Original subtitles

All right, so in this lesson we are going to talk

about applying materials to your 3D objects.

This is essentially what controls the look of all of your objects, right?

So whenever you make them by default,

you get this little gray kind of material applied to them by default.

So we're gonna go over kind of how you can kind of manipulate

the materials to make a bunch of different kinds of surfaces.

So let's go ahead and we're gonna start with this scene right here that I made.

Just to show you real quick how I did this.

What I did here.

I have two lights.

The both of them are area lights.

One's a little bit bigger,

ones a little bit smaller.

And then I put a camera in here.

And then I also am using global illumination.

Whenever I hit the render button up here,

the render to picture viewer.

We'll see what we're going to start out with here just to kind of give an idea,

some sort of as a sort of baseline of what we're doing here.

Alright, so that's looking pretty decent right now that

the lighting is czar aid, I guess.

But let's say we just want to manipulate

the sphere here to show you some of the different options available to you.

So I'm going to go ahead and close this.

And let's go ahead.

And if we go to the bottom here,

you'll see this empty window right here.

If I go ahead and double-click on here,

you'll see I get a material.

Just like that.

I can select it and hit the Delete button,

or I can go into create and go to new material,

works the same double-clicking is pretty easy to just go ahead and do that.

Now, if I double-click on this material,

you'll see I get this Material Editor window here.

Where this is essentially all of the controls for I'm manipulating your material.

We're gonna go through a few of these.

This would basically be a course in itself.

So I'm gonna kind of skip a few things here and there and

kinda show you the more important things to be aware of.

So the first thing that we're going to do is name our material.

I'm going to name this cool num

derail their yeah. All right.

So before I edit anything,

I'm gonna go ahead and show you how we apply that material

to an object in our scene. I can just click.

I can drag it either into the window here,

into the viewport like this,

or I can drag it into

the object and I'm just gonna go ahead and put it right here on sphere.

And whenever I do that, you see that

the material is applied to this little space over here,

signifying that it is applied to that object.

So let's go back in here and we will double-click again.

And let's start with color.

So again, we see all of these different options.

There's a lot here and we're gonna talk about probably about five or six of these.

Now, starting with color,

that's probably the most important one or ear.

Now, this is where we can essentially changed the color

of the object in our scene, right? Pretty easy.

We can use, we can use the color sliders here.

We can use an eyedropper here to select certain things.

Will say, okay, and whenever I change that,

you see that it automatically updates in our scene here.

Now if I go to their rendered a picture viewer

again will get an idea of kind of what's happening.

All right, so now we see that we're starting to get some rail look and colors.

And that's perfect. That's what we want.

So let's close out of there.

Now going back down to these options here, now,

this whole like top segment here is really just picking a precise color that you want.

Also, if, if you're trying to work with the brand colors or anything like that,

you can actually use the eyedropper from you can,

you can have your design opened up in Illustrator or Photoshop,

and you click on the eyedropper and then you can select a different window.

And that's pretty useful.

Looks good.

Make this blue area.

Now another cool thing that we can do,

let's say we want to make a material that's from

an actual image or design rather than just a solid color.

Well, what we can do is we can go into this texture button area here.

If I click on this arrow,

you can see that I get a ton of dropdowns.

Now if, if you wanted to use a specific design,

you can just click on this right here,

just a little empty box right there.

And then you can just find your design and a load it into Cinema 4D.

And essentially your object will be wrapped in that design that you created.

So for this, we're just going to hit this down here.

I'm gonna show you some of these options right here.

Where there's, there's kind of the column procedural textures

that you can apply to your, your objects here.

Things like noise is like a ever repeating kind of texture

that it's nice to use for certain things.

If you just wanted to do like a quick rough surface,

you can just use something like noise and we're going to use that here in a moment,

but I want to show you some of the other options.

So you'll see that I have this C4d octane.

This is generally what I personally use for materials and rendering.

You're not going to have that because at the plug-in.

But for this lesson we're just going to talk

about the standard stuff that comes with similar 40.

So don't worry.

Now, there's things like facts that you can apply.

You have surfaces.

This is a good one right here and we're gonna,

we're gonna pick one of these, but these are kind of,

like I said, procedural repeating surfaces

or textures that you can apply to your objects.

So for this one array here,

let's go ahead and put, I'm gonna put a

Let's see, let's put a checkerboard on here and we'll see what that does.

You see right away.

If I hit render.

So it kind of overrides the color that we applied.

It says, okay, hey, if you have a texture mapping here,

then you want to use that and not the color that you selected.

So even though this is blue, you're not gonna see that.

Now the other cool thing with these maps is that I can click on

checkerboard and I can kind of I can manipulate the color,

I can manipulate the patterns.

