Turn Your Seamless Patterns Into C4D Redshift Textures

what's up everyone my name is melanie and in today's tutorial we are going to be creating a seamless pattern in adobe illustrator and then we're going to take it over to cinema 4d and create a texture with it in the end we should have something that looks a little like this and hopefully this will give you the skills to create all sorts of fun stylized graphic textures the softwares that you need to follow along with today's tutorial are adobe illustrator cinema 4d and redshift with that being said let's go learn some stuff let's start by jumping into adobe illustrator to create the pattern for this material now you can use either photoshop or adobe illustrator for this portion and there's a ton of tutorials on creating seamless patterns in either but for this tutorial i'm just going to show you the workflow of adobe illustrator to cinema 40. when creating the composition the size is going to be dependent on how close to the object you're going to be in cinema 4d or how much detail you want in your texture if your pattern looks blurry in cinema 4d it might just be because your texture is too small so typically i start with a decent size something like 2048 by 2048 and i'll throw up some other common sizes but this is generally a good size that works in most cases it's not too big and not too small and now that we're in our file we can start to build out this texture a seamless pattern has you guessed it no seams so if you took a seamless pattern tile duplicated it and placed it again on any side of the original pattern you would not be able to tell where one begins and one ends thus the pattern could go on infinitely in any direction which is why these are great to use in cinema 4d because you can create one single cool pattern and you can use it over and over for different objects no matter what the size or shape of them is for simplicity i'm just going to use circles in this pattern but you can use whatever you want go crazy use squares triangles squiggles all three whatever fun seamless pattern you create should work when we get to cinema 40. so i'm going to start randomly placing circles on my artboard and i don't want the stroke on but you could use it if that's the look you're going for and i'm trying to space them out kind of evenly so when they tile they look cohesive and there's not big gaps in the pattern that have no circles at all and we'll vary the size of the circles making sure some hang off the edge and i'm just holding alt and dragging to make a copy of these circles now the edge of this that's falling off is going to be copied onto this side so you can see that these two are actually too close together even though you can't tell right now that looks pretty good pretty even now that i have a pattern i'm happy with i need to take all these circles that have edges hanging off the artboard and i want to duplicate them to the opposite side to complete the seamless pattern so let's first get a copy of our circle by hitting ctrl c to copy the circle and then ctrl f to paste it in front now we have a copy right where the original circle is as you can see and now we can move it and we'll just right click and go into transform move and i want to move it all the way to the other side of the artboard so we need to move it the entire size of the original comp which if you remember is 2048 by 2048 so let's move this in the horizontal direction 20 48 pixels and zero angle and actually we could just right click transform move and we're doing the same distance with this circle and we'll just hit copy and it will make a copy on this side and that will save the paste in front step now we've moved these from the left to the right and we want to move these ones from right to left we can actually just click them both transform move and now we want to go the opposite direction so we want to go negative 20 48 and now we want to do the same with the ones on top and bottom so we'll move this bottom one and we don't want to move in the horizontal anymore we want to move vertically up 2048 and make a copy and we want to do the same thing here make a copy now all of our hanging edges are on both sides so this will be seamless we can just make sure we like the way this looks might add a little something there that looks pretty cool i don't know this really doesn't matter i'm just messing around i think i like that though you should always save your stuff also we're gonna save this and we'll call it circle texture and then uh oh i'm in cmyk dang it you want to be an rgb and we also want these to be solid black now let's export we can either export this as a jpeg or as a png in this situation i don't think it really matters so we'll just do a jpeg and then we want to make sure we use the artboard and page one if we don't check artboards the overhanging edges will export and our pattern won't be seamless anymore so make sure you check on artboards and artboard one we'll just go maximum here and now we'll head over to cinema 4d and start to build out a fun texture here we are in cinema 4d and i just created this little scene i put in a really crude quick and dirty lighting setup it just has a dome light in which i've imported in hdri which will just give us some better reflections and stuff and then i just added an area light to brighten our object up a little bit so we can see our texture better i just made a simple little j and here it is without the subdivision nothing fancy and then i added the subdivision to round out the edges a little and set subdivide uvs to boundary if you don't change this and you leave it on standard you'll probably get some weird stretching at the edges so just a little forewarning there so let's get started by creating a redshift material and if you don't have it in this create menu it's also up here under redshift materials i'm just going to start with the base redshift material and we'll put it on this j and let's rename this let's just call this jmat and let's double click this material to open our shader graph which is where all of our nodes live if you look at our material