Creating material wipes using fields - CINEMA 4D Tutorial

- [EJ] Hello and welcome to yet another C4D Weekly. In this week's installment I'm going to show you a super easy way to be able to create a material wipe using the new Fields feature introduced in Cinema 4D R20. So here's my scene, I got a doggy balloon animal, and basically what I want to do is kind of transition and wipe from the marble material to this gold material. So, what I'm going to do is just click and drag and add this gold material on top, and you're going to see that just totally overwrites that first material. So, how the texture system works is the right most material is going to be added on top of all the materials to the left of it, okay? So, how we're going to transition from one texture to the next by using a linear wipe is via vertex maps. So, how can we get a vertex map added to our object? So, it's really easy, we're just going to go to the Character menu and go to the Paint Tool. And I'm just going to click on it anywhere, and you'll see that I just painted a vertex map. And basically what a vertex map does is just show you in yellow and red what's affected by the vertex map, what has 100% strength and what has 0% strength, so yellow and red. Now, what we can do is go into our vertex map, and one brand new thing you can do is actually use Fields to control and manipulate vertex maps. And this is extremely powerful, it has tons of use cases. But what I'm going to do is just check on this vertex map, I'm going to go to the Freeze and I'm just going to clear that out. And you can see that that actually clears out the initial vertex map that we just painted. And actually we don't even need this Freeze layer, so I'm just going to delete that. And what I'm going to do to control the field, or the vertex map, is use a Linear Field. And now what you can see, and this is huge, that now I can edit and choose where my vertex map strength is using a Linear Field, which is really, really great. So I can rotate this, do whatever I want, and the key to getting this material wipe to work is by using vertex maps to make this material wipe actually happen. And how we can do that is if I go into my Gold material, double click on it, I can go into my Alpha channel, let's just go ahead and turn it on. And there's a really handy thing in the Effects menu down here called Vertex Map. And this is where you can actually load up a vertex map, so I'll just click on this little option here. And you see that we don't have any vertex maps loaded up, but if I just drag and drop this into the vertex map, you can see exactly what's happening. And actually we can't see anything yet, let's go ahead and just click off of the Vertex tag. And now you can see exactly what's happening, is now I can use this Linear Field and use that vertex map to drive the Alpha channel of our gold material. So we can now wipe this on, which is really awesome. If I go ahead and just hit Render, all right, so there you go you can see that transition of our gold material wiping on and combining with the marble texture underneath, really, really cool stuff. And this is just some of the surface level power of this unified field system. Now, let's just say wherever the gold was, we wanted some displacement. So, let's go and grab a Displacer here, make this a child of the Balloon Dog, and let's just go ahead and add some noise here. So we have this noise happening, just kind of scale this up a little bit, something like that, okay? Now, let's say we wanted to just isolate the displacement to wherever the gold material was, so what we can do is go ahead, and since the Linear Fields or any fields are now separate objects, we can use them across different aspects, say vertex maps and even controlling where a displacer or a deformer is affecting an object. So I'll drag and drop that in there, this Linear Field, now you can see that not only is the single Linear Field affecting the vertex map and the vertex map is driving the Alpha channel of a material, but it's also driving where the displacement of the Displacer deformer is occurring as well. So really cool, powerful stuff, it's a really great example of just how unified the new field system is and how you can use it across so many aspects of Cinema 4D. And again, including vertex maps and deformers, controlling them at the same time. And again, if you want to learn more about Fields and really dive deep into all of the new features in R20, head over to cineversity.com and check out their huge expansive training list on the new R20 features. And again, they're always updating content, so be sure to head over there fairly often and see what is new. So you don't want to wait until next week to learn something new? No problem. Here are some other ways to feed your creative brain to keep you busy. You can check out my other courses in the LinkedIn library, visit my website, eyedesyn.com, for more tutorials, subscribe to my YouTube channel and be alerted when I post a brand new tutorial, join my Facebook page for daily MoGraph inspiration and keep up to date on all my latest MoGraph creations on Instagram. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you here again next week.