How To Texture Your Scene Using Topcoat From Greyscalegorilla

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Instructor Nick Campbell

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  • Works with Release: 17 and greater

Topcoat is a brand new texturing plugin from Greyscalegorilla that makes reflectance and adding realistic reflection to your scene easy and beautiful.

Topcoat is a brand new texturing plugin from Greyscalegorilla that makes reflectance and adding realistic reflection to your scene easy and beautiful.

Everything we see in the real world is a reflection. It's the most important part of any C4D texturing workflow. So, when Reflectance came out in R16 and R17, we were excited to say the least. Finally, a realistic reflection tool that helped us achieve beautiful photo real renders with native C4D tools. It's with this in mind that we made Topcoat. We made a texture tool for designers, not technicians. Just click to add the perfect type of reflection to your scene. Or, shift click to continue to layer multiple coats of texture for realistic textures every time.

Go try out Topcoat on Greyscalegorilla.

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Transcript

- Hey everyone. It's Nick here from Greyscalegorilla, and in this video, I wanted to show you how to texture your scene using Topcoat. We built Topcoat to help you build realistic reflections and layered reflections inside of Cinema 4D really easily, with a really simple interface. Let's head on into Cinema 4D, and let's texture our scene using Topcoat. All right. Here we are in Cinema 4D, and we have this nice logo here. It's just missing some textures. Everything else is ready to go. Here's Topcoat. It's installed and it's docked over in the side here. We built Topcoat in order to allow you to try out and layer multiple reflective layers inside of Cinema 4D using the new Reflectance channel. Reflectance channel was added in R16 and R17, and it's so beautiful. We wanted to build an interface to allow you to really use it as quickly and experiment with it as simply as possible, and that's what Topcoat does. Let's texture our scene. First of all, let's add a chrome detail to the edge of our scene here, and in this case, we're just going to click the chrome preset, and that's going to add this chrome texture all the way around the edge. We could also try out some of these other presets, something more blurry like this gloss layer. But I think for this one, let's keep it really simple and just click chrome, and now we have our chrome edge. Let's get a little bit more detailed on this other texture. This is going to represent the center here, and I thought we could build a basic car paint from the ground up. If you've tried to build a car paint before, you know it could take a lot of layers to make it look right. But we built a lot of tools in Topcoat to allow you to layer your reflectance and layer your reflections to allow to make some really realistic textures inside of Cinema. Let's go ahead and do that. In Topcoat, we're going to click our base coat layer. This is a really diffuse layer. It's going to give us kind of a general color, and in this case, it's default white. But what we're going to do is go into our modifiers and make it more of a dark red. Let's make it a hot rod red. This is going to be our base color layer. Here's the important part about Topcoat, is it allows you to layer these together. For example, if I want to add some metal flakes to this texture, I can now hit shift click our metal flake layer, and you can see over in our viewport, it's going to add those two together. If you want some really blinged out metal flake '70s style, you're all set. However, if you want it to be a little bit more subtle, you can come into our modifier, and click something as a color that's maybe a little bit brighter than our base color. This will give us that metal flake without being so obvious about it. That's looking better. It's already looking more like a car paint. All right. Let's add another layer. I'm going to shift click our gloss layer. A gloss layer's a blurry reflection. This is going to allow us to pick up a lot more detail in our reflections. However, we can also make this an orange color, and that's going to be a lot more kind of shiny reflection. With any Topcoat texture, as you're layering things, I always want you to keep in mind that having a basic shiny layer on top of everything can sometimes really make it stand out. And in the case of a car paint, it can really, really help. I want you to think about this: any time you're texturing anything, always add a very nice, fresnel lacquer to the outside of your texture, just to see if you like it. Let me show you the difference here. If I shift click our lacquer layer, it's going to add a really nice, bright, shiny top coat on top of all that. And to me, this is when Reflectance really starts to stand out, it's the ability to layer these together. Down here, we have some sliders. I'm going to pull down our lacquered layer so it's not so bright. I'm also going to pull back our gloss and our flakes just a little bit to make it a little bit more subtle, and that's looking really nice. Maybe a little bit more lacquer. Let's do a zoom up, close up here and see all of these textures combined to really make much more realistic textures than we could in the past without reflectance and without Topcoat. The most important part is that we built this all in minutes. Let's do a render here to the viewport, see our final render in all of its glory with all of its reflections, and look at that. It's looking really nice. This is the reason we built Topcoat. The ability the build some detailed textures inside of Cinema 4D using the new Reflectance channels, and really be able to play around with all this layering, without getting too hung up in all the details and all the settings inside of the Reflectance channels. That is it today. I wanted to give you a very fast overview of Topcoat. If you want to learn more about it, please head on over to Greyscalegorilla. We have a bunch more videos about texturing and how to make this kind of stuff inside of Cinema 4D. I hope you check it out and I hope to see you in another video really soon. Have a good one, everybody. Bye bye.
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