So far to create materials in Cinema 4D, I usually just pick a default from the software. While this does usually get me the desired effect that I want, I should definitely know how to create my own materials so that I can branch out and create different effects, and ultimately be more creative. Using tutorials from Aleksy on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/user/vozzza) I actually discovered that there is a lot more to materials than I thought.
The first tutorial showed me a good way to set up some basic materials and set my defaults so that these materials are always easy for me to access. Once I had set these up I was able to change the colours accordingly, so now I can create any colour plastic and any colour metal that I want.
The second tutorial in the playlist showed me how to use displacement settings, which was something I completely didn’t know about. Displacement settings are a good way to create shapes from 2D black and white maps without having to actually model it in the geometry.
Here is the timelapse of me following the tutorials. Once I came to the end of the displacement tutorial, I realised that I could explore it further using my own personal knowledge. I decided to explore the different noise maps and found one that looked a tiny bit like lava, so then I changed the colours accordingly. I discovered that in the material settings there are animation settings, so I exported the piece with an animated lava material.
Here are the finished renders. I found that because you cannot see the shapes before you render, it’s hard to actually judge the speed at which you have set the animation. For this reason, my first export is way too fast; it took an hour to render so when I slowed the animation down and rendered again, I lowered the quality to get my result faster.
After rendering this out, I decided to experiment with lighting techniques with the original materials I made. Here are the results
In the first one you can see the colours of each of the spheres under normal light, but I wanted to experiment with how different coloured lights can change how we perceive colours, so in the second, third and last photos, you can see how the right sphere absorbs more of the light from the environment. I think this is because that sphere has more reflection and therefore the light will bounce off of it better than the sphere on the left that is rougher.
Bibliography
Voznesenski, A. (2018). YouTube. [online] Youtube.com. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLfcT-lYpEwJbKExTuJ9yZXbyLz9g9ykCH&v=WNpfVgLeVfk&feature=emb_logo [Accessed 27 Nov. 2019].
Jennie Hawkes 