty heavily clamped now obviously this is so I can add a highlight halftone this is what's going to be used to drive that right in fact I've got another one split out here this is the mask for that area and you may notice that it looks so not quite white here it's because I've got a lookup table on top of this render view here so if I turn this off on the IPR you can see it without it I'm gonna leave it in there I like the way it looks it's also one of our gist you lots so from there I'm using that clamped utility the the Lambert and I'm setting a range to it I'm setting a range of 0.1 to 1 and then that range this is where it's gonna get kind of tricky here I'll I'm not going to get too heavy into this because I'm gonna show you how to build it from scratch in a minute so that range is driving the position of another ramp that's set to circular now it's driving the position of the second not so you can see here this ramp is gonna say okay I want the circle to be really tiny or I want the circle to be really big okay then it goes through a UV transform node and this is the magic sauce of getting the the halftone pattern working in Arnold is using the UV transform node setting this ramp to go pass through and what it's doing is it's taking that single circle that it made right here and it's going to repeat it a hundred times why and a hundred two hundred times in X okay from there I'm rotating it about 4045 degrees 42 degrees in this case to get that halftone look so if I go ahead and isolate this now it's gonna look really weird it doesn't it's not mapping correctly it's sort of like all over the place in fact it's using the UV space of the model which is not what I want I need that I need to project this through a camera space so it appears that the the dot patterns are being projected from the camera it looks a little bit more like what you would consider like a comic book or a print sort of style so if we break out of the camera here and we jump in here you can see it's doing what we want and I'm gonna explain some of this other stuff in a minute but it's not projected right so it goes about all the way out to a camera projection node which then takes it through our camera that we're looking through and says okay now it looks more like a halftone pattern now we're getting the dots projector from the camera from the straight-on point of view we've got the bigger dots on the highlights and the tinier dots on the little part so I'm gonna like I said I'm gonna go a little bit more into detail about how this works so that's all all these little halftone patterns and let's take a look at the mid-tone mid-tones doing this and let's make this bigger so we can see it a little bit better like 90 oops let's go like 90 percent and then I'm going to just draw region holding down shift just region over this let's go a little bit bigger let's go 110 all right there we go okay so now let's look at our at our shadow this portion of this this material so it's go ahead and isolate that and you can see this is like a crosshatch pattern so what the heck is going on like how we do in this well these mats are then going to be put into a layer RGB node which has all the different colors associated with my highlights and my mid-tones and my shadows and these mats are just going to reveal those colors so it becomes a lot like Photoshop in that case where you're just setting things to you know some of these I believe actually I don't think any of them are set to multiply this one's set to overlay but the highlight is set to add and and just things like you would achieve in regular copying or in Photoshop and of course let's go ahead and look at the output of just this texture this has no shading on it at all that's one thing that's interesting Spyder versus that they they maintained a lot of that three-dimensional shading it's not completely tuned shaded or flat so this is just my my texture that gets put into a standard surface shader and then output where we have a slight bit of spec and now we're seeing all the shading in there as well and that's really what's what makes this thing feel like it's from the spider verse is because it's got that mixture which I really thought was really creative and interesting so on top of that we've got our we do have let's go ahead and look at the image that so this mask which I made this an illustrator and brought it in and this is creating our masks for our webbing and then the actual red texture of the red color is in this layered shader as well and then our c40 noise I just threw like a Luca noise on there to basically break up that that paint pattern or that texture map of the of the webbing so that it looks a little bit more hand-drawn a little bit more messy which is something that I really liked about the movie as well alright so we've go all the way out here to this section let's go ahead and just really look at everything let's go ahead and bring this guy down so we can really look at the whole thing I'm gonna bring all this down so we can see it just for a minute before we break out our own alright well let that cook let that finish up rendering so now you can see the highlights happening with this halftone pattern you could see the mid-tones happening with a slightly darker halftone pattern and then you can start to see some of the darker cross hatching pattern like underneath the ball here and in the little area here where it's let's break this down here like right in here you can start to see that halftone pattern come in but all that combining in a very sort of interesting creative way to get to this type of shader also you can move the lights around everything is completely interactive let's go ahead and grab these let's grab our let's grab our rim light now let's grab our key right and let's break out into a different