Cinema 4D Tutorial - Creating Stylized Sketch Animations Using the Cinema 4D Art Shader Video Lecture | Create stunning 3D Graphics with Cinema 4D - 3D & Animation

everybody it's EJ from I design comm and
today we're gonna be talking about going
further than your typical cel-shaded
sketching tune look so we have our
little birdie guy here a little birdie
dude and he he definitely says he
definitely thinks that the bird is the
word
and we want to go beyond just your
typical cel-shaded kind of look from
sketching tune and how I'm going to go
about that is two different ways so
we're going to get a little sketchier
and a little bit more organic we're kind
of handcrafted in the way this model
looks and and like I said we're going to
do this two different ways so one's
going to be the shading and then another
is going to be the actual lines so the
thing I'm going to be doing is using the
c4d art shader now the art shader if I
jump into my luminance texture here you
can see I have a cell shader here
already I'm going to blow that out
let's see was that anything I don't
think that was anything and what I'm
going to do is go over to boo boo boo
boo
right down here we're gonna go to art
shader and right away nothing's really
going on at all just made everything
black but what we can do is we can load
a texture and if we go into our content
browser here if my content browser will
load up here and we can cheat a little
bit and say okay what the heck is the
art shader and we can go into the sketch
options here and let's go to the shaders
and we can actually kind of cheat and
say okay this is an art shader that some
clever folk from a clever person from
Maxon made and let's just open that up
and see how this works
so this is the actual art shader and you
can see that we have a a circle with
this like sketchy kind of texture in
here right and that's just a jpg and
it's referencing a JPEG and if we
actually go ahead and let's uh right
over that blue texture you can see that
if I replace that blue texture we now
have this cool sketchy kind of thing
going on on our bird and you'll notice
that the first thing is if I move around
my light source that's lighting and
controlling everything else in my scene
like the the cel-shaded materials
because my cell shaded materials are
being affected by lights and also the
shadows from those lights and I can move
this around and you can notice that that
art shader is not changing as far as
where the highlight is the highlights
over here even though our lights kind of
pointing to the left here so that's one
of the things that's kind of unique to
the art shaders that the the lighting is
defined by this little material here so
you can see this shaded kind of sketchy
sphere the light is kind of hitting it
from the bottom right here you know what
I mean so let's go ahead and try to
recreate our own a little art shader
here so we can do this by I'm going to
create a new composition and we're going
to create a sphere let's create a sphere
and we're just going to create a
buh-buh-buh let's create a composition
big enough
and it's got to be a square we want it
to be a big enough resolution so if we
zoom in our our little art shader
texture kind of sketchy look is gonna is
going to still hold up so maybe we can
do like 1200 by 1200 and then we'll just
scale up our sphere here kind of fit the
boundaries of our composition and I'll
double click in my material area and
we'll create a women ins shader and then
we'll bring our sketch in tune and right
now I'm just recreating that sphere that
we kind of saw in the art shader and if
I apply this let's actually apply that
to the sphere let's let's not use the
camera go into interactive render region
here so we actually see well this will
look
go and we'll use a light let's actually
create a light infinite light in here
move this out of the way and now we can
basically choose where we want our high
light and our light source to come from
so like I was saying that art shader
yeah the lighting is defined by where
the specular is on your little image so
let me jump back we jump back to that
art shader
you can see that we're trying to rebuild
this right so the specular highlight is
is built down here just kind of baked in
so if you want this so it's all you have
to figure out where you want that
shading to be now you can also go into
your art shader here and this is kind of
like a nice thing because you can
actually rotate this and you can see in
our preview that we're actually rotating
where that highlight is on our little
sphere up here in our preview you can
change it that way so you're really not
a really beholding your stock if you
have your specular highlight in the
bottom you can always rotate it up so
keep that in mind so when you're
building this you can also just build
this straight inside a Photoshop instead
of going this route but this is just an
easier way to get kind of get started so
you can really just try to say okay this
is how big I want my specular highlight
to be we can one thing we could do is
make this like grayscale if we wanted to
but we'll stick with some kind of blue
for our little bird
these are the colors we will use
that's looking pretty good
all right so I think that looks good
that's our specular highlight there's
our shadow so we got that just get this
look into how you'd like it to look now
