From the course: Cinema 4D R18 Essential Training: Motion Graphics

What are materials? - CINEMA 4D Tutorial

From the course: Cinema 4D R18 Essential Training: Motion Graphics

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What are materials?

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- [Instructor] Here we have a scene that I thought would be good to introduce you to materials. I've already created and applied several materials to the objects in the scene. But we're not gonna worry about that just yet. We'll get it later in the chapter. Because lighting can change the look of a material, it was important to discuss that first. So, if you haven't watched the previous chapter on lighting, it would be a good idea to go and do that before progressing. Just show you what happens when we disable the lighting in the scene. Has a dramatic effect on these materials, doesn't it? So let's just enable that. Along side lighting, materials are one of the most, let's say challenging aspects of working in 3D, because this is where you can transform a scene from good to great. By the same token, a great scene can be marred by poor lighting and materials. So, let's just come down to where materials are stored, and we will just open one up. And this is the material editor. Now, materials are made up of channels. And you can see all these channels available here, these are the ones that we can use to make up materials. Each channel contributes to the quality of the material and turn them on and off depending on the type of material you want to create. So, we've got some properties already on, some channels already on here. We've got the color, which is the surface color. And the reflectants. And the reflections just makes materials shiny and reflective. We also have some other channels available of course, as you can see. We've got the diffuse which can produce irregularities in the surface color, these can either brighten or darken this channel. The luminance can add some luminescence to the color, so, for example, if you've got a rather dull material you could just mix in a bit of luminance and that would just give it a bit more life. Transparency, you can use that to create glass, things that are refractive. We've already talked about reflectance. We also have other channels, bump is a common one for adding texture to materials. Normal works in a similar way. It's a bit of a different set up, but it's a bit more realistic than bump. And then displacement is really realistic, because it actually displaces the object that the material's on, but it's slower to render. And you can also look at some of these other channels on your own time. So, it'd be very rare for you to actually turn on all these channels on a single material. Usually it's only just gonna be a couple and the most common ones I'd say, are probably these three. Depends on the quality of material you want to create. So, coming back up to the color channel, you'll notice this slot here that says texture. Texture can be a bit map image or it can be just an image that you have on your hard drive or something like that. You can also use a shader. Images that are generated by C4D are called shaders. So, things like these gradients and noise and things like that. So, a good place where you'd commonly use shaders is in the bump channel, because it needs something for it to work and these are usually gray scale images so something like a noise could be used and you could see the material preview changed and we've got a bumpy surface. So now you know what makes a material in Cinema 4D. I want you to come back to this scene once you've completed this chapter and open up this material that's called complex. Just open up the window here. Have a look at it and see how it was made. And when you're creating your materials in the future just bear in mind, each channel contributes to the quality of the material and you can turn them on and off depending on the type of material you want to create.

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