shot and we're gonna grab the move key and I'm just gonna move this highlight around you can see how interactive it becomes it's just like completely interactive we'll get our highlights where the light is showing up we can move that down it's very interesting very very cool alright so I promised that we were gonna build this from scratch so let's go ahead and do that now okay so I stripped out the the old or I took the I made a new material applied it to our props here we've got just the standard surface in here right now we need to build out this material so the first thing I'm going to do is grab that utility that we we knew was going to be really crucial to this so I'm gonna hit ctrl tab to bring up the search we're gonna type in utility hit enter create our utility I'm gonna put this out to the beauty and now we are looking at our utility we need to set this to Lambert mode all right cool so this Lambert is going to be driving everything that we need to create so we need to create three mats like I was saying before I want to highlight Matt a mid-tone map and a shadow mat so let's grab another let's grab a ramp control tab ramp OOP now float ramp and delete control tab ramp RGB enter okay so let's throw our utility into this ramp great so now we're just going to remap these values to this ramp let's go ahead and look at the output of this ramp now we can sort of clamp in to our highlights and where we want our highlights to live okay so I think that's probably pretty good maybe clamp them a little bit more that's good all right I'm gonna hold down ctrl and drag off this ramp and make a duplicate and this is going to be our mid-tone so put this in there we're gonna look at the output of this and now we're going to find where what we want to consider to be our mid-tone now this map mat is just going to be good for getting to figuring out where our mid-tone halftone pattern is going to live I don't want to happen on the highlights so I'm gonna make another knot on this right here and let's go ahead and make that value up there okay so now it's just a matter of me figuring out exactly where I want bees to live I don't want it to creep into the highlights too much okay that's pretty good I'm imagining that anywhere it's white we're gonna have our our mid-tone have to UM pattern it anywhere where it's white we will not let's bring this down a little bit and then in the shadows of course it's going to be non-existent okay so that's gonna be our mid-tone Matt I'm just gonna pull off a copy of our first one and push this into the input let's take a look at this output all right that's gonna be our shadows so I know that this one's gonna want to be white and we'll make this one black so that we are making a matte just for the shadowy bits and let's make it fairly contrasting and really we want to just make sure that it's gonna be visible down in here and maybe a little bit a little bit stronger right in there that's good so that's where our cross hatch pattern will be okay so now we've got three mattes ready to go let's jump back up here hit down holding down shift alright now we can start building out the different parts of this this halftone so that we can get into the juicy bits of making this shader so we need to split out another ramp so I'm going to make another ramp out out of this top node we're just gonna work on the highlights for right now okay so we made a copy of that so what this ramp is going to do is that's sure this one's going to control the size of the dots on our highlight let's go ahead and look at the output of that and we don't want it to mimic too closely the Matt because I don't want the dots to be completely black or sorry completely small and non-existent so I'm just gonna drag this out a little bit longer than then the other one to give make that highlight roll a little bit more and we're going to use this to create we're gonna use this to drive the the size of our dots in our halftone pattern excuse me so let's grab a the next thing we're gonna do is range map this one a grant range mapper I'm gonna push this into the range boom okay let's look at the we don't even need to look at the output of the range the range I'm going to leave as is as zero and one for right now just so it'll be easier for you to tell what's going on and then we're going to grab a ramp RGB and this ramp RGB is going to be set to circular and we're going to change the we're going to right-click inside of the ramp boom and we're going to change the interpolation of all knots to step and we're gonna push our loops it's kind of sensitive make it about like half way there okay so now we've just created a circle if I look at the output of that of course it's on in the UV space right now so it's gonna be sort of like weird looking but what we're gonna do is we're gonna use this range which is pulling a value off of our off of our model here we're gonna use that range to drive the position of this knot right here it's gonna make the the circle either actually I think I need to have this flipped but we'll go ahead and look at that in a minute so it's gonna drive the position of not two here blink blowing points going to make a really tiny dot or a really big dot okay that's where that range comes in because in the ramp here this is considered zero and this is considered one right and that's what our range is going to give us a range is giving us zero to one so if we take this range and we say all right I want to drive the position to of this ramp if I output that it's not gonna really look like anything yet because we haven't repeated it and we haven't told it how to wrap onto this or project through the camera yet so let's do that really quick let's grab a UV transform all right pop that in and we're going to put our ramp right through the pass-through