node you'll probably see a lot of things that look familiar to you from the regular cinema 4d material menu we have diffuse color where you can adjust your color then we have reflection color and right now our reflections are white but if we change them to something like blue we'll see our reflections are now blue usually i leave this pretty close to white but add just a tiny bit of color since nothing is really pure black or white then we have ior which is index of refraction and more or less affects reflectivity and we're just going to leave that at 1.5 you can also change the roughness of reflections so they get a little rough around the edges which i typically do because i don't like my reflections to be perfectly crisp unless it's a super reflective material there's also these presets up here so you can do a lead material for example and this would give you a great start to building a metal material anyways let's just start with plastic here and we'll turn up the roughness and add a little color to the reflection and we'll just leave the diffuse color for now because we're gonna make some changes what we're going to start with for our pattern build is a color layer node if you just start typing it will filter your nodes just drag it over to add it and a color layer node works just like layers in photoshop so you can stack multiple colors on top of each other and mask parts of the color out so if we connect this to our material we're going to want to connect it to diffuse color and you'll see our material turn black and that's because right now our base color and our first layer are both black so if we turn this off and we change this color to something more like a white and see how thing changes and now we want to enable this layer 1 and click this button and right now it turned our object black because we have layer 1 stacked on top of the base layer and we don't have any part of it masked out so it's basically just right on top of this base color i'm going to change this to like a blue some kind of blue we're going to add in our polka dot texture that we just made so to do that i have a hot key setup so if i just hit shift t it will open up my menu and i can just pick my texture and hit open if you don't have that set up there's a couple different ways to do it you can either go to tools create texture node or you can search in here for a texture node drag it over and hit these triple dots to bring up your menu or you can set up a hotkey which is what i suggest because hotkeys are awesome and it's super easy to do so to set up a hotkey for this you go to window customization customize commands and the thing we want to set it up for is create texture node so start typing that in here and you'll see it filter out and you just want to click into it and i have a shortcut set up already so it's here but if you didn't you would just click in this box and hit shift t and push the assign button and that's it and then you can just close this and if you hit shift t your file menu will open and you can import this circle texture that you made i don't think i showed you but i uv mapped my j already and i'm not like the most astute uvn wrapper but this works well for what i'm doing and i took it over to rhizome uv because cinema 40's uv mapping leaves a lot to be desired and i've heard they fixed it in r22 and it's a lot better now but i am still on r20 it's not perfect by any means but it works for what we're doing here so i just wanted to show you that in case you wanted to see it okay so now we have this pattern in here and we'll just leave this wrap u and v checked since it's seamless it will just repeat the pattern if you didn't have them checked it would just use one instance of your pattern and then everything else would just be black so if we connect this to our layer mask you will see this pattern now acts like a mask you would see in photoshop all the black portions are being masked out of the blue color layer which allows our white color layer that's underneath to show through so if we change this to i don't know yellow say and we have yellow underneath and that's the basics of stacking this material now this is big for what i want to do i don't want the pattern to be that big so i want to actually make this smaller and so you can remap the scale right here now the redshift scaling is a little strange because it's kind of counter-intuitive so in order to get your texture smaller you actually want to make your scale bigger so i always tell myself go bigger to go smaller and go smaller to go bigger so if i want to make this smaller i actually want to increase the scale to something like five and that's a lot smaller the other thing about the scale is that all the controls in red shift are really touchy so even going up 0.1 or 0.2 or 0.5 can make a huge difference so you can see just going from 1 to 1.5 you can see that's a pretty big difference just something to keep in mind i want to go a lot smaller here so i'm just going to go back to 5 and this is just the first layer and i'm liking that you can rename your node here maybe i'll just call it ctex1 and then i'll duplicate it by holding ctrl and dragging and i'll call it ctext2 and this is going to be our second layer and to get a second layer we're going to hit this enable button and you'll see that this is now enabled as before it overwrote our materials because there's no mask so the black is stacked on top of everything else but if we connect this then we're gonna get a black and white look because our map is the exact same as the blue one so it's on top of the blue one but what we can do is let's make this layer two color something besides black maybe maybe some kind of red so if we take this and let's just offset it a little bit and now all of a sudden we have a pretty cool looking material like i said these are really touchy so i'm at like 0.008 and you can see how big of a difference it made the other thing i want to talk about quickly are these blending modes which work the same as in photoshop so if we change the blending mode to something like multiply you'll see we get the red multiplying