So if I change this both the ten hit render again.

And so now we see that we get the pattern is repeating more.

And that same thing you can do that with textures that you make personally.

Let's say you make something in Photoshop and you wanted to apply it in

here and then you want it to repeat ten times across.

Well, you can do that easily by just clicking on

the image and you'll have similar settings to these.

Alright, so let's go ahead now.

And oh, so the other thing I wanted to say is you see these checkboxes here.

If it's not checked,

then it will not apply to the material.

So you've got to be sure that anything that anytime that you adjust

something that you actually want to use, that it is checked.

And then if you decide not to use it,

you can just simply uncheck it and it's like it never happened.

Alright, so that is color.

And now let's go down to luminance.

Actually, I'm gonna go ahead and remove

that just by going to that little drop-down hit clear,

that gets rid of that image texture.

So now whenever I go down to luminance,

I'm going to go ahead and check that button and you see that right away.

Just turns pure white.

Basically what the aluminum does is kinda gives you flat colors on 3D objects.

So sometimes you don't want shading on objects.

And maybe that's because you're, you know,

maybe you're making a reference image that you're just,

you know, you just want to be able to see the reference image.

And you don't want to see the shadows and the viewport.

That could be one thing or maybe you're just using using an image, ads, and environment.

If that's the case,

then you can use it as a luminance and it'll kind of get those reflections perfectly.

And I'll kind of show you that here in just a moment.

But again, I have a color setting.

I can change that to whatever I'd like.

And you see an imam actually get a little bit of shading

in there so I can uncheck colored because I don't want that.

And then uncheck reflectance because I don't want that either.

And whenever I hit render now,

you'll see that it is a perfectly red sphere.

Now, everything that has that texture applied to it will just be that solid color.

So luminance is pretty cool and it's,

it's definitely very useful for certain occasions,

but I'm gonna go ahead and turn luminance off,

and let's go into reflectance.

So now this is a pretty big one here.

Or actually, let's, before going to reflectance,

I'm gonna go into transparency.

And you'll see that whenever I turn that on,

we get kind of image or object or anything that has that material on it.

It's just kinda disappears.

Well, what we can do is we can control how transparent that object is going to be.

Now, this isn't like,

this isn't how you would make glass or anything like that.

This is just b, how you kind of make it more ghost-like.

But you can change this brightness right here.

And you'll see that as I'm changing that brightness,

we kind of start to see it come back a little bit.

Like going to render that because you get a pretty good idea of how that would work,

but okay, so onto reflectance, when to turn that on.

So by default, we get this kind of a specular highlight is what it's called.

And this specular highlight,

it makes things look OK,

but it's not realistic.

Things don't have real specular highlights like this.

Everything in the world has a reflectance to it.

So one of the first things that you wanna do is actually

remove this specular layer here by hitting remove of here.

And you see that that kind of gets rid of basically everything.

Now, what I can do is go into ad and I have a whole bunch of different options here.

Each one does something a little bit different.

And I'm not gonna get into that because they're pretty subtly different.

But we can just start by going into Beckman here.

And whenever we make that, we see that it applies

this image right here in the reflection.

Now, whenever you render this,

it's not actually going to show that image.

But I'm just kinda showing you that for

reference for yourself so you know how reflective It really is.

And if I go ahead and hit render on

this will give you an idea of what happens here is you see that,

that sphere now where we were,

you know, right around here.

Now we're right here.

Now.

It's reflecting the sky which is black,

and then it's reflecting the ground right here.

So it's not like too terribly interesting,

but let me go ahead and I'm gonna make an environment

just so we can see the reflection is a little bit more for these settings here.

So a clues that I'm gonna go ahead and close this two.

And then I can go up here where it says floor.

And I click and hold and do sky.

Now I'm going to make another material real quick.

Just by double-clicking, return,

reflectance and color off, turn illuminates on.

And then in texture,

I'm going to go into surfaces.

And let's say I want to get something like a cloud,

a cloud like material kind of in the sky.

And I click on that cloud here and let me try to adjust some of these settings a little

bit to make it not look so crazy. Let's see.

All right, that should be fine.

And then I was going to apply that to our sky.

Alright, I'm gonna close that out and

you can already see that reflection starting to show up here.

Now if I hit render,

I'll see if we can get a better view them.

This. There we go.

So we see the sky and then we see our ground that we have here.

Alright?

It doesn't look pretty, but it gives you

a pretty good idea of what the material is doing.

So I'm gonna double-click back on that material,

the material that's on the sphere here.

And then go back into the reflectance

and show you a couple of things that you can do with this now.

So you can turn down the reflection with this layer wondering here you can just

turn it down like this and then we start to see that color

poking through that we had previously.