of this UV transform and now before we do anything let's go ahead and look at the output of that we're gonna repeat this thing like a hundred times and we'll do like half of it in Y and you can start to see we're starting to see something now only like I mentioned before it actually needs to be inverted so let's go ahead and invert these colors really quickly here we did not mean to do that let's make that white and this will be black alright and yeah okay so white and black and let's go ahead and push this through a camera so let's go ahead and make sure our camera is in our object manager here grab the UV transform I'm going to push out a projection camera projection good push that right into the camera projection color and let's grab that camera put it right into the camera slot look at the output of that good okay so something is wrong here I think it's because our ramp this range does not need to be zero it needs to be like 0.5 there we go and let's try we want it to be a little bit smaller than that so let's just push this down good I don't want it to so I don't know if it's really super visible let me actually zoom in here a little bit easier to see if I get a little closer alright so you're probably like what the heck's going on right now okay so like I mentioned before this range map here is going to be controlling the position of this knot right here and if it's at its not gonna actually work for right now cuz I'm doing it with the with the range but if I take this range and I make it like zero it actually sort of like flips in on itself so I probably need to like make it like 2001 or probably like point 1 there we go so this is what's going to be giving us our halftone so you can see the anywhere where it's sort of white and light it we're getting a nice big circle big dot and as it falls into shadow it becomes the size of 0.1 in fact I probably want to make this a little bit smaller point oh five something like that so in addition to that if I don't want to make it so big I could actually change this right this range map right here to like 0.85 and that's gonna make it a little bit smaller that's good something like that so that is how we do it that's how you control the size of the Half Dome pattern pretty cool right it's actually a really kind of cool thing that Arnold is able to do this it was definitely took some experimenting okay so now that we've got the halftone pattern on the high light maybe we want to repeat it a few more times maybe it's like 150 we'll go half of that so it'll be like 75 all right now we've got like a good amount going and again we're gonna use this ramp that we made the mask to mask this this stuff off so it's going to make sense later on when we build our art texture alright so we've got our halftone pattern happening on our let's go and make this a little bit bigger on our highlight so let's go ahead and start to make our mid-tone halftone pattern so instead of doing this all over again what's great is you can just grab all these nodes and just hit hold down ctrl and just drag out a copy and then we're just gonna take actually I'll build I'll take this exact same ramp that we did before let's spit this out here input there and we're gonna throw this ramp into input there let's go ahead and look at the output of our mid-tone so now that we've built at once we don't have to rebuild it again we just need to use this ramp which is coming off of our of our utility Lambert and figure out exactly where we want our half tone for our mid-tones to start and end okay so let's grab this make this dark cool so now this is going to be controlling our mid-tone half tones I'm gonna pull this over a little bit get it out of the shadow all right and this will be the color on this one on our highlight is white and that makes total sense for a highlight but it's not really gonna work for our our mid-tone so when we want to adjust that color we're gonna do that in by adjusting the color of not this ramp because that's driving our range but we'll adjust it here once we build in when once we start to get into that we'll build it right here in fact I'll go ahead and invert these really quickly here because it is going to be a dark mid-tone and we're gonna set that to probably multiply or something and like you know knock it back a little bit okay so that's looking pretty good let's go ahead and move our standard surface over we're gonna do the same thing for our shadows only our shadows are gonna be slightly different so our shadows we're gonna try a slightly different approach okay so let's grab a ramp let's just copy the ramp for the shadow up there good boom input there this is gonna drive like I said the size so that's looking pretty good I might actually expand this out a little bit it feels good okay so this one I don't want to do I don't want to do a this kind of halftone pattern here I want to do a crosshatch pattern so how could we do that well right now we're using a circle note a circle ramp but we could just as easily use like au au ramp or we could use a V and then we could adjust you can see right now it's actually changing the size of that of that line over the shading here so it's using its using this same range that we built before to drive that position to of that ramp which in turn gives us this look but it's probably gonna be too too wide so let's go a little bit skinnier that feels pretty good and now I'm just going to adjust in the UV transform how many times that's repeated so if I repeat it in X it's not really gonna do anything I really want to repeat it in Y so let's do like maybe 150 that feels pretty good and I feel like it may need to be a bit wider so I'm gonna bring this back up to point 6 on the output max of that range just gonna make it a thicker line and now I want to rotate it I noticed