Realistic Materials in Cinema 4D Physical Render

what is up guys my name is Matt workman for cinematography database and in this video we're gonna be going over how to set up materials to look realistic instead of cinema 4d for physical render so this is for the physical render native renderer inside of cinema 4d for the people using Sena designer so if you look at any of the posts I do on Instagram a lot of these are redshift but it's the same exact idea for physical renderer if you look at the floor here you can see that it's a little bit glossy and shiny and there's some bumps in it and it's really apparent with things like the asphalt in these renders here so that's what we're gonna be setting up so if you have set designer which I would really recommend if you're gonna be doing this for learning for just like a jumping off point for models for materials it's a good place to start and there's a lot of other places to go after go ahead and download asphalt 2 and you're gonna get basically over here a zip file like this and there's gonna be two files from cinema 4d in there and then a bunch of JPEGs right and we're gonna go and cinema 4d I'm gonna show you how to make materials out of these but you could also just double click and open this and this will have the material made for you but it's really pretty important to learn how to do this from scratch so let's jump into cinema 4d here so we're in cinema 4d and the goal is to make a realistic looking asphalt road that's gonna be like a little bit wet and reflect light so this is extremely important and it makes your lighting look more realistic and really nice so if you've ever done a night exterior what done Road we're gonna do that so I'm gonna start with a generic person because everyone has it but so what we're gonna do here is we're gonna set up a new material and we're gonna go down to here and you can either go to create not the PBR material just regular material or you can just double click and then you double click this and it opens up the material editor it's also all going out over here so I'm gonna name this I already spelled asphalt wrong but I'm just gonna call it asphalt so we have a lot of different channels and I guess we'll go over them quickly the basics but really what's important is how to set up materials not how to make the materials in here work not how to make every single setting and channel work so what we're gonna do is we're gonna start by clicking and dragging this onto the ground here that's one way of doing it if you undo you can also click and drag it up to the plane up there and you get this material tag essentially and we're gonna come back to that in a second so we're in the material editor here so what we're gonna do is we're gonna go to color and color is like you would guess the color of the material so if I go like this and I change it you'll see it's updated there and if you want you can just make flat colors and these are procedurally based flat colors you know in the computer but it's a lot more realistic and easier to make realistic things if you use pictures or material so I'm gonna hop here we're gonna click on this bar here okay so this is where I've been keeping my material so you're gonna have something called diffuse glossiness normal and spec and depending on where you got these there might be other things as well but you're gonna look for the thing called diffuse it could also be called color and sometimes El Beto but hopefully it's diffuse or color but also albedo it's basically the color what's like the base color of this material so you're gonna say no to this and it's gonna ask you every time but go ahead and just say no so when you do this it's going to load that picture onto the material there so really easy but you might look at this and be like this is kind of gigantic right it looks like very large gravel or asphalt it's not the right scale so what we're what we're gonna do first is actually we're gonna click on editor this is important under texture preview size you're gonna go to I think 2k and if you're a laptop or whatever can't handle it you can do lower but this will give you a more realistic preview and I think it's like really helpful you know so if you ever like a super computer you can turn it up to like 16 K or something but 2k 4k that's gonna work out pretty well for most people so now you can see that the asphalt is the wrong size but it's really easy to change and I do this every single time so you're gonna click on the tag up here and there's a bunch of different settings here but basically if you change the projection from UV mapping to cubic you'll see that now the gravel is kind of the right size you could even make it smaller it really depends but at least it's closer and most of my materials are made to be used in cubic projection you don't have to understand what that means it right out of the gate but that's how you're gonna get most materials that I produce most people produce to be accurate unless you start to get into UV in which we won't jump into on this one so now that we have the base color right I suppose we should let's light this so that we have an idea of what this will look like in render so I have my physical send a designer here and we're gonna go get something like a sky panel is always a good thing so let's start with the s60 here and I'm going to under sing it just put that onto the ground and we're just gonna backlight it I always find this is like a good way of like testing out how things look I'm actually going to uncheck reflectance here so it's just the color nothing else is happening all we've done is added a JPEG texture to the color channel so I'll turn this on and the viewport does not exactly show you what the