So the color blue starts to show through whenever we

turn the kind of opacity down on that reflectance.

So let's say we wanted to, somewhere around here.

I can render that again,

kind of separating things a little bit.

So now you see that you can definitely see that color poking through more.

So this is a 100% reflective,

and this is probably,

this is 32% and reflective.

So now if I go down a little bit more here, again, all,

all these settings are, are important,

but I'm not going to touch on all of them too much

because it would take significant amount of time.

So you should definitely explore all of

these things to kind of learn them a little bit more.

But skipping down to roughness here,

if I start to turn this up,

you'll see in this material here what's happening.

It's making the material kinda blurrier.

Now depending on what kind of thing you're,

you're trying to make.

Most things in the world don't have 100% pure sharp reflection to it.

They have maybe one or two or maybe there's

certain things that like like plastics or

something like that might be something in the thirties here.

So I'm gonna go ahead and render that to give you an idea of what happens there.

There we go. So you'll see that that's actually starting to look pretty cool.

Like it could be like a metal or a plastic kind of thing going on.

And if you see some of the,

you know, the difference between the two right here.

This looks significantly more realistic.

Again, it really depends on what you're going for and you should

definitely reference certain materials.

If you're trying to make a metal,

find the, find a real life metal that looks like, you know,

do some Google image searching,

Find that metal and work

to kind of recreate it with some of these settings that you have here.

Alright? So the other thing that you can do,

let's say you wanted to make something more

like more of like a metal or a gold type thing.

Well, what you can do is in Layer Color here,

you can change this and this kind of changes the reflection color.

Let's try to get something a little more.

Something along those lines.

And then I'm gonna turn color off because we don't want to use that color anymore.

Now we see it's kinda like a bronze looking thing.

Now, let's go ahead and render it into that and see kind of how that looks.

So just by using the reflection color,

we're kind of getting some,

some sort of metals that look a little bit more realistic.

Now, it's really important to note here that reflections are really important.

Are your environment is really important to how materials work.

Sometimes you can make the perfect material,

the perfect golden material or perfect metal or perfect mirror.

But it doesn't look right because there's just not reflecting the right things.

So you need to make sure that there isn't an environment around these things,

enough stuff for it to reflect,

to wear, it looks good.

So in this situation right here,

this might be the perfect material,

but we're only reflecting a couple little things here and there.

So it's tough to really tell if it looks good at this point.

But that should give you a pretty good idea on how reflection works.

And a turn color back on.

And then I'm going to turn the layer color or

their reflection color back down to two white little change the roughness about 20.

And let's see where we're at right here before we kind of go on and make some more edits.

Alright, so we can see that that's looking pretty good.

Now let's go ahead and make some other changes here.

Now if I go down to bump,

what bump does and it adds a kind of,

you can basically add a bumpy surface to your material without changing the geometry.

Now, that's important to know is that this is not changing the actual geometry.

It's changing how the lighting reacts on the actual surface here.

So I'm gonna go ahead and turn that on in texture here.

I'm gonna go to noise.

Now whenever I play that you see right away I get

those kinda like brainy looking thing right here.

Let me go ahead and render that.

You can see that that's actually, that's pretty cool right there.

Kind of like a wave-like surface are just like I said,

something like an eye brainy looking.

But if you get really close,

you can see that this doesn't actually change the silhouette at all.

It doesn't, it doesn't change the actual geometry.

And that's what displacement is four and we're gonna talk about that in just a second.

But the other thing you can do with noise,

you can click on noise and then you can go into the global scale here.

You can change this to something like ten.

And now we see that we're starting to get more of like a bumpy metal surface here.

Which looks pretty cool right there.

Really subtle things like that go a really long way whenever it comes to 3D.

3d rendering in general is just no surface is perfect.

Nothing, everything has kind of a texture to it.

It might be really shiny texture,

but maybe there's kind of like a waviness to it.

Sometimes if you look at like,

like a skyscraper that's mostly windows,

you'll see kind of like a

See overall I kinda bends in like real subtle bends

and reflection in the reflections and kind of make a little warped looking thing.

Because that's how the real world works. Nothing is perfect.

So it's really important to kind of put some of these kinds of things on, on things.

Going back into bump here.

And I can turn that strength down to, let's say five.

And let's render that and see how that looks.

Alright, so that's a pretty cool there.

I should give you a pretty good idea of how bump works.

Now let's go down to,

let me leave that bump on and then go down to glow.

Alright, so here's a fun one that whenever I,

as soon as I turn this on, you see that I got this glowing thing right here.

Whenever I render this,

you'll see that whites while it's rendering,

you'll probably like, I don't see a glue at all.