in my reference some of that crosshatch pattern it's kind of hard to see it was like rotated like at 45 degrees so I'm gonna grab down and my UV transform of that hit 45 actually I'm gonna go to negative 45 gonna kind of go up the other way that's good that's what I was after I've got fairly low quality settings on it turns my render settings so they go faster but that will all clean up with samples cool so now if we look at the output of everything that we've got going here let's grab the highlights we've got a highlight that we've got and go ahead and grab our render region over that area and we've got our mid-tone and then we've got our shadow it's all looking good right so now we just need to put all of these pieces together and then we're going to put it into the shader to get the final touches so let's grab a layer RGB layer RGB a and we're gonna push we need to figure out what this is going to be so let's go ahead and grab our let's make a red color at the very bottom layer one put let make it red sort of like a darker red maybe and then we will put our spider webbing on here which will be a mask that'll mask out layer two so let's grab that from our other shader it's right here so subscribe control-c control-v alright so we'll grab that guy and we're gonna push him into layer to mix and for layer two we're gonna add let's put it in black is probably fine we'll set this to multiply mix layer two why you're not working oh that was later for I meant to put layer two let's just drag this up give him our give ourselves a little bit more room here get kind of cramped let's grab multiplying cool alright so we do need to change the UVs on that so let's go under layer let's unhide our oh it's already there okay cool so we'll grab our inner ball and we're gonna change this UV to flat and that one's gonna be a little bit too small so let's make it bigger something like in here it's pretty good alright we'll grab our shader ball and we'll do the same thing on this one flat and let's rotate it I'm gonna hold down shift for snapping let's go 90 degree is cool and let's scale this up okay so we've got that all set up now and we need to start adding in our different shading layers so let's start with the shadow first and I'll leave the shadow it's gonna go on to layer three and really we just need to put in our our layer that's our shadow layers right here so we're gonna put this into layer three oops wrong one layer three where's that going into the input and let's go ahead and move over and let's put our shadow our mats over a little bit more because they don't make a lot of sense and way out there all right I'm gonna zoom in make this a little bit easier on myself all right let's grab our mat we're gonna throw that into layer three mix and make sure layer three is gonna be set to multiply alright so now we've got our our shadow pass kind of in there and we can of course we're gonna just how heavy the this is going in we can do that a couple different ways we could actually adjust the mask and make this not quite as bright which is then gonna mix down that shadow but I'm gonna leave it full right now just so we can see it a little bit easier all right let's do the same thing with our mid-tones we're gonna throw our mid-tones onto what's going to be layer four input and let's grab that mask and drag that over all right so this is going to go into layer four mix great grab that that's also going to be multiplied only this time it's you you definitely just don't really want to see this very heavily I noticed in the movie any of the mid-tone halftone patterns we're very subtle very very subtle so I'm gonna go ahead and grab the white here and I'm just gonna drag it down into like a gray I just want to feel it I don't necessarily want to see it very much and the mask I feel like needs to bleed off into the shadows a bit more that's good and now I'm just going to I don't like how the halftone pattern is sort of like getting too too big right in here so the way that I'm gonna fix that is going into the the midtone range here and making sure that it doesn't get that big there we go that's better and the size going up is fine I like that that's feeling pretty good all right now we're gonna do the highlight and the highlight is gonna be fairly simple I'm just gonna grab the highlight bring that into layer five input let's go and make sure that layer five input is set to plus alright so layer five is there and we could I'm still gonna use the layer five mask because you know we don't like these little tiny tiny dots that are happening over here so we'll bring that mask over and we'll bring that mask right into the layer there's not layer five mix right yeah okay I'm just gonna drag this up so I can see it a little bit easier all right cool so now again that highlight the dots are getting a bit too big if we look at our reference with with kingpin they're they don't ever get that big so let's grab that range and we're gonna adjust that down to maybe like point six maybe even a little bit less than that maybe a point five there we go and then I feel like we need to repeat these it's like a little bit too big so let's go back into our camera or sorry our UV transform and change that to like 200 by 100 oops not 1,200 this isn't actually a kind of interesting look by just repeating it that way all right there we go that's feeling pretty good so let's take a step back take a moment here to look at what we got let's go ahead and just region eyes this whole thing we've got our mid tone pattern we've got our shadow pattern and we've got our highlight pattern and we're basically building the the building blocks of our diffuse map which is kind of great using this method I did add a I think it was a knocking noise let's go ahead and look at what what what it was I think