How do I get started with materials in Cinema 4D?
Francesca replies There are a million possibilities when creating materials. I would suggest you go in and play! To create a new material, double click in the Material Manager to create a new material, then click the material you’ve just created which opens up the Material Editor and this is how you go about building your material. To apply this material to an object you can either drag and drop it straight onto the object into your scene or drag it onto your object over on the right hand side, in the Object Manager, where there is a list of everything in your scene.
Go back to your material and tick your Colour channel, here you can play with your base colour and you’ll also see a Texture tab with a little arrow – and this is in all of your channels. When clicking on this Texture arrow, you can add images, noise, Fresnel and many more effects; and within each of these are multiple parameters that allow you to control those effects – you can even animate these textures. You can add Transparency to make objects completely transparent or translucent; or you can add Luminance or Glow to create a glowing effect. Bump and Displacement maps are also put into your materials here, to create the appearance of, or to create, actual texture.
There are also preset materials that you can have a look at in Cinema 4D that may give you a better understanding on how materials can be broken down and constructed. There are lots of places to learn about using materials in Cinema 4D, including 3D World’s YouTube channel and the magazine’s own website www. creativebloq.com.
For more immediate training you should logon to your Vault account at
www.3dworldmag.com/vault to download your free beginner’s guide to using Cinema 4D, called R15 Crash Course the video training covers everything from modelling, animation, texturing and rendering in an hour. The perfect starting point to learn Cinema 4D, and it’s free!