Developing Realistic shaders in Arnold for Cinema 4d | Vol.01

In this series of premium tutorials, in almost 8 hours, we learn how to develop advanced and realistic shaders in Arnold for Cinema 4d.

My name is Kamel Khezri and I’ll be your host in this course.

This is the first volume of a series of courses created at mographplus.com intended to introduce the tools and workflows for creating complex and realistic shaders, utilizing Solid Angle's Arnold renderer in Cinema 4d.

Our goal in this course is not only how to create realistic shaders but before that how to train your eyes to see real-world surfaces and analyze their features, and then recreate those surfaces and shaders in Arnold.

In this first volume will be covering four major shader categories, Plastics, glasses, metals, and fabrics.

For each category, first, we try to familiarize you with the features of that shader type in the real world and then show you how to recreate those features using Arnold shaders and nodes.

We start with plastic,

In the first lesson of this course, we learn how plastics tend to appear in the real world and what features they have, after that we start using Arnold for Cinema 4d to recreate those features.

In the second lesson, we try to recreate a highly-detailed Bowling ball shader and we really go all the way and make it as detailed and realistic as possible.

Next, we create the shader for a vintage shiny dirty plastic phone

Then we start discussing glasses,

In the first lesson of this section, after understanding the physical features of glasses, we try to recreate a different type of glasses in their bare minimum form.

In the second lesson, we recreate a smudged glass shader, and it takes time but the result definitely worth the effort.

Then we take a look at creating an extreme example which is going to be a dirty rusty colored glass shader, and I promise you there is a lot to learn here.

The next category would be metals.

In the first lesson of this section, as we did with plastic and glass, first we figure out how metals work in the real world and then we create different types of metals.

In the second lesson, we create a detailed scratched vintage silver mug and I show you how to create every little detail in the reference photo.

Next, we create the shader for a bronze cast sculpture and also a few other versions of the same shader to make it more interesting.

After that, you learn how to create antique metal shaders.

In the final lesson of the first volume, we explore fabrics and show you how to realistically create different types of fabrics in Arnold Renderer.

For the majority of the course, we’ll be taking a reference photo and use Arnold for Cinema 4d to recreate that shader, but to be as informative as possible and to not repeat ourselves we might change that rule sometimes.

In the second volume of this course which is planned to be released in the near future, we plan to cover, wood shaders, translucent shaders like chocolate, jade and marble, leather, plants shader and much more … stay tuned for that.

So there is a lot to learn in this course and if you are trying to take your Arnold knowledge to the next level and learn how to build complex shader networks in Arnold, you are in the right place.

Let’s get started.