Tutorial No.85: Creating "The Dragon Shader" in Arnold for Cinema 4d

[Music] thanks for watching this video tutorial for growth plus comm if you are interested in learning horrible 5'4 cinema4d fundamentally please make sure to check out our ultimate introduction to Arnold 5 for cinema4d course which is a massive ten hour long course in which we explore all the aspects of Arnold for cinema 4d thoroughly the guys will come back to modem + comm accessory here with you and in this tutorial we're gonna be making this dragon shader or basically this kind of changed like shaders and the standard surface shader in Arnold 5 in the transmission section has some pretty amazing parameters like the depth the scatter and the scatter and isotropy that can be used to create amazing stuff and amazing shaders like this now we have already discussed those parameters in quite a lot of details in our ultimate introduction to Arnold 5 for cinema 4d course so I'm not gonna go over those parameters and explain them I'm just gonna be you know kind of try to create something nice like this using those parameters and it's not like one of our previous shading tutorials for Arnold for cinema 4d in which we use tons of nodes trying to kind of add more variations and more details to the specular roughness and the specular weight or transmission weight or roughness I'm just gonna be strictly using the standard surface shader itself to create you know fascinating and complex looks like this and more precisely the transmission section of the standard surface shader will be used more so let's try to create something like this now what we have here as you can see the thicker parts are basically having more subsurface scattering properties and the thinner parts like here having a bit more refractive qualities and that's what we're gonna be trying to achieve in this tutorial so let's get started and I just take a look at the scene that we have currently so we're gonna be using this scene and you can download the project files from the link that is available down below in the description you can download the project files and create your own shaders if you want to the model here is from 3d scans comm that you can go there and download it if you wanted to as well now let's get started before doing anything with the lighting and the way I have my lighting setup for the scene now make sure the active camera in the IPR is your active camera as well here so we can lock it in and take a look at the scene that we have so let me just get out of the camera for now and if I this is the lights that we have we have this main light which is coming from this back side we have this back light which is coming from here this front slides and this background light if I go to my lights manager here we can actually take a closer look at those lights so here is our main light if I solo it you can see this is the light as you can see it's coming from the back side because we're gonna be trying to see that scattering properties that's why the main like the key light is coming from this side this way you can actually see those scattering properties much better okay so that's our main light then we have this back light just to enhance that scattering effect a bit more from this side as well then I have this front slide that's coming from this side which is this big light here and just to make those very dark areas a bit brighter okay and we have also these background lights if I just solo it just to add a bit more lighting to the backdrop that we have here okay so that's the lighting perfect and for this backdrop if I open up the standard surface shader that is currently being applied to the backdrop you can see it's a very simple standard surface shader with this shade of blue and the exact RGB values are here and the weight off point one so we get this kind of nice backdrop as well now lets me create a new standard surface shader and assign it to this dragon model that we have here and we can probably actually get back to the camera here as well now let me open up the standard surface shader you'll probably can just double clicking stuff middle clicking so we can use our material editor now base color can be a base weight can be set to zero specular weights I'm gonna try to something like 0.5 and the roughness it really depends on the look that you want and as we know the roughness here also controls the transmission roughness so make sure you set it to a value that you want now let's start by increasing our transmission weights okay something close to one as we know in Arnold we need to actually when we're using the transmission weight we need to make sure opaque is disabled if you are using Arnold for 3ds max this opaque option is disabled by default so you don't need to actually check anything off okay now we have the transmission color so if I just use a specific color here just to see how its effect the dragon model that we have the transmission color basically controls the color of the light when it passes through a transmissive shader and this color basically filters the refraction according to the distance travelled by the refracted ray the longer light travels inside a mesh the more it is affected by the transmission color therefore for example a blue glass gets a deeper blue as Ray's traveled through the thicker parts and naturally colored glass has this different shades of color based on its their thicknesses thinner parts will be tinted lighter and thicker parts will have darker shades of that particular color now we can obviously change the transmission color to whatever we want but here we have this important parameter which is depth and depth basically controls the depth into the volume at which the transmission color is realized increasing this value let's say to something like 5 or let's say 10 here or we can probably some try something like you in 20 so increasing this wall you mix the volume thinner which means less absorption and scattering and this wall is a scale factor so that you can set a transmission color and then tweak the depth to be appropriate for the size of your object and control how the transmission color affect the thick and thin parts of your object so as you can see if I go to something like 200 now that color is kind of less visible it's less contrast II the thinner and the thicker parts generally have the same shade of blue even though it's just a very light blue at this point when you increase the depth while you that much probably may be something like 50 now in this case I'm gonna be using this color for the transmission color and I'm gonna set the depth to about 3 centimeters now the next parameter that we have here is the scatter and the scatter and isotropy scatter basically allows you to simulate subsurface scattering for refractive objects and can be used to create shaders for high viscous liquids like honey caramel chocolate or surfaces like ice so if we use another color you know other than black let's say this kind of whitish color here you can immediately see the beautiful subsurface scattering that's happening based on the Shea of the geometry now if you try to kind of have a nice balanced color with your transmission color you can kind achieved that look that we saw that Jade look that we saw before so we have this bluish color for our transmission