Create shiny and refractive materials - CINEMA 4D Tutorial

- [Instructor] Let's continue where we left off in the previous movie and create some reflective and refractive materials. So in the Material Manager, I'm going to double click to create a new material. I will assign it to the sphere because this is the first object we want to work with. And I'm going to double click this once again, and we'll call it, Glass. Now to make a refractive material, we work with the Transparency channel. So I'll disable the Color and the Reflectance channel and just turn on Transparency. Simply by turning this channel on, we have managed to create a glass material that's because the index of refraction or the refraction preset that we have here is already set to glass. Most glass objects in the real world are rarely colorless. And when light enters the object, it weakens and changes color, we can emulate this with the Absorption Color and the Absorption Distance. Just click onto your little color chip here and in the Color Picker, I'll add in some values and just press enter to confirm that. So I'm going to set the Absorption Distance to be a little bit less than this and around about 70 centimeters. If we just move the Material Editor over and click onto the sphere, the radius of the sphere is 70 centimeters and just through a little bit of testing, this gave me a decent look. The lower the value, the more intense the Absorption Color, because the light has less distance to travel. If we set this down to 10, you can see that there, and this has become way more pronounced. I'll just undo that. Let's close down the Material Manager and I'm going to enable the Interactive Render Region and just move it over to around about where the sphere is. And you'll notice at the bottom here by using an absorption color, we also color the area shadows. Let's just turn that Interactive Render Region off and create a new material, double click. And we'll drop this onto the platonic. Let's double click this and we'll call it Copper. To make a copper material, we use the Reflectance channel. So I'm going to turn off the color and just look at the reflectance. The Reflectance channel defines how shiny and reflective the material will be. So we'll delete this default specular by just highlighting it and clicking remove and then we'll click on add, and I'm going to use a GGX layer. There are many different types here and they're used in different ways to determine how light is scattered by the surface. But all you need to know is that GGX is a good type for metals and Beckmann is a great type for anything else. We'll create the GGX layer and then we'll come down to where it says Layer Fresnel. And in this Fresnel type, I'm going to choose conductor, from the presets, I can choose the copper preset and we have this pretty much set up. Using Fresnel equations, these types work in conjunction with the index of refraction settings to realistically render the behavior of light rays, passing through materials. And a good example to describe the effect would be to look through a window straight on, and you can see through it as intended, but look at the window from an angle. And it appears more like a mirror. So the Fresnel Effect can be summed up as the greater the angle at which you view a surface, the more reflective the surface appears. So when working with reflectance, you can see these little arrows here next to some of the words. If you twile those down, you'll see a texture field where you can load in an image or a shader. A shader is an image that Cinema 4D creates. And one of the most useful things you can do to adjust the roughness is to load in a texture. This will add variation to the roughness where some parts of the material will be more shiny than others. And this is typically achieved with a gray scale image. We're going to add a noise shader and the noise shader is perfect for this purpose. Let's click onto the image there to open the shade of properties. And there are loads of different noise types. These probably don't mean anything to you and that's why if you go to the right of that list, click onto this little drop down arrow there's some thumbnails that as you hover over, it will show you what type you're looking at. So I want to go with the FBM type and I'm going to increase the Global Scale and to control the tonal range of the noise, you can adjust the Low and High Clip, the brightness and the contrast. So we'll just adjust these settings, maybe increase the Low Clip. We'll bring down the High Clips. And I want to just knock back the brightness, just a touch and we'll bring down the contrast as well. Yeah, somewhere around there feels good. And then we'll just navigate our way back to the shader by coming up to here and just clicking on the back arrow. And you can think of these arrows as kind of like browsing a history or like on a webpage or something like that. So we'll increase the roughness. If we adjust the roughness slider, this would determine how pronounced this effect will be. So the higher the value, the more rough or dull the material will become and lower values will give us a more mirror like surface. So I'm going to just increase this to around about 25, looks good, adding imperfections and variations to materials improves their level of realism, but also adds contrast and visual interest to the scene as a whole. We'll also apply this material, this copper, to the Atom Array, but I don't want it to be for the whole pyramid here. I don't want it to be on, on this one as well so I'm going to make a new material. And what we'll do is we'll base it off this dark blue color here. So I'm going to click and hold onto that and I'm going to press command, click, and drag or control, click and drag. And we'll just move this over and drop it down here. Now I'll double click this one and we'll name it Plastic. And in the Reflectance channel, we just want to remove this default specular and we'll just add a Beckmann layer. And then I'm going to come down to the Layer Fresnel and choose the dielectric type and increase the roughness just a little bit. So let's close this down and we'll apply this Plastic to this pyramid here, the second one. And you can see now that this material is being applied. When you apply a material to the top of the hierarchy, it's like, it's applying it to every object like this, but then as soon as you add another material, this becomes the right most tag. And so this one takes precedence. Let's just clean this up by removing these two material tags. It's worth noting that when you work with reflective materials, you want to have an environment for the materials to reflect. And we'll come back to this in a later movie, for now, we've created both reflective and refractive materials and discovered how gray scale images and noise shaders can control the perceived roughness of a material, adding variation and realism.