final render is gonna look like as far as brightness but it gets it somewhat close somewhat so I'm gonna go up to render settings we're gonna switch into physical and I'm gonna go to progressive and all we're gonna have to talk about these aren't way we're gonna have to talk about that but I'm gonna go into progressive and am I gonna turn on GI I guess I just I won't for a little bit here so we have this i'ma hit shift R and let's see what we get so it's a little bit dark but it rendered really quickly so I'm going to pause this here that's our starting point and I'm gonna just double this real quick and it's gonna look super bright in the viewport but when you render especially because this is so dark looks okay so we're already like 40% of the way that maybe even like 60% of the way there right because now you have this really interesting color texture that repeats almost perfectly seamlessly and it just breaks it up it makes it look less CG because you have this organic pattern happening on there and part of the reason it looks so good is because I actually scanned that I scanned the ground to make this material which will maybe cover that someday how you actually scanned materials it's pretty easy but it adds a lot to it but there's a couple of things missing and we're gonna we're gonna show you how you fix it and add those things back in there so we have the color now and you'll see that once there's a JPEG in there it doesn't matter any of this stuff so leave it however you want we have the color so now we're gonna add a little bit of bumpiness to it I'm gonna use the bump map we're gonna use the normal map I'm not gonna break down exactly what that means but this is how we're gonna add some some bumpiness to it so we're gonna go to normal we're gonna turn it on and we're gonna go find our normal map which is this purple map it's purple in blue oh I said yes oh I forget what happens when you do that but you can usually say no so now if we get real close to it and we often on it we can see that it's very flat here and then this adds a little bit of trickery to it so that it will render with a little bit of bump to it so let's render now and see what this looks like if it's a little bit different so you do have to let the progressive render do a couple iterations but now there's a little bit of bumpiness to it and it's actually just like a rendering trick we haven't actually added any like a geometry to it it's not actually really bumpy it's just a way of kind of like tricking the renderer into having a little bit of like shadow in it it adds a lot and it doesn't take much computation power to add it in so we do that and this normal map was created based on the real-world heights of this actual asphalt that I scanned outside of my studio so that's the normal map really important and in a lot of cases just having color and then normal you could almost be done in a lot of cases because not in the real world I mean in the real world there's a lot of specular but there's not it's not always obvious but what we're gonna do now is we're gonna make this actually reflective and kind of shiny like it would be in the real world so this is a big topic and I'm just going to go through the workflow and maybe in the future we will go over like what this all means but we're gonna go to reflectance and we're gonna turn it on and by default it's gonna look like this I'm gonna render it and it's okay right so we have a little bit of a reflection here I should pull his feet out of out of the ground but it's like okay but it's not good it doesn't look right and the city that's up is actually kind of weird but you just have to kind of memorize this workflow so we are gonna change from type from specular blend legacy to Beckman it's the top one it's the new one that's the one we're going to use and we're gonna change from additive which actually additive is correct but we're just gonna change it to average okay I'm not gonna go over what these mean just just follow along let's turn off the roughness all the way and we're gonna turn off specular strength okay so what we're gonna change now is the reflective strength that we're gonna go all the way to a hundred so now look at the preview if you're using cinema 4d r19 let's do its feet drive me crazy oh I do just use a scan but not everyone has the scans yet um what we've done is we've made this thing basically like a mirror right so that's that's cool it's not what we're looking for but it's cool but we're gonna change the mirror into what we want okay Wow so like when we did this it basically turned it into like a metal material and we're thick you don't see any of the diffuse color it's just pure reflection but there is still the bump the bump it bumpiness the normal map is in there so we've kind of turned it into like black plexi or like ice or something like that so that's good to know if you want to have this kind of look but we want to make this look a little bit different than that so what we're gonna do is we're gonna go down to layer Fornell and we're gonna go to dielectric I'm not gonna explain what that means just switch it to dielectric and let's check render it let's render it now okay so now this is getting pretty decent so now we actually can see through to the color right so we can see the the asphalt colors in there I'll bumped up in pebbly we have the bump the bumpiness of it with the normal map and they match the color and the normal map they match each other so it just gives this illusion of it and now it feels like we have what is either like a really thin layer of water or gloss on top of it and that's a pretty cool effect and in early CG this was like basically all you could do it was tarted implement anything else