Because what it does is it applies that global afterwards.

And then basically it uses that glow along any of

the really bright parts of your material.

And for this one right here,

the whole material is basically pretty bright,

so it makes something very sun-like.

And you can change stuff like the brightness,

the inner strength to outer strength of radius.

If I change this to something like 40,

I don't know what's going to happen here.

This could just explode everything but and let's find out,

I guess there, yes.

So you see that's much larger of a glow.

In most situations, you probably don't want to apply this in your 3D renders.

This could be something that you apply later on inside after flex or Photoshop.

But it's a pretty cool way to get something pretty quick.

So turning that off and let's go into displacement.

I'm gonna turn that on and let's try again with the noise and go to texture noise.

And whenever I put that on the EC that this crazy spike ball thing appears.

And whenever I go to Render,

you'll see that nothing actually happens.

It doesn't look anything like that.

The reason that that is is because you need to make

your object editable before displacement will work.

So if we go into the sphere here and then I can just,

so you see that whenever I made the sphere,

I just simply went up here sphere and then just like that.

But I have to click on it and hit C.

And now I can actually edit the polygons of it.

So now whenever I hit render,

we'll see what happens here.

Alright, so something really similar to what we had with the bump map,

except when we zoom in now we can see that's actually

affecting the silhouette near the surface of the geometry.

I can crank this up to what's, let's say 25.

And let's see kind of what happens here.

Now, it's also really important to know that anytime that

you add reflection or displacement,

or essentially the more channels you're using,

the longer your render is going to take.

So a lot of times this stuff is a balancing act that, you know, it's.

You really have to kind of be cautious on what you

want to take more time and what you want to look better.

Alright, so looking at this now this is looking pretty sweet.

This is like the planet of krypton,

which is pretty cool.

We get these real sharp edges.

Pretty cool that we started from this.

And now we have something like that.

All that just by changing the materials really.

Alright, so now let me go ahead and show you

a couple more things on how you control the mapping on your objects.

Settling includes this turned displacement off.

I'm gonna go into color and I'm gonna go to sea,

or I'm going to just go ahead and add a checkerboard to the three here are.

And you know, I'm also going to just make a cube instead of

a sphere and change this to 80 by 8080.

And then in order to get this perfectly on the surface of our plane here,

I, I know that.

So this is the total size.

So if I divide that by two and go to 40,

I will raise it by 40 inches and it'll be perfectly on the surface of that plane.

Now I'm gonna go ahead and apply this to that cube.

And now whenever I hit render,

and then we'll see kind of what happens.

So you can apply any, any of these materials,

you can apply it to any of

these different kinds of shapes and it'll try to figure it out.

So the reason I wanted to use spheres

to really get a good idea of what happens with the reflections with a cube,

with a little bit difficult, a little bit more difficult to tell.

But the other thing you can do is whenever you have your material applied here,

let's say you wanted or let's go ahead and move the sphere over here.

Let's push it back.

Remember here.

Now, let's say you're like, hey,

I love this material on the sphere,

put on the Q, but it's just the,

the, the patterns too big.

I wanted to be smaller or bigger.

What you can edit individual.

You can edit how the material works on an individual object

by clicking on the material next to that object.

And you'll see here that I get things like projection.

Well, if I click on this drop down here,

you'll see that there's a ton of different projection methods.

And this is essentially how your material will be applied to the surface.

Now, UV mapping is a little bit more of a complex way.

By default, all these things,

all these plain shapes, they come with a UV map.

So it, it'll say UV mapping on here,

but you can actually create your own UV map.

And that's not something I'm gonna get into in

this lesson because that's a whole other thing in itself there.

But, but basically what you can say is,

I am using this as a cube.

And so whenever you do cubic mapping,

it's going to, it's going to look at this object as if it's a cube.

You can do cylindrical and you'll see that that kinda changes things quite a bit.

If it was a sphere,

you can do spherical.

But for this case right here,

I'm gonna do cubic.

And what I can do down here now is I can change the tiling of just

how this one works on just the cube.

So I'm, I'm only adjusting how the mapping works on individual object control.

Look like go ahead and render this.

See what happens.

All right, so you see just like that,

it's this exact same material on both of these,

but it looks a little bit different.

So that's kinda how you can do some basic kinda mapping.

Again, to do more advanced map mapping you do,

you would, you can unwrap,

essentially unwrapping what that means is

to flatten out the sides of an object to be able to make it a flat surface.

And that's kind of how materials are applied to objects.

It tries to see them as two-dimensional things,

to be able to apply it to the correct areas.

Alright, so that is kind of how you can do some some basic materials.

And yeah, sounds good.

Alright, I'll see you next time.