it was uh it was a Luka noise okay so if we wanted to add like a Luka noise let's go ahead and do that I'm just like Luca all right let's grab the c40 noise we're gonna change this to Luca this node lives on the seventh floor sorry I had to do it let's do like 200 no 200 not 20 there we go all right so this is just gonna break up that texture a little bit we're gonna throw this into and put six and we'll set the input six to do do do and make this overlay alright let's go ahead and look at the output of that alright it's way too heavy but bring this down a little bit it starts to feel a little bit cool and broken up and yeah something simple maybe even a multiply might look better let's see what the multiply looks like bring that back up a little bit yeah I kind of dig the multiply a little bit better in fact I'm gonna make this I'm gonna make this a little bit more contrast II yeah it's just adding a little subtle almost like paint strokes kind of feels like more painterly alright so we've got the building blocks here now it's time to pipe it back into our standard surface into the diffuse slot so go ahead and throw this into our standard surface base color make sure that the base weight is all the way up and let's go ahead and look at the output of that it's very shiny and we have like a very hot specular which is not in line with what's happening in the film they've all got pretty diffuse reflections and I'm gonna bring the the overall sort of weight of that down good and now I feel like the it's really close but the the red is just way way way too dark so let's go back into our base our layered shader rather and just brighten up our red and let's go ahead and take a look at why I think it might be this might be this multiply layer that we've got going on turn this one off yeah it's this guy right here so I'm gonna actually change that that sort of weird layer that I had on here before back to an overlay and just bring it way down like that just so we can barely start to feel it all right cool and let's go ahead and make this a little bit bigger it's gonna be really hard to see our shading but I just want to be able to see it a little bit bigger alright that's looking pretty good our mid tone pattern I think is too big we're gonna change that in a second our halftone pattern is great but it's a bit too heavy-handed I think I want to knock it down a little bit in terms of its opacity so let's make those adjustments really quickly here oops I didn't mean to do that let's go back to you know and I'm just going to walk over to our mid-tone and adjust its mask Oh actually I want to adjust the size so I'm gonna do that with a range so I'm gonna make it a bit smaller 0.4 something like that actually maybe it's not the size maybe it's the repeating it needs to be repeated more which is I'm gonna do that to the UV transform and I think I'm gonna mimic what I did on the highlight which is a hundred right sorry two hundred and one yeah that's feeling better to me and now I just want to knock down the opacity of the shadow so I'm gonna do that with the with the mask right here and just find a nice I don't want it to be so dark that it's distracting to see how that looks down here that looks pretty good I love how it's like I just it just looks sort of like printed it's really got a great look and the fact that the fact that you can do this with nothing but UV transforms from projections and ramps and Arnold is really cool I wish you had this sort of ability in some of the other renderers but you know maybe someday and if we wanted to add even more imperfection to this to this red and whatnot you could like go shoot or scan in like some paint strokes that you make maybe another program or maybe just in real life and like bring them in and add them to this to make it even feel more realistic but yeah that's pretty much the jist of it let's go ahead and like knock this out like full like this and we're gonna turn off our region and let this cook for a second while we talk about what we've got going on all right so I hope you liked the video it was a lot of fun to make a lot of fun to experiment with this type of look and I hope you can go off and experiment with your own spider-verse shaders cuz I don't know about you but that movie really inspired me just I was so excited to come home and like try to build this kind of shader it was a lot of fun so yeah if you liked the video hit me with a like if you have any questions about what I did here go ahead and ask in the comments and I'll be happy to answer if you need any help creating this remembering anything I've done hit me up if you're in our art GSG connects Lac I'm always in there answering questions so yeah I hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you in the next one hey welcome back everybody hope you liked that video I had a lot of fun making that shader and sort of diving into the different levels of halftone and it was just a lot of fun to like figure out a way to make it and if you haven't seen spider-man into the spider verse I highly commend checking that movie out it will definitely inspire you to go home and start making some cool stuff so anyway give me old thumbs up if you liked it and subscribe if you really liked it and I will see you in the next video

Channel: Greyscalegorilla

Views: 102,559

Keywords: Cinema 4D, c4d, tuts, tutorials, motion graphics, greyscalegorilla, arnold, rendering, shader, spiderverse, spiderman, lambert, spiderman shader, spiderman c4d, chad ashley tutorial, chad ashley arnold, arnold shader, arnold shader c4d, how to make spiderman shader, cinema 4d arnold, c4d arnold, cinema 4d arnold shader, cinema 4d arnold tutorial, c4d arnold tutorial

Id: 4zsR25y7UVA

Length: 34min 14sec (2054 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 24 2019