other than this but we can go and effect that glassy layer on top and that's kind of one way to think about this is it's kind of like a glossy reflection on top of the color so if you turn off the layer this preview here that's what it looks like with the color and then you added some like gloss to it it's kind of one way of thinking about it sort of but so if you see right now I'm going to turn off the normal map and you'll see that it's this really really really perfect reflection like a perfect mirror of what's going on and if you go up to here to roughness and you start to play with this it will essentially make the surface rougher and it will essentially diffuse out the reflection so if you look at the preview here what is a very defined hot spot becomes blurrier and blurrier or rougher or glassy or hoops and you get different effects on that so I'm gonna turn the normal back on and we're end it already with it at zero which is like very very like clean reflection and now we're gonna kind of like messy the reflection up a tiny bit so let's hit render shift R and we'll look at the difference this does get it get this does get into like how many samples you have in the render settings to make this come out cleaner but if we look at the difference we have like a very pretty much like clean reflection except for the fact that the surface is actually a little bit of bump has a little bit of bumpiness to it and as we go down here we've now diffused the reflection a little bit so it's a little bit softer I don't know the word exactly to describe it but that that ability to change the roughness of the glassy enough glossiness of it that is where we get our realism so I'm going to turn this back down to zero and this workflow again is a little bit convoluted but we just have to follow it we're gonna go to colorizer okay and again I know this workflows wonky but you can schedule you got to pull that out you click and drag it down we're gonna double click this and we're gonna make it white okay I know this is look I know this is weird and then you got to click this and we're gonna go find our glossiness map or it could also be called roughness it could also be called anything that's like glossiness roughness does anyone call it anything else but glossiness a roughness is usually what we're gonna have here not spec glossiness we're going to add that in here and no okay and so what we're gonna do is we're gonna go back to our reflectance we're gonna click here and we were just in this and if you want to go back there's this as well but you can just click here and now we're affecting the roughness instead of it being all one type of roughness we're gonna actually define the roughness based on the colors of this map so now if I bring this back up like this let's see what we get we're gonna render so it might be a little bit hard to see but I'm gonna try to explain it now what we've done is we've defined what part of this texture is rough and which part of it is smooth or you know more glossy and because of the way I made these textures the color the normal and the glossiness are all derived from the real world and based on their Heights and different things so when you put those all together now you start to get the illusion that this is like real asphalt where like it has a color it's a little bit bumpy and it's actually more reflective in this case it looks like it's a more reflective it's hard to tell it's either more reflective on the lower parts and less reflective on the top or vice versa I can't I always have a hard time figuring that out in this view so I'm going to back up and I'm gonna show you a little bit on how to tweak this cuz this is really important it's gonna make your render so much better and I'm gonna try to I'll just leave it at this example but if you want to make wood floors if you want to make concrete if you want to make any of your grounds look right this is the way to do it and you're gonna need the materials you're gonna need these materials which is why I started making them so what we have now is like a very very wet asphalt right but we can continue to tweak this and we don't have to stop here though I know if you're just getting into materials this is this is enough I think that you could probably just go with this workflow as such and just keep going but what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna attempt to tweak this so let's see so we're gonna go back into this and basically now if you change this gradient it changes this map essentially and you can just play with it so to start let's see what happens if I drag this here and you can see it in the reflection or in the little preview up here it actually got rid of it made it rougher right so now it's pretty reflective and this made it so that it's less reflective so if I do it like this it will have a little bit of reflection but less so we've essentially like dried out the pave if that makes sense right so it's less reflective it's less like wet if we want to think about it that way and I want to change something else too in a second but so that's what that looks like and now if I change this little thing I go up here and you look now it's like really reflective again so let's check that out so we just basically did like now it's like really really like glassy it's really smooth reflection and it feels like it's a little bit more wet I feel like as far as um compared to this so we kind of dried it out this spreads the reflection this kind of like focuses it we're gonna think about it that way too so I'm gonna stop that and so I like it pretty much in between works out pretty well it's kind of how a design needs to be used but you can tweak it there the last thing we're gonna look at