How to Render a Make-up Product in Cinema 4D With Arnold

The best cloud render farm, Fox Renderfarm will share with you a tutorial made by 3D artist J. The rendering case shared this time is relatively simple, without very complicated scenes and cool visual effects, focusing on the details and reality of the product. This sharing is mainly divided into the following parts, modeling, lighting, material, rendering, post-production.

Software used: C4D & Arnold, AE & PS.

Modeling

The scene mainly includes paste and bottle models. The modeling part is completed with C4D. The bottle model is relatively simple and will not be described in detail. It is mainly about paste modeling, which is also relatively uncomplicated. It mainly uses two effectors, displacement and spiral, for terrain objects. The steps are as follows,

1. Create a terrain object and turn it into an editable object (polygon). A small pointed shape is pulled out through the dot pattern as the convex part of the paste.

2. Add a spiral effector with a spiral angle of about 350, and now the basic shape of the paste is complete.

3. Add a displacement effector and add a noise shader to the displacement shading option. Adjust the global scaling of the noise to fit the effect, adding some bump detail to make the paste more realistic.

4. Cut the paste into circles around by boolean.

5. The complete model is the effect that the ground can be padded with a flat object and receive shadows when rendered.

Lighting

The lighting for this scene can be divided into two parts, body light and ambient light. Body light mainly includes surface light source and point light source, generally to the object to produce local lighting; Ambient light generally plays the role of overall lighting, the light source may not have a clear direction, basically through HDR mapping. Of course, not all scenes have to contain these lights, but use them flexibly according to your needs.

First, create an Arnold quad_Light surface light source and camera, create two rings to align to the center of the bottle model, and then constrain the camera and light to the Rings respectively, so that both the light and camera can be aligned to the center of the model.

Adjust the light brightness or exposure to the appropriate parameters, while the light sampling is adjusted to 4. Switch the renderer to Arnold and turn on IPR real-time rendering to get this effect.

In the same way, add 3 Arnold quad_Light surface light sources on both sides and top surface of the camera direction, so that No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 lights are aligned to the ring in the center of the model, and adjust the appropriate brightness parameters and angles, so that IPR rendering can obtain such an effect.

The main shape outline of the product has been shown, but the brightness in the direction facing the camera is insufficient. It is possible to add an Arnold quad light surface light source 4 to that front side thereof, and the front side portion is also illuminated.

The shape light of the scene is basically arranged, but the whole scene is still dark, especially for the products showing white, it is not transparent enough. At this time, add an Arnold Skydome_Light as the ambient light, adjust the appropriate brightness, and the whole scene is illuminated.

You can usually add an HDR map to Arnold Skydome_Light as ambient light to increase the lighting detail, and this time I'm using the ambient node with a realistic gradient effect of the ambient rgb node as ambient lighting (because it's faster). Of course, you can also directly use ordinary solid color lighting， while lighting may not be so detailed.

Material

Materials are mainly realistic, and the difficulty is the mixed superposition effect of multi-layer materials and the surface details of some materials,

1. Adjust the metal material of the cover first, mainly adjust the parameters of base and specular, and add a layer of enamel coating to increase the reflection details. The parameters are shown in the figure. Adds a surface bump effect to the normal channel of the metal, controlled by the C4D noise node. The concave-convex effect is relatively small, increasing the details of matte metal.

2. Bottle material. First change the UV projection of the bottle to cylindrical mode, and fit to the object.

The bottle material is mainly composed of the ceramic material of the bottle body and the translucent glass material of the bottle mouth. The two materials can be mixed through the layer node. Layer 1 is connected with the ceramic material, and Layer 2 is connected with the glass material.

At the same time, a black and white map is used to control the mixing amount of the two. (Here, the gradient rgb node is used to realize the gradient effect.) The black part replaces the ceramic material of the surface layer 1, and the White part replaces the glass material of the surface layer 2. Adjust the mouth of the bottle to 90% White, which means mixing a little ceramic material in the glass material to achieve a translucent effect.

Add a black-and-white map of text on the normal channel of the ceramic material of the bottle body to make the text part slightly convex, and also add a C4D noise map on the normal channel of the glass material to make it have a little concave-convex detail. These tiny concave-convex surface details can enhance the realism of the product.

In the same way, add a layer of black text material, the material parameters are shown in the figure, and the material of the White bottle body should be different to a certain extent. It is also connected to the layer mixing option through a black and white paste to control the mixing amount, so that the black text will come out.

In the same way, adding a layer of red text also controls the amount of mixing through a black and white paste. The material of the bottle is completely adjusted.

The SSS material of the paste is relatively simple, including the three attributes of base, specular and subsurface. It is mainly to adjust radius and scale under subsurface to appropriate parameters.

At this time, it was found that the paste part was still too dark and not transparent enough. You can add a surface light source to the paste and use the include mode of the light to illuminate only the paste without affecting other objects.

Finally, to adjust the details, let the surface light source 1 exclude the disk of the ground object, so that the light can directly illuminate the metal material of the cover to generate highlights on the surface. Then give the ground disk a shadow receiving material, of course, the original material can also be, because the rendering will output shadow channels separately.

At this point, the light material is completely adjusted. Due to the low render sampling parameters, there will be some noise and excessive unnatural light and shadow. There are also some small defects on the material, which can be easily solved through later software, so that the efficiency is higher.

Rendering

1. AOVs multi-channel output, add an Arnold object mask label to each model that needs to output a mask separately. You can change the name of the AOV multichannel for each label. Open the render settings AOV multichannel panel, and drag the Arnold object mask channel you just renamed from the invalid multichannel layer to the active multichannel. At the same time, drag the shadow channel shadow-diff.

2.Render settings, the final render sampling parameters and Ray depth are increased a little bit, as to what each parameter represents such a basis will not be detailed.

The final rendering is a multi-layer file containing multiple channels, including masks and shadow channels for different objects, and saved as a PSD file. You can also output Z channels if you want to do depth of field later.

Post-production

1. Open the rendered PSD file in PS, and you can see that the layers of AOVs are saved. In PS, you can easily make separate adjustments to each layer. In particular, brightness and color adjustment and so on in the later software adjustment efficiency is much higher, what you see and what you get, do not need to adjust the rendering for a while to see the results.

If the rendering scene requires a depth of field effect, you can output the Z Channel and post-synthesize it in AE, which will be better than PS and more flexible than direct rendering depth of field. This method can be explained in more detail in a later sharing.

Summary

Although the scene and effect are relatively simple this time, the most basic white basemap. There's no cool visual effect, and it's about simulating reality, which is what physical renderers like Arnold are good at. So the details of the lights and materials are important.

Lighting: white ambient light is very important to increase the product's transparency and lighting details.

Materials: the superposition and blending of multiple layers of materials, each layer of material will have different surface details. Rich and reasonable surface details can increase the realism of product rendering.

Post-production: the rendering output is multi-channel, and later adjustment will be more flexible and efficient. Each renderer has its own multi-channel rendering output function, which can be used flexibly.

Rendering speed, really, is not Arnold's advantage. But also relatively, the more computer cores/threads, the faster, so, you can use a render farm to accelerate the rendering speed.