Texturing and Rendering a Wine Bottle: Using Gradients to Generate Texture Elements

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Instructor Raymond Olsen

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Cinema 4D Gradients can be useful tools in your projects, let’s learn how to use some gradient tricks to make a striped texture that can be edited with sliders.

Cinema 4D Gradients can be useful tools in your projects, let’s learn how to use some gradient tricks to make a striped texture that can be edited with sliders.

Using the various modes in gradients can be a major time saver allowing you the freedom to edit your textures from right in Cinema, no need to go back and forth to photoshop and save out new files.

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Transcript

Raymond Olsen: Cinema 4D's gradient shader can be a useful tool in your projects. Let's learn how to use a gradient shader to make a striped texture for the neck wrap of our wine bottle. Here's that striped texture that we're going to be creating for the neck wrap and all we're going to be doing is adding one stripe, and this is something you could easily do in Photoshop or Illustrator, but I want to show you how to do it with Cinema's gradient shader because the gradient shader is so useful. So I'm going to jump into the render view and this bottle metal material is what's up here on the neck wrap so I'm going to come over to the basic and I'm going to rename this neckwrap just so we don't get confused. And this is the last material that we pulled in out of the content browser with the white wine bottle so it's actually got a diffusion channel and a bump channel in it and those are using some noise textures. Now we're not going to mess with those, but I just wanted to point that out. I kind of like how it's breaking up this texture so we're just going to leave those alone. We're going to be dealing with the reflectance just like I did with the label and currently this only has one layer in the reflectance channel and it's a GGX layer so if I turn on our Interactive Render Region, we can see that's what we're seeing is that GGX layer. It's a shiny reflectance layer so let's call this reflections, so we can keep these layers straight, and let's add a Lambertian Diffuse, and just like the label there I want the Lambert layer under the Reflection layer so we'll call this lambert, and again, just like the label, we want to put a layer color, but instead of using a texture, this time we're going to open this menu and come up here to Gradient. Go ahead and drop that in and then I'm going to click on the gradient to enter it and right now we're getting a left to right 2D U gradient which is kind of giving us vertical stripes, or vertical bands and I want a horizontal band or stripe so let's switch that to 2D V, and now you can see we're getting a bottom to top gradient which is what we want, but if you look over here at our render, we're seeing tiling. So our projection or our UV's need fixing so let's select that Texture tag and you can see in the projection it's using a cubic right now so if I select the wine bottle and then activate our Texture tool, you can see there is our cubic projection. I prefer to use a cylindrical projection on this since this is a cylindrical object up there on the neck wrap. So let's go ahead and change that from cubic to cylindrical, and now we have our cylindrical projection, and now I'm going to active my Axis tool and then we're going to bring that up to the neck wrap. So I'm going to turn off my IRR and then I'm going to jump into the front view and then I'm going to go to Display Quick Shading, just because this will go much faster and we're going to finish by scaling our projection up. And I want the projection to hang off the top and bottom of the geometry just like I did with the label and that way, you never see tiling. So it's a kind of a safeguard for me. So that looks great and if we jump back in to the texture, now you can see we've got the texture being applied to the neck wrap just like we want. So I'm going to disable my Texture tool, disable my Axis tool, and now let's make the stripes. So if we twirl down the gradient, right now we have Interpolation set to Smooth Knot, and that's going to give us a smooth gradient from the black knot to the white knot, but if we switch this interpolation to none, now we're going to get a solid black color all the way up until the white knot so if I just drag this white knot back, you'll see it's adjusting where the color break is. So I'm going to bring this to about right here and then I'm just going to click anywhere over here in the black and it's going to give us another knot, and then I can just bring that over and position the top of our stripe so just get those to where they look good. I do want an orange stripe and to get my orange, I'm going to open up my Picture Viewer and then I'm going to open our Raccoon label Texture, just fit it to screen, and now with my white knot selected, I can just use the Eye Dropper and sample that. Close my Picture Viewer and now we have an orange stripe. So I'm gonna go ahead and twirl down the gradients and if you look in here, there is a list of different gradient types that can be used for whatever you want. I use them for framing pictures in Box mode and making stripes in U and V mode, I use them for Layer Masks and Layer Shaders. It's a very useful tool. Now at this point our scene is complete and in the next video, we'll fine-tune our lighting and materials to prepare for the final renders.
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