I'm not gonna get into the specular too much here but if we go to I believe there's a couple different ways of doing it but if we go up to this up here if you're used to photoshop you're basically layering this reflection on top of the color you can bring this down okay so right now if you look at it the reflection is like bright white and that's it's not the most accurate there's a couple different theories on it but you can kind of tone it down to like something like 25 even and now when we render let's see if it made a big difference it kind of didn't I was expecting more of a difference to be honest it'll essentially make this less bright and less blown out but realistically if you were to shoot put a sky panel on the ground on something like this like a reflective surface the reflections gonna be like f1 20 superb right you're not gonna be able to hold it in it will blow out like this so this is pretty physically accurate so I'm gonna pause this render and I'm trying to think if there's anything else but this is the basically physically based material workflow here and there's a lot more to cover but if you just copy this workflow and you start using this stuff these materials your renders and your lighting just the normal stuff you've been doing it's gonna look so much better and so you don't have to do this every time either once you've set this up I'm hitting B and you'll see that I have my own presets for SD materials and name it whatever you want so go up here make a new preset library name it things and then take this and drag it in there I guess I don't have s fault so I'll just do it that's asphalt - I shouldn't named it asphalt - but now now it's in here and you don't have to build it again you can just use it over and over again and it's going to hopefully it'll have moved the maps that you need into a local folder and then now you have this so I'm gonna close this give it a minute and if we want to recreate it now really easy I'm gonna hit B double click have the asphalt put it on there click it and remember cubic mapping that's it so this is the workflow for physical render it's very very similar for red ship well in theory it's very similar to in redshift and we're gonna start the rich ship series after this one because this should get you pretty much going as far as physical render there's physical render has not changed in many years so it's it's pretty pretty standardized or as red shift change is almost like every month so I have to definitely get on that series and I'm still learning how to use it as well but now we have our grounds make it as big as you want I know we're all kind of used to working in the real world so we kind of keep things like realistic size but you can just make a gigantic you could make it like infinite if you really wanted to so now anywhere that you look you're gonna have this nice little realistic texture so I'm gonna just bring in some other stuff I don't have as much in set designer for physical render on my personal accounts um but they are on this so I'm gonna bring in like I don't have that much stuff unfortunately I usually just I make them but I mostly use the redshift at this point because it's so much faster but I could bring in this this might be a little bit large is this a little bit large it's not too bad it's a little bit lag in the viewport but uh this is one of the first houses I built simply like a heavy asset could be like a little bit smaller but what we can do now which is kind of fun is that you just I try to make this so that you can treat it like the real world as much as like possible right so let's do this I'm going to understand again we're gonna I'm gonna use it as like I'll work like a practical overhead light in his house which is not like you know really not what like sky petals are being used maybe they're a little bit they're kind of like studio lights they're kind of large as far as rigging to the ceiling probably should just use the lay mat but I'm gonna use the sky panel so we're gonna go like this turn it on and I'm gonna I'm gonna play with this and what we're gonna expect now is we're gonna expect this to light up the room and then that room is gonna reflect in the ground just like it would in the real world I don't know how much you guys think about reflections when you're shooting but I think about them a lot I mean for this reason specifically and you can test those things in cinah designer roughly and it's you're never gonna have like the exact you know material of where you're shooting but you can get something that visualizes it pretty close so let's go to progressive and let's turn it on GI just cuz it's gonna look a little bit better q MC Lyte mapping where's that what we use it's been a minute it's been a minute I don't use physical all that much anymore so let's let's see where we're at here we're gonna have to tweak the sittings I'm sure but this is the workflow yes that's not bright enough actually doe not bad not bad so now I want to UM I want to show you one thing as far as like using this in escena so like there's not very much like actually coming out and it's just pure black the the pure blackness of CG CG doesn't you can get like full black in CG whereas you can't it's a lot harder to get that entry in real life so I'm gonna double this value just a little bit bright and I'm gonna do it so that there's just a little bit of light hopefully coming out of the actual window now this is not a good lighting setup but it's just kind of her for show here and I'm going to hold ctrl and I'm gonna make another one and that the viewport does not like that sometimes would you do that but here we are doing it so I'm gonna put another light in here so that should make this room a