Let’s take a look a the layer shader.  It is one of the more powerful shaders in the C4D shader arsenal.  It basically works very similarly to the layers palette in Photoshop and the layered timeline in After Effects, so most of this will be familiar to a lot of you.  Let’s dive in.

We’re going to start our shader by layering up a few pieces of noise.  (A good piece of reading on this in 3Dmax is written by Neil Blevins.)  We’ll start with a noise of type Gaseous, and crank up the global scale a bit to give some nice subtle tonal change across the whole material. (This texture reference of C4D noise is really useful when choosing noise types.)

Now stay in the attribute manager and add the layer shader.  The noise we just added will be moved inside the Layer Shader as it’s first layer.

After we step inside the Layer Shader by clicking on the shader name in the attribute panel, let’s add another layer of noise.  I will give this a different noise type, and leave it’s global scale at 100%.

We’ll change the transfer mode of our new layer of noise to an overlay transfer mode and take the transparency down low enough so the noise is subtle.  (Remember, less is more!)

Next we’ll add another layer of noise with a very small global scale and clipping values so it is mostly white with little specks of black.  Set the Layer Mode to multiply and now we have some small specks of dirt on our nice layered noise.

Noise isn’t the only thing you can use to layer up!  I’ve chosen a fresnel shader here, but you can add any gradients, images or anything else you want.

I always recommend using at least 3 layers of noise any time you need to get in close to an object.  When objects are small on screen, you can get away with one layer of noise. However, if your camera gets anywhere close in, the viewer with totally notice the pattern in the noise, so layer up good if you want it to look good!  “Fractal Noise” is, after all, a fractal, which is just a fancy word for “repeating pattern”.

Another option for modifying your layer shader are effects.  You can perform all kinds of “Photoshop-like” adjustments.  Adding an effect layer is just like adding an adjustment layer in AE.  It applies an effect to the combination of ALL of the layers below it.  One particularly useful effect is colorize.

Colorize works similarly to the Colorama effect in AE (a favorite of mine).  With some modifications to a basic gradient, you get some very good effects.

Here is the break’down’ of our layering ‘up’…

So there is our finished layer shader in the color channel.  Copy and Paste the layer shader into other channels in your material (like diffusion, bump, reflection, etc.) and with some minor tweaks to each, you end up with a really rich, detailed and organic material that looks great up close.

I hope this was helpful.  It’s just the beginning of what you can accomplish with the layer shader.  If you have any questions about this tutorial, something you think I should add, or a request for a tutorial, please contact me through the comments forms.
Good luck and happy texturing!

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