what we're going to do is we're going to
just save this out and I'm going to save
it out as a Photoshop file
let's do up eight bits fine we don't
need an alpha and let's just pick a
place to store it so this will be our
bird art dart save that out make sure
it's current frame zero render a frame
there's our big frame now let's hop into
Photoshop and this is where the real fun
happens so we're going to go and there's
our bird art start and now what we can
do is I'm going to double click on this
so I can actually start editing things
but Bo let's go to essentials
make sure
hopefully you guys can steal this uh
do there
undo undo undo there we go
all right don't know what happened there
though uh what we're going to do now is
we can go in here and let's get our
smudge tool where's our smudge let's go
to smudge there's our smudge and we can
get like a really fun kind of brush here
right but I can go in here and right now
my strengths kind of low so now we're
just kind of very subtly brushing and
kind of deforming our cel-shaded texture
here we can crank up the strength here
let's make this a little bit bigger and
just kind of get a little crazy in here
let's have some fun
put your Bob Ross afro on and paint some
happy spheres happy spheres happy
spheres let's just watch out that you
don't get any that the black edges in
there it's okay if you kind of go
outside that sphere like this because
the art shader will kind of fix that for
us so we got our specular highlight here
looking good now we can go down here and
do the same kind of painterly sketchy
look to our darker shaded part down here
looking good love this brush
happy spheres spheres looking happy and
let's just see how this looks so let's
go ahead and let's just save this as but
but but start
let's just do this art one that will be
your bird art one hit okay let's jump
back into cinema and here we go
and now we can let's go to our bird
instead of that art shader that is that
from the content browser let's get
see our bird let's go ahead and so this
is we don't actually need anything in
the shadows or anything like that don't
need to load that up all we're going to
worry about is the actual texture here
and we're going to go ahead and grab
that bird art one that we just made and
that's our little texture thing and we
already have our rotate there that I
kind of screwed around with there but
now you can see that if I zero out the
rotate you can see that we now have our
specular highlight here we have this
nice little sketchy thing going on and
you can adjust the scale but you need to
notice so like I was saying it's okay if
you go outside the lines and you get a
little bit of of the stuff outside but
the thing you need to keep in mind is if
you don't scale up your sphere or your
image you kind of fit the bounds of your
of this preview window you're going to
get this black edge you can see that on
our character already so we need to
adjust this and you can see just a
little bit there so we need to just
scale that up just a little bit more
still have a black edge let's scale it
up a little bit
actually that's our actual uh that's our
stroke nevermind so we're looking good
and in again you can scale this up as
much as you want you can have the
specular highlight all the way up here
you can also scale this on the U and the
V but again make sure you don't scale it
down too much you have a lot of control
over scaling that original image that
you made in Photoshop to kind of fit how
you'd like it to look and again as well
as just rotating where you want that
little specular highlight to be you can
see that already if I go ahead and let's
create a new material with this and
let's replace that darker blue texture
right here and let's go ahead and with
our art shader we're going to go ahead
and let's change this to a darker blue
so what I'm going to do is go into
colorizer you can see that now we can
start editing those little shades with
our colorizer here so let's go and let's
just change this to kind of like a
darker and a blue day like this see how
that looks
we got a little darker blue and you can
really see what's going on up in our
preview here adjust these knots and the
midpoints and all that good stuff
make this a little bit darker here
that's a little bit too light you can
have a lot of control with the the
colorizer action going on here
Oh looking good so we got this nice
little sketchy slightly darker color for
the wings and the eyebrows and all that
stuff now we can do the same thing for
now let me rename this not have all of
these named e so but but so this is the
light blue
this is the dark blue in this one I'm
just going to use for the yellow beak
and all that stuff so I'll go ahead and
hitting option I'm going to just replace
that orange and let's just go back into
our colorizer and just change these to a
I'm kind of yellowish
a lot of stuff going on and let's get
rid of the black
this look good make it brighter orange
really bright whoa whoa
really blown out
makes you got to be careful with what
you're doing here this darker
and make this even darker here
is not and
it will better
good core I'm liking that
again adjust that to your heart's
content and so that there we go so
that's kind of we're getting our
sketchier texture now the cool thing
about this is say that that that
highlights way too bright right we can