lot brighter maybe like unrealistically bright not sure and if you watched my video on the physical sky and ambient light we're gonna use that because it just makes this whole thing a little bit better looking even if it's not as accurate so I'm making a new material here turnoff reflectance and we're just gonna go to something like 14 right I'm gonna drag this on to the sky and now that sky is gonna emit just a little bit of that's actually probably a good amount it's gonna basically act as one big light source and just fill in like the things that are pure black so that we don't have like as much pure black in the scene because it doesn't look as realistic okay so this is a decent example now you know you're gonna keep playing with the settings so what we're looking at now is an interior where we've lit the or an exterior where we've lit the interior and now we have light directly coming out which is this on the floor and we're seeing the reflection of this in the ground in our new material now if this were a redshift this would look a lot more realistic and we'd probably be done but with physical it's a little bit slower which is why I don't use it as much but if you want to increase the quality of this reflection here you're gonna go to your settings up here and you go back to physical this blurriness subdivisions here the higher this number the higher quality and less noisy the reflections are going to be that are blurry really should be called like glossiness or something right but a preview if you're doing preview stuff just keep it at one or two you'll see that as you increase this number your renders take like much much longer so six would be pretty high even for my system but we can do like four and this has to do with the shadow quality so for and we can turn these off for the most part I don't believe I have any of those on so four and four will up the quality essentially of this so let's kind of pick an angle here and we're gonna render and I guess I'll just let this render for the rest of this video to kind of end it so this is how to use materials inside of Cinna designer I would say that in most cases you want to be using what's called a PBR or physically-based PBR is like physically based rendering a PBR material I have like eight onset designer there's more that are free there sites like polygon and mega scale today make incredible ones and we didn't cover how to do height maps or displacement maps but that's that's for later but if you're looking to get materials specifically for the floor because the floor is the place that like you really want this to be happening if you want wood to look right if you want nice reflections like with concrete sometimes or asphalt this is the way to do it so this is physical renderer and it's gonna take a while I'm not gonna lie this will take a while for this to look anything near the quality of what I usually do in red shift but it will get there you're getting the reflections in it is physically based it is physically accurate it's tracing the reflection from the camera to the wall and there's no trickery like in a video game engine like we'll probably be seeing in the future um it's very realistic the question is how fast is your computer how much time do you have to live as resolve but this is the physically based workflow after this I'm gonna be starting the red shift series and you'll see with this exact same setup how much faster this resolves to something that looks honestly photorealistic and people I kind of think it's a photo in a lot of cases but let's pause this here that has been about a minute thirty on the thread Ripper resolving and it's you know it's it's semi convincing asphalt with a little bit of wetness on it and you really as you're as you're playing with this material you really want to get this is standard nothing to think about standard this is where things get funky where you can play with things you can you can go into the roughness and you go to the colorizer you can basically play with how it maps these materials and you just play with it until you get something that you like and if you want this stuff to look a little bit more realistic you really want to start using materials like PBR materials but with um basically texture Maps textures and not like flat colors because flat colors just look really fake there's no flat colors in the real world even something like a white wall I have a plaster material there's a little variations in the color this is a bumpiness there's some variations overall that make it a little bit more realistic so that wraps it up for this video hope you enjoyed it if you have any questions specifically about this workflow for physical render for Cinna designer head - the forums at cinematography database I do check the comments here but this YouTube channel isn't so much of like a community like the main YouTube channel it's mostly a place that I post tutorials I hope that doesn't make anybody feel bad but that's the way that I I think about this channel if you really want to ask questions feel free to do that on the forum I will see you guys on the next video and we're gonna start getting into some redshift for people that are using it and want to know a little bit more about it or people they just want to see it is it worth the investment I think it is if you're doing it in a designer as part of your like xual workflow now for your job

Channel: Cinematography Design

Views: 40,532

Keywords: cinema4d, c4d, archviz, cine designer, cinematography design, physical render, PBR Material, cinema 4d tutorial, set designer, lighting design, previs, previz, cine design

Id: __wiS9J12Ek

Length: 27min 14sec (1634 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 08 2018