Easily Create this Complex Stitching Effect in Cinema 4D

Todd Blankenship: 00:00 Hey, what’s up? I’m Todd. And in this video we’re going to show you how to do some procedural stitching type effects in Cinema 4D kind of like this. So these renders come from Zachary Corzine who did a full training series about creating procedural looks that we have over on Greyscalegorilla Plus. And if you don’t know what plus is, it’s our subscription platform where you pay one time a year and you get access to all of our training, a lot of great material downloads and plenty of other downloads as well. And so on Plus we also have a quick tips page where we’re constantly adding new content. And Nick did a shorter version of one of the techniques from this training for the quick tips page and we wanted to go ahead and share that quick tip with you guys. So what you’re watching right now is a YouTube video. It’s based on a quick tip that’s based on some training in Greyscalegorilla Plus. So before I confuse myself any further, this Rosa video,

Nick Campbell: 00:56 Hey, it’s Nick here with another quick tip for Greyscalegorilla Plus. Today we’ll be making this beautiful stitching technique using built in Cinema 4D tools. Now I learned this technique by watching the procedural systems with Zachary Corzine training here also on Greyscalegorilla Plus if you haven’t checked this out, it is packed full of really beautiful ways that he uses simple Cinema 4D tools to create some really beautiful renders here. Um, if you haven’t checked it out, definitely go watch it. Uh, what I wanted to do with this quick tip is just bring out one of the really simple but beautiful things that I learned in this training out into a quick tip. So without further ado, let’s get started. Let’s open up a new scene file and let’s go ahead and grab a plane. Now we’re gonna have to shrink this down a little bit.

Nick Campbell: 01:43 Let’s go to 200 by 200 and then also reduce the segments of the plane. Now we’ll light this thing up in just a moment. So let’s turn off our Redshift render view. And by the way, you can follow along with any um, uh, version of Cinema 4D or any render and just light it and add materials, uh, with your own render. Uh, okay, so what do we do? First thing we need to do is add an atom array, A. T. O. M. I hit shift C to bring up our little search bar, hit Atom array and just drag your plane inside of your atom array and you get the basic atom array look. Well, how do we start to get all those nice little bevels? Well, we use a bevel. So go ahead and hit shift C again and go B E V, E L.

Nick Campbell: 02:24 there it is. And when you find it in your little finder here and shifts, you just click it or hit enter and it will come into your scene. Now you just want to make the bevel a, a child of the plane. So just drag it in hierarchy under the plane. The next thing we’re going to want to do is head on over here to your options inside of your bevel and go to point mode instead of edge mode. And start to turn up your offset until we get this nice little pattern, something along the lines of this. Okay, so where do we go from here? Well, all we have to do now is just duplicate our bevels. So select your bevel. I want you to copy paste and just control C control V under keyboard of course, and then bring this under the plane again.

Nick Campbell: 03:07 Now don’t make it a child of the bevel. Make it a, a child of the plane just like this. And now when you go into that second bevel, head on over here to your component mode and go back to edge mode and shrink this offset down quite a lot. You want it a little bit closer, uh, to make this type of pattern. You don’t want to go too far, too big or too small. You start to get some weird patterns. Again, if that’s the look you’re going for it, go ahead. But to build this one, we’re going to go somewhere around here and again, let’s copy and paste that bevel and bring it under our plane. One more time. We’re going to have three total bevels. And let’s shrink this one way, way down. Okay. So that’s somewhat likely like it, but we’re not getting all that nice little detail.

Nick Campbell: 03:51 So first thing we need to do is go up to our atom array, shrink down our cylinder radius. Let’s go to something like 0.7 0.8 maybe and also go to our um, sphere radius and make it something like to, okay, now we’re getting a little bit more of that beautiful thin stitching, but how do we get all this other extra detail? Well, this is where we’re going to go into our second bevel and go to our subdivision and turn it up to one can already. We’re getting more detail. And again, w w you know, as you follow along, experiment with this effect, experiment with it, with other geometry, we could do that as well. Um, so let’s set that first, the second bevel, two subdivision one and then our third bevel. We want to crank this up even higher. So this is where we’re getting in these nice little stitching dots.