go back into Photoshop when we actually
save this
bird
mid so just save that out go back in a
photoshop and just start going nuts
again start going crazy let's that let's
uh kind of tone down that highlight
we'll mix a little bit of blue in there
let's get more of the darker tones in
here really start screwing around with
this stuff in here
again you can color outside the lines
okay
said that art shader kind of takes takes
care of all that stuff so you can smudge
you can just go ahead and just grab
colors in here and and kind of sample
these colors maybe make it a little
darker and paint over top of this
actually paint instead of smudging and
do stuff like this we can go back to our
smudge and I think there's a sample all
layers option that will actually yep we
can just start smudging that darker
shade in here
war
so again we're grunting this up we're
making this way more sketchy than it was
kind of losing the toning down that
little highlight spot here adding a lot
more texture to this
and I think I think that's looking
pretty good let's see what that looks
like and what I'm gonna do is just save
it and typically you should not just
save over it but I want this is kind of
like a cool workflow because all of
those textures in in cinema are
referencing this Photoshop file so if I
go and save this I can go back into
cinema 4d and let's just have these guys
update so just reload image and that
should
reload all of them I think
just make sure yet I think that reloaded
all of my textures here
yeah and you can see that that just
updated so that looks like kind of you
know pretty nice right so that looks
pretty cool we toned down our our little
bright spot there
go into our colorizer here and we can
get some of that lighter blue back same
with a colorizer here get some of that
lighter bit for that specular
you have a lot of control with the
colorizer and all that stuff there we go
a little get a little highlight on that
beak so that's part one that the art
shader is really cool really useful or
getting a nice kind of hand hand
sketched kind of thing going on with
your sketching toon objects and cartoony
objects the other thing is a kind of
making your edges a little bit number
one your strokes a little sketchy but
number two kind of making your geometry
not so smooth so we we kind of sketched
up our our textures let's go ahead and
basically this objects made up of a
bunch of geometry a lot of subdivision
surfaces now we can go in here and kind
of tone down the subdivisions here and
kind of make this more chunkier geometry
we can totally do or all of my geometry
is underneath this Youngberg null I can
go here and to just kind of make
everything a little bit less like a kind
of simplified geometry I'm going to go
get its display tab and adjust the level
of detail and you can see that that is
kind of giving us simpler geometry and
kind of counteracting the
subdivision surfaces there and stuff
like that now you might have to move
some stuff around like the eyes maybe if
they're if they're kind of intersecting
but I think everything looks pretty
decent maybe you have to move the arms
out a little wings move these out a
little bit there we go that looked a
little weird when we moved it out so
that's uh that's kind of simplifying our
geometry and let's go ahead and let's
distort all of our geometry a little bit
by adding this place er going to our
shading here but but but let's get some
noise and the noise that I found kind of
works good is you want to you want to
have smoother noise and I found that
this VL noise works pretty good so we're
going to scale this up a little bit and
you see that's kind of chunking things
up you know kind of really distorting
things so maybe that's a little bit too
much so we can go into our our displacer
here and see how that looks maybe tone
things down overall for all the geometry
here but then maybe duplicate this
displacer and find where our actually
bird body is like right here and maybe
have a more fine finer control over how
much we can distort the actual body so
that's looking good so that's distorting
the actual geometry so we kind of
simplify we kind of sketched and
deformed our texture with the art shader
we deformed our geometry using the
simplifying our level of detail on our
geometry as well as adding some
displacer x' with some noise
like so and now the last thing is
getting a sketchy outline right so let's
go ahead and do that so let's go into
our sketch material that's already added
here and the things that I like to do to
kind of add this nice sketchy look is a
going into thickness and kind of
distorting the thickness of our material
by enabling the noise and making some
noisy a deformation along our along the
thickness of our outline here so we can
go ahead and you change the different
kinds of noise the the sketchy kind of
the noise that really I think after
experimenting a lot up to create a
really nice sketchy kind of distortion
is actually the oboe is it
oh it's a Luka the Luka I think has a
really nice sketchy kind of look to it
we can scale this up a little bit and
get this nice sketch look let me zoom in
a little bit here
hopefully you guys can see so we got
this really nice sketchy kind of look
against scaled it up you can adjust the
total strength of that noise you can
increase the thickness so your your your
adding noise to the thickness of your
