Creating a Cartoon Character in Cineversity Brand ID: Creating and Applying Materials

Photo of EJ Hassenfratz

Instructor EJ Hassenfratz

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  • Duration: 08:42
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In this video, we will apply high quality reflective textures onto our octopus model.

In this video, we will apply high quality reflective textures onto our octopus model and add an HDRI to allow for nice reflective highlights to show up on our model.

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Transcript

In this video we're going to apply some colorful textures to our octopus character using the Cinema 4D reflectance channel and then add a simple HDRI, so we have an environment for our object to reflect. So let's go ahead, let's texture our model here. We're going to double click in the Material Manager here to create a new material and then double click that material icon to open up the Material Editor here. So let's just rename this Green because we're going to create a greenish-yellow texture for our actual body or skin color of our octopus. So we're going go into our Color channel and let's just enter in some values here that I thought looked good. So a value of 102 for the hue, 47 for the saturation and then 100% for the value. We got this nice greenish-yellow color and then we're going to go ahead and in the Reflectance channel we're going to apply some Reflection. Right now we just have specular, so we're just gonna remove that, and before I actually start messing with this even further, let me just go ahead and select all the objects that I want to apply this material to. So the tentacles and the head, and I'll just go ahead and right-click on that material and hit Apply. So we actually see what this is going to look like when it's actually applied to our character. Go into the Reflectance and we're going to add a Beckmann layer here. So this is just a reflection, as you can see it kind of turned our octopus model into some really shiny metal, which we really don't want. So what we're going to do is, number one, bring down the Specular Strength that's a little bit...we don't need the Specular here and we're going to bring down the overall Strength of this Reflection layer. And you can see that now, as I bring down this Strength of this layer or the opacity of this layer, we can see more of that color channel coming through. Now this is still too shiny, you can actually see in the viewport here. And this is R19, that we have this nice default HDR image being reflected onto our model here. So you can see these nice trees and stuff here. And this is just a great inview port preview of how reflective your material is going to be. So this image is actually really sharp and kind of distracting, so what we're going to do is just blur this out by upping the Roughness of our reflection. And you can see that now all we get is some nice highlights from that default HDR image, and we can actually maybe bring up the overall Strength of that reflection layer, so we can get a little bit more of that nice reflection happening. And now what we're going to do is going to the color and maybe introduce a little bit of Hue to this reflection as well, so maybe a little bit of a yellowish tint. You can see that it kind of...it's just a very subtle thing, but introduces a little bit more color to that reflection. And the last thing we're going to do while we're in our reflection layer is introduce some realistic reflection falloff using some Fresnel. So I'm just going to choose Dielectric, and we actually have a preset here called PET and this is kind of like a plastic imitation falloff. So I think that looks pretty good. And you can see that kind of blew out our reflection all together, so maybe we can bring down the strength of that falloff to maybe 80 and we introduce a little bit more of that subtle reflection here and then we can still play around with like the overall strength to get a little bit more of that reflection back. So it's all dependent on how much reflection you want. I like a little subtle bit of reflection here that's blurred out so it looks a little bit like a vinyl toy. It's kind of the look that I'm going for here. So this is looking good. I'm happy with how this green color looks. So I'm just going to go ahead and CMD+Click and drag to duplicate it. And with this new material, I'll just rename this Blue, because what I want to do is apply a blue material that has the same kind of reflectiveness as that green material and apply it to our lips there. So I'm going to go to my color channel and change this color to something a little bit more like royal blue. So I'll just change these hue, saturation, and value, values to 235, 75, and then 90, and we get this nice royal blue. And I'll go into the reflectance and remember we had that yellow kind of hue there, we'll just change this to maybe a light blue. And you can see that's just a subtle change, but I think it adds a nice little pop of color in there. And then we'll just apply this to our mouth or our lips and then we'll just duplicate this blue color one more time. And we'll just change this to like pink, and this will be the color for the inside of the mouth and I'll go in here and maybe just, you know, move this hue value over. Something like that. It's looking good. And again go into my reflection and we'll change this color to maybe a pinkish color right there. And we'll apply this to that loft object that's making up the inside of our mouth. So finally we'll add some textures to our eyeball here, or eyeballs, and for this we'll just duplicate this pink texture and we'll just double click and rename this "White." So for the eyes I want them to be very glossy, way more reflective than the body textures here. And to do that, I'm just going to bring this back to white for the actual color. And for the actual color channel, also change this to white. And then we'll just remove most of the roughness, so maybe only a 5% roughness. And then really bring up the reflection to maybe like 40. Now let's just go ahead and see how this looks and apply this to the sphere that's going to make up the white part of our eye. And you can see with the nice HDR reflective image that's in our viewport, that's looking pretty good and nice and reflective. I'm liking how reflective that is, it's not too distracting but way glossier than the actual green texture and blue and pink textures that are making up the rest of our octopus character here. So I'm just going to duplicate that white texture. Change it to black, go into our color channel, just bring that down. And maybe even bring down the brightness of the layer color there, to maybe 70. And then we'll apply this to our pupil. And you can see that image very clearly with the trees and the building over here of this default HDR image that is showing just for reference. And you're going to notice if I hit render all of our reflections go away because again, that image we see there is just for viewport purposes. So what we actually need to do to have some reflections from an actual HDR image is to bring one in. And it's very easy to bring a HDR image in, we're just going to bring in a sky object. And now you can see that our whole scene is filled with that gray background. And we'll just apply an image to it. And in your Content Browser, if you navigate to your Presets, Prime, Presets folder in that Prime folder, Light Setups, and then the HDRI folder. We have a whole mess of HDR images that we can use to apply to our sky object here. So I actually like this nice light studio set up or we can also use an actual real life location here, like some woods or whatever you want to do, you can pick and choose whatever one you want. But I'm going to use this photo studio. I'm just going to drag and drop that into my Material Manager here and then drag and drop that onto the sky and you're going to see that, that viewport HDR image switched over to the actual HDR image we have on our sky object. Now if I actually render this, you're actually going to see the same thing that we see in our viewport and that's looking really nice. You can see the nice little light tents and stuff like that in there. I think this is looking good. I think we have some nice subtle reflection on the body of our octopus, as well as the lips and the mouth and some nice glossy textures for our eyes. So one thing we need to fix as we actually render this, that gray background of our sky and that HDR is going to show up in our render. So to prevent this, but to still be able to use the image for reflection, we're simply going to right-click on our sky object, go into Compositing tags and say, Seen by Camera, we're just going to uncheck that. And what's going to happen is that when we render this out, the reflections are still going to be intact because you can see we still have Seen By Reflection active here, but it's not going to show up in our actual camera render. So this is perfect. So with that we have our octopus model all nice and textured and ready to animate. And in the next video we'll actually cover how we can rig up our model for animation.
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