Nick Campbell: 04:38 So maybe something like two or even three is going to give us these nice little patterns in here and give us this really beautiful intricate effect using just atom array and bevel. They had no clue you could do this stuff. Okay, so the last thing we need to do now is head on into our deformer menu here. Go to our displacer, and again, just add it in the hierarchy, uh, with all the bevels. Now this is uh, how we’re going to add a little bit of cushion, a little bit of push up in the middle of this thing. Go to your display, sir, and head on over to shading and open up the shader and add a gradient. Now by default it’s kinda tilting it sideways because our gradient is just going from black to white left to right. Instead go ahead and click into your gradient, go to type and go to radial.

Nick Campbell: 05:24 Well, I’m sorry, not radial, circular. There we go. And now we’re getting that push up effect. In fact, right now it’s a push down effect. Now we could reverse the gradient if you want, but you could also just go into the displacer, go to object and just reverse the cushion here, the the height. Okay. So now we have this nice push up effect. We have all this nice stitching and you can actually go in and start adding other bevels, other patterns and other pieces of geometry even to see what this looks like. In fact, let’s quickly go ahead and do that. Let’s just go grab a cube and a set this whole thing up with a cube as well. So I just duplicated our atom array. I’m just gonna turn all that stuff off and I’m going to replace the, uh, plane with a cube.

Nick Campbell: 06:09 So all I did was replace that cube. Go delete our plane. And now we have a completely unique look all on a different piece of geometry. In this case, we may have to, uh, shrink our cube down a little bit just to get a little bit more detail. But again, look at it totally, drastically different. Look, we may have to play around a little bit more with this to get something that we want, but again, experiment with this and see what it could bring to some of your work. Now let’s go ahead and go back to this one. Promised you that we would come light this thing. I’m going to go copy and paste this into, uh, the Redshift starters scene. Now this is where the tutorial started. Let’s go ahead and fire up our Redshift render view. And if you don’t have the Redshift starters scene, uh, this and also the materials we’re going to use are also included in Greyscalegorilla Plus.

Nick Campbell: 07:01 So, uh, you may want to stop and just download all the materials and uh, just so you have them for future, uh, quick tips as well. All right, so here we are. Um, this is, uh, let’s turn off the example and let’s paste in our brand new one that we just made. It’s a little bit low in the scene. So let me leave this other one on just so I can match it. I’m gonna bring it up in the scene. Just so it is close enough to it for depth of field reasons. Let’s turn off that original one. And here we are with some basic lighting. It’s a basic stuff all set up, ready to go and Redshift. And so let’s add a material well over in your content browser. Once you have everything installed from Greyscalegorilla Plus you’ll have access to, let’s go find it, the Everyday Material Collection.

Nick Campbell: 07:43 Now if you haven’t played around with this, there’s tons of materials in here, uh, and there’s some really beautiful cloth as well. So let’s go, uh, first of all find it has so much stuff here and we’ll want to make sure we have it there. It is Everyday Material Collection and uh, I want the one for Redshift. So let’s open up that. Let’s go to fabrics. Open up that one. And you can see we have all these fabrics. Let’s just use this bed sheet white as a start. Let’s drag that onto our atom array. And when we go back to our attributes, um, you’re going to see, uh, we got a nice little cloth effect. We probably UV mapping might be a little, um, little too tight knit on this thing. So I’m just going to go to cubic mapping and do a little zoom in here to kind of see what this looks like and our depth.

Nick Campbell: 08:31 The field’s a little tight and it looks like our cloth is a little bit too large. So let’s do something like 50% that might shrink our cloth down a little bit more. If dad’s looking better, let’s zoom back out. So we get our depth of field all set up looking good and man, that’s looking pretty nice to me. Now. Um, if you, uh, have the Redshift starter scene, um, and uh, you, you have all this extra stuff and you have the content browser, experiment with different fabrics, with different shapes. And like I said, definitely go check out Zach’s course. Little tips like this. Uh, and the way that he uses MoGraph is just mind blowing to me. I learned so much by watching it. Uh, like I said, I had to come out and make a little, a quick tip just for you guys. So that’s it for today. Let me know your thoughts and thank you as always for watching. I’ll see you in another quick tip really soon.

Todd Blankenship: 09:20 So I hope you enjoyed this technique. We kind of just wanted to give you a peek at the type of content that we’re uploading to Greyscalegorilla Plus, and so yeah, we’ve got a lot more of that stuff in there now and obviously tons more rolling out in the coming months. Anyways, thanks for watching and I’ll see all of you guys next time.