on top of the blue which creates a pretty cool look it's kind of like that chromatic aberration effect anyways we'll just put it back on normal and then right okay let me talk quickly about a small little cheat that exists let me disable this so you saw that i have uv unwrapped my object if you don't want a uv unwrap there is a way that you can get textures to look pretty decent in cinema 4d without using uv mapping and that is to use this node called tri-planer so the tri-planar node basically projects your texture in all direction and then smooths out the edges so you don't get the harsh edges you can see my scaling looks a lot different in this but this is like a really fast way to get your texture to look really good and you don't have to uv unwrap anything this is definitely an option that a lot of people use probably most people though anyways in order to use a tri-planer you just take your texture and you pipe it into the triplaner node and if your node isn't showing up you can connect it to this blue thing and then find your node in here typically on the tri-planer you can go texture image x y or z any one of those doesn't really matter because it will automatically do the same image on each axis if you wanted a different image on each axis you could import different images into each one and honestly i don't know what that would look like but putting the same image on every access just kind of smooths out your material without uv unwrapping i'm going to go back to the way i had it just just because we set up all the scale and everything the way i wanted it so i'm going to go back to that but just know that that other thing exists and you wouldn't have this weird seam right here which is kind of inevitable with uv unwrapping that you will have seams to get rid of that i could just use a tri-planer bulky let's move on let's re-enable our layer 2 and we have this fun little pattern here i think i'm gonna do one more instance of these dots and i'm gonna make them pretty big and pipe them into the layer three mask so let's do that i'll just copy this down here reset the offset and i just want to see what these dots look like so i actually want to connect them straight to the output and this is a way to be able to see and adjust just this one thing without having to pipe it through all of the other stuff so i want to make them pretty big here so let's make them like this big maybe a little bigger than that oh geez actually let's go 1.5 so i have these little dots that i like and i have set up this connect to output also in a hotkey which is shift v so to reconnect my regular material to the output i'm just going to highlight it and then hit shift v and it'll reconnect and that's another hotkey that i think is worth setting up because you can just switch between these so fast so this texture we're gonna pipe it into layer three mask and you can see layer three mask isn't here so we'll just go up to this little blue bar and all of our options will pop up so we'll go to layer 3 and layer 3 mask and nothing's happening because we haven't enabled layer 3 yet so we want to enable it and now we can use this black mask what is going on why is that not flat black i think my texture must not have been fully black i'm not really sure i could have gone back to adobe illustrator and re-exported but i thought it might be valuable to see how i fixed it in cinema 4d so the way i fixed it was i put my texture into a ramp node which is basically a gradient redshift's version of a gradient and i made my ramp black and white just to make sure one value is completely black and one value is white and i'll just make this a step gradient to make sure i only get two colors and then i piped that into the layer mask which fixed the weird transparency issue i had going on so now i have these circle dot things just by stacking a bunch of these different masks on top of each other we got a pretty cool looking texture you could even change this color to something you know some fun color get a pretty cool pattern but i it's still a flat material and i think it would be fun to add some some depth to it so we're going to do that now one thing we could do that would be really cool is add a bump map or a displacement map so if we take our texture and we put it into our bump map and then output this output into our overall bump you should see it indent just it's really subtle with the bump you can see right here this is without it and then this is with it but this isn't working that well right now and we're gonna fix it but first let's look quickly at displacement which i think will actually be able to give us a better result a much more prominent dip so we want to grab a displacement map node and import the sky into there to the texture map and then output it onto output displacement and in order to get a displacement node we'll take off this bump so we can see what's going on in order to get a displacement node to work with redshift you need to add a redshift tag to your object and then you want to override the geometry and then enable tessellation and enable displacement and get this and it looks bad which i did on purpose you know we could make this 10 by 10 just to exaggerate it more and as you can see this is really jagged and the reason is because we have a map that is either full white or full black so when we're displacing it's either fully undisplaced or fully displaced and there's no in between so what we need is a nice gradient on our dot texture so that we can smooth out our displacement so we're going to go back into adobe illustrator in order to do that and if we grab all of this and we just use gaussian blur and we want to blur it quite a bit because we want it to be we want it to look really gradual that's like a 7d blur that's pretty blurry and here's the other thing about displacements white is displacing up and black is displacing down so gray is neutral meaning it isn't displacing at all we actually don't want our background to be white because then it will be pushing all of our pixels up but we just want them to stay where they are so we need to make a rectangle