color so if I just go ahead and use this orangish color for the depth we start to kind of get that nice contrasting look you can see this thicker parts are kind of more the subsurface scattering effect is more obvious than we see this thinner parts are beats more refractive and if we kind of decrease the roughness a specular section you can actually see that effect a bit better but I think it's obvious enough now the next parameter that can be used to really control and enhance the look is this scatter and isotropy which is the directional bias or an isotropy of the scattering the default value of zero right here gives the isotropic scattering so that light is scattered evenly in all directions and positive values bias the scattering effect forwards in the direction of the light while negative world news bias the scattering backwards towards the light you can see we just don't get that contrast that your offer I mean it can be nice for a specific look but I really like that contrast alone so I'm probably gonna increase my scatter and I start with something like point seven okay now we start to get this beautiful look lets me just come down here we can actually involve the subsurface effect itself it's gonna be a bit more expensive if you wanted to and but I think it can be used to enhance the look a bit so if I just zero out my transmission wait for now and start increasing the subsurface weight something like maybe 0.5 and if I just turn off uniform scaling and work on my radius values for red green and blue probably I don't want the red rays to scatter that much into geometry so probably something like 1 centimeters so you can see now we can see the red colors on the thinner parts and let's decrease the radius for green and blue for about 4 centimeters obviously if I want to be a bit more blueish I can increase the blue radius or a bit more greenish I can increase the green radius but in this case I'm gonna set them to about 4 and now if we start increasing our transmission weight obviously the effect of subsurface scattering would be less visible but it just adds that little detail that little coloration to the edges that can enhance the effect so as you can see we get this very beautiful and complex shader by just adjusting a few parameters in a transmission section depth scatter scatter an isotropy and the transmission color obviously if you want to kind of enhance the look of it we can probably increase the specular weight if we wanted to it all depends on the particular look that you are after but in this case let me just set it to about 0.5 okay now if want to change the basically color and the look we just need to adjust the transmission color and the transmission scatter color parameters here so if I just stop this here let's name this shader something like green jade lets me duplicate this let's name this I don't know red Jade pink Jade do we even have those I don't show we don't care here so let me just sign this shader I'm gonna run the I PR again and open up these let me just get back to transmission and the subsurface section here so can obviously change this color to whatever color we want and you would see a huge change immediately right you can see very nice so if we can use bluish color here probably less saturated so you get some nice beautiful looks simply by adjusting these two colors but in this case let's use this one for the transmission color and use this color for the scatter color and we can obviously adjust the anisotropy to get that particular look that we're after can maybe increase it closer to want to just get that extra contrast your look if we wanted to but in this case let me just stay about point seven and we can obviously adjust the depth parameter you can see if wanna see less of that scattering attributes you can increase the depth and as you can see now we have a more refractive looking shader in front of us let me just set that to three again and probably in this case just to kinda complement the colors that we have I'm gonna probably decrease the just see decrease the subsurface scattering weights so in this case I probably want the red color to be more visible in the thicker parts and green and blue more on the edges okay and if we increase the transmission weight again we can obviously just make sure it's not one because if the transmission weight is set one you can see the subsurface section will be grayed out and won't affect a shader at all so I'm gonna just decrease this to about point ninety three so the subsurface section would be slightly effective just add a bit more detail there okay folks so here's this render as well as you can see it's quite nice quite fascinating and complex and I imagine if you can actually spend a bit more time and add a bit more detail to the specular and transmission roughness and I think or use a texture for the transmission color or the scatter color it would add a lot more complexity to the shader but in general as you can see a lot of stuff can be done with the standard surface shader okay now for the final render I'm just obviously make sure your lights having enough samples probably something like three would be enough which is all the lights here are at three and four the render settings I'm probably going to increase my camera samples to about five the few samples we don't need that much I'm gonna increase my probably specular and transmission samples to about three as well we have subsurface scattering but it's not that dominant it's barely visible so we don't need to actually go crazy for the subsurface scattering effect as well so I'm gonna if the subsurface scattering is a bit more dominant obviously you need to increase the subs for scattering sampling I'd be tired probably to 5 6 or even 8 to get a more clear subsurface scattering effect but in this case because the souther scattering you affecting the overall rendered that much and it's barely visible so probably something like three would be enough and I'm not gonna change my right depth settings and you can obviously use the resolution that you are looking for in this case probably something like 1080p would be nice so now you are ready for your final render hopefully you enjoyed this tutorial now we explain these parameters very quickly in this tutorial but if you want to actually understand more about the transmission section or subsurface scattering section of the standard surface trader make sure to check out our ultimate introduction to Arnold 5 for cinema 4d course at our website mograph class comm we go over every single parameters with tons of examples at that tutorial but this one was just a fun tutorial to create some amazing and complex looking shaders so thank you for watching and I will see you in the next tutorial thanks for watching this free video tutorial for more growth + calm if you are interested in learning Arnold 5 for cinema 4d fundamentally please make sure to check out our ultimate introduction to Arnold 5 for cinema 4d course which is a massive ten hour long course in which we explore all the aspects of Arnold for cinema 4d thoroughly

Channel: MographPlus

Views: 33,345

Keywords: Arnold, cinema 4d, c4dtoa, shading, sss, transmission, tutorial, rendering, lighting

Id: 3lihKkGGAoI

Length: 18min 53sec (1133 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 05 2017