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.

Filed under: Tutorials, 3D, C4d, Materials, Shaders, Texturing, Tutorial