background and make it middle gray 50 gray and by hitting ctrl shift and left bracket we can move this rectangle all the way to the back so the black circles are on top of it and now i'll export another jpeg and we'll call it circle displace again we'll use artboard range one and actually i'm just gonna double check that these are actually black because we had that transparency issue and now i'll just re-export it and now we'll go back into cinema 40. and now we want to leave this node the same because we still want the black color layer and remember that's what we built here is all of our colors layered up so let's import our circle displace that we just made as a new texture node by hitting shift t and it will automatically name it our file name so i'll just leave it alone and let me rename this other texture as big c tex big so i have this new texture i just imported and i want my scale and offset to be the same as c text big so let's change the scale to 1.5 and now let's hook our imported texture node to the texture map of our displacement node that we had from before and now you can see that we're getting a much smoother displacement and we can adjust the amount of our displacement by going into our redshift tag and adjusting both the maximum displacement and displacement scale together and there you go now we get this cool texture that looks like it's two layers and if you wanted to flip this we could let's pipe our texture into output so we can see what we're doing we can use a ramp and pipe our texture into the ramp pipe the ramp into our output and now instead of using black to gray we want to change this ramp to use gray to white and we'll invert the ramp and get something like that and now if we put the ramp back into our displacement you'll see we get the opposite which looks weird because it's so extreme right now but you know you could get some cool shoe tread with this thing kind of looks like shoe tread anyways i'm going to flip it back to the way we had it before i just wanted to show you how to invert your displacement map in cinema 4d you could also go back into illustrator turn these dots white and then re-export your map and have it go from gray to white and that would also work okay so i'm going to delete this ramp so that our displacement goes inwards again and that looks pretty good i'll show you real quick what this looks like in a bump map and it still looks pretty good you just don't get as much depth and even if we increase this from like one to five you're still not going to get as much depth as you would with a displacement map but a displacement map also adds to cinema 4d's calculations so it's pros and cons you know so we'll hook back up our displacement and it now has depth but it's still a super flat material and i want the black part to have small bumps like like a rubber material or something let me organize this stuff really quick okay so now i want to add a bump and i'll just start with redshift noise node i'll hit shift v to connect the noise straight to the output so that i can see what it looks like and it's obviously way too big so let's increase the scale to like 10 maybe remember that going bigger in the scale actually makes our texture look smaller and that's too much so maybe let's go five that looks pretty good and you can adjust the black and white values here but i'm not going to mess with any of that so let's connect our material back to output and now we need to add a bump map node and we'll pipe the output of our noise to the input of our bump map and we'll pipe the output of our bump map into the overall bump input of our main material and now you can see the whole thing is really really bumpy and this is way too much so we'll make this a lot less like 0.1 and maybe even 0.05 now you can see we have this nice bump on everything but maybe we only want the bump on the black material and the red material to stay smooth so how would we do that what we want is a mask that will subtract the red circles from our bumpy material and if you remember this ctex big is the texture that is subtracting the red dots from our black material so we want to use this texture and mix it with the noise so that the dots are totally black and the rest of our texture has this noise pattern so let's bring in another color layer node we'll have the base color be our ctex big texture and we'll connect the color layer to output so that we can see it we'll disable layer one so that you can see our base texture is this ctex big and now we'll re-enable layer one and put our noise texture into layer one color now if we multiply the noise onto our base layer the dots are still flat black and the white portions now have a noise added so now we'll use this final color layer as the mask so before if we if we reconnect our main material to output before we had the noise going straight into the bump map which added noise to the entire material now we're going to use this color layer which will smooth out all of the red portions and they no longer have a bump and now we've created this really cool material that looks like completely separate objects but is actually just a flat really simple j that we added a bunch of material stuff to there you go that's how you create really cool abstract geometric patterns using just one circle pattern remember we started with just this really simple circle pattern that we made in illustrator in about three minutes thank you so much for watching i hope i was able to teach you at least a little something you didn't know if you create any cool patterns or textures using this tutorial i would love to see them just tag me on social media i can be found at mograph mel across all of the platforms i hope you all have an awesome week and until next time happy animating

Channel: MoGraph Mel

Views: 2,009

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: redshift, c4d, redshift c4d, redshift textures, create patterns in c4d, c4d custom textures, c4d textures, c4d tutorial, redshift texture tutorial

Id: R-IvM0d1Ltg

Length: 27min 45sec (1665 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 22 2020