In the first part of this tutorial, we built a lighting grid using a couple of MoGraph Cloners and a Volume Effector.  At the end of part 01 we ended up with a lighting grid made up of plain spheres (see below). In part two, we’ll model a basic light bulb and go through the process of placing that object into our cloners without “breaking” our setup (see above).

Step 01

Grab a reference model for the bulb.  Grab it from anywhere, we’re only using the image as reference for modeling.  In the front view, go to Edit > Configure.  Under the Back tab, browse and select your picture.  This will give us an overlay image to help us draw our profile spline.  Using the Bezier Spline Tool, create a spline down one side of the profile of the light bulb.

Step 02

We need to make sure that our spline begins and ends at zero on the Y-axis.  The best way to accomplish this: select the bulb spline and go into point editing mode.  Select the Move Tool, and in the tool attribute manager, go to the Snap Settings tab, and activate the Grid checkbox.  Select each endpoint of the spline and drag them toward the Y-axis.  When you’re close, it should snap into place.

Step 03

Next, while you have the spline selected, hold down the Alt key while you click to create a Lathe NURBS.  The spline will become a child of the Lathe NURBS object. Now we have the basic shape for our bulb.

Step 04

Now we’ll make some basic materials for our bulb, one glass material and one metallic material.  You can tailor the materials to your own taste, but below are some screen shots of the most important parts.

The only other major thing to change is the Lumas Shader on the metallic material. Crank the roughness of the anisotropy in one direction. This will get us the brushed metal look of the back of a flood lamp.

Step 05

Start by applying the metallic material to the Lathe NURBS object.  Then press the “C” key to make the lathe nurbs editable.  Go into face editing mode and select all of the faces on the top part of the bulb.  While you have the faces selected, drag the glass material onto the selection.

Now that we have the bulb finished, we get to the important part.  Replacing the spheres in our mograph light rig from part one of this tutorial.

Step 06

Under the bulb cloner object, make our new Lathe NURBS bulb a child.  You’ll notice that we’re a little off on the positioning and scale of the Lathe NURBS bulbs.

Step 07

Deactivate the bulb Cloner object so we can get a clear look at our old bulb sphere and our new Lathe NURBS bulb.  Reposition and rescale our Lathe NURBS bulb to make it approximately the same position and dimensions as the old bulb sphere.  When you get it, make sure to reposition the Axis of the Lathe NURBS so that it is at X:0 Y:0 Z:0

Step 08

The last step is to throw an HRDI map on a sky object to get some nice reflections out of our metallic shader (Read how to do this)

FINISHED! You should now have a fully functional lighting grid that looks decent from any angle while still being dynamically updatable.

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Chrome text, chrome logos, chrome, chrome, chrome… everybody wants some bling bling.  What makes metallic textures look so good?  Reflections.  Reflections are easy if you have some text floating in a complete modelled environment.   What if you want some chrome text as an element to bring back into AE for a composite?  Here’s a beginner/intermediate tutorial to show you how you to make it quickly…

Step 01
Start with some basic text like this (I created my text using a MoGraph Text Object and a Random Effector).

Step 02
You can use your own custom material, but starting with a preset from the Content Gallery is not a bad place to start.  I’m going to start with metal006 from the basic folder.

Here’s what our text looks like now.  Not really what were looking for.  Why does it look like this?  It has nothing to reflect… (think about what a mirror looks like in a pitch black room).

Step 03
We add a Sky Object to our scene.  A sky object is an infinitely large sphere,
whose center is the origin of the world coordinate system. Perfect for making reflections.

And now here’s what it looks like.  Again, not what we’re looking for.  Why?  It has only has our white sky object to reflect.

Step 04
Back to the Content Browser.  This time we’re going to take a material preset from the HDRI folder.  (These were a new edition to C4D with version 11, and a great addition at that. If you would like to read about what exactly an HDRI map is, read on here.)

We’ll take that material preset and apply it to the Sky Object.  Now we have something that looks like this.  A lot closer to what we want, but all I want is our chrome letters, not that big wierld looking room behind it.

Step 05
To make the Sky Object not appear in the render, but still appear in the reflections of our text, we will use a Compositing Tag.  Right Click on the Sky Object in the Object Manager to find it.  The Compositing Tag is one of the most useful C4D tags out there (I suggest reading about it at some point).

In the settings we’ll uncheck Cast Shadows, Receive Shadows, and Seen by Camera (make sure that Seen by Transparency, Refraction and Reflection remain checked).

Now we’re almost there except for some finishing touches.

NOTE: These last steps are where you are going to be able to customize your chrome texture the most.  The right combinations of options to the shader is what separates professional looking chrome from ugly hobbist chrome.  (Remember LESS IS MORE, you should tone down and modify almost every procedural texture you apply to your shader.)  All this being said, here’s a couple of things to start with…

Step 06
Add a Fresnel (pronounced: FER-NELL) texture to the Reflection channel.  I normally tone down the gradient from it’s 100% black to 100% white starting setting. This will help to tone down our reflections a bit and offer some variation in the amount of reflection over the text.  Also, turn the blurriness up a few percentage points to blur the reflections coming off our text.

Step 07
Activate the Bump channel and add a Noise texture to it.  Pick the noise type that you like, and lower the Global Scale to something small.  We just want to have very small variations on the surface of the metal to help break up the reflections.

Now we have something like this.  A little TOO MUCH bumpyness on the text.

So we’ll go back to the bump channel and take the Strength down to 1% or so.

And we’ll get something like this.

Render out with an alpha channel and bada-bing… There some bling bling for your graphic.

You can download my ChromeWithHDRI.c4d file here.

Did I not explain something clearly enough?  Leave a comment. Did this tutorial raise an question you’d like to ask? Leave a comment. Like the tutorial? Leave a comment.
I hope this was helpful.

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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