objects so you can always kind of you
know if you have a lot of distortion you
want to get some of that thickness back
you can increase the overall thickness
but you can see how that luca noise type
really looks like almost like a bleeding
pen or something like that you can see
the difference between lucca and just
typical noise you can see that the
typical noise kind of gives you maybe
like a pencil kind of luck or something
like that so that works well i mean you
can experiment a lot and have a lot of
fun with this stuff by like luka Luke is
fun Luke is a fun person and and noice
type so the same thing I'm going to go
and add some noise to our opacity and
this is really where you're going to get
that really nice sketchy hand-drawn look
is because you know when you sketch with
a pencil it's not going to be a
consistent opacity when you're when
you're drawing on a piece of paper or
something like that if you actually
still use a pencil and a piece of paper
as I'm using a Wacom tablet and stuff
like that these days
but again I'll use the luca noise type
here let's increase the scale on this as
well
and yeah that's looking pretty good as
well we can kind of tone that down if
it's a little bit too much of our
opacity kind of we're losing a little
bit of too much a pass 'ti there but the
one final thing I like to do is go into
clone and actually clone some of our
strokes so we're just kind of
duplicating the stroke on top of another
and now it's kind of looking like a
charcoal on a thing and that is kind of
controlled by how many times you want to
repeat it so you could have a lot of
clones here so we can really get looking
like a charcoal kind of thing I'm just
going to get up bring this back to three
so we have three copies of our original
stroke and then we have our the major
thing you want to watch out for is this
line offset this kind of tells you how
are these clones are kind of offset and
these are the thickness options so this
controls how much random or variation is
to the thickness there is so you can
increase this and this scale actually
controls the actual amount of the
thickness overall of all your clones so
you can increase the thickness of all
your clones by increasing the scale and
same thing with the pass 'ti so this is
adjusting the variation of the opacity
of all of those clones really crank up
the opacity you can adjust the line
offset a little bit more to we're
getting really nice at you kind of look
and you can play around with all these
kind of thing all these options here and
have some fun experimenting that's half
the fun right there so I think that's
looking pretty good we got a really nice
sketchy look the one thing I like to do
is a you know since you have all of your
effects now you can go back and adjust
the thickness here but Baba and we can
go into our color and kind of lighten
this color up so let's just say let's
get some blue boop boop and kind of
lighten this up
my own interactive render region it okay
there we go so we're just gonna lighten
it up and I think that you know a
lighter sketch fits this composition and
this this whole color scheme a little
bit better and you can kind of play
around with with how light you want to
go with this so it's like you just
painted this and you're coloring it in
your coloring the edges with a colored
pencil kind of thing so let's go ahead
and I like this look so what I'm gonna
do is I have my yellow sketch material
here I'm going to go ahead and duplicate
this and overwrite that yellow material
and then simply go into this duplicated
material so you can see this blue
material is now on the beak and the legs
I'm just going to go and grab like a
more orange II it's a word a more Orange
II texture for this so again trying to
just make the the outline just a little
bit just a tad bit darker then the
colors were using for the actual objects
itself
so maybe something like this that's a
little bit too light we definitely want
to make sure our form is still
maintained so you can actually tell that
that's a beak there
that sure that looks good
in my eyeballs are little eyeballed a
little bit too
we need to increased you know geometry
there a little bit so it's a little bit
more round it looked a little bit odd
when our eyes were a little bit chunky
but that and that's another thing is we
need to apply that texture that the art
shader texture to our eyes so let's just
make this our eye texture and again go
into our art shader go it go here we
don't need reflectance we'll turn that
off let's go into again we'll go to
colorizer and we're just going to make
this all gray scale on greyscale
gorillas we're going to make this
greyscale
there we go we can make this so we still
have that nice little eyeball highlight
like you know the picket you eyes as I
like to call it like every time I see
eyes like that with a little bright spot
looks like picture Iike oh that's
looking pretty good so you can kind of
bring that back in you know play around
with that
um I think the one last thing I want to
do is I'm not very happy with the this
the shade of blue on this so let's bring
like that that look better yeah like
that much better like that shade a lot
better there well
so yeah that's uh
mate so the final part is is actually
animating this and actually having what
you know with the 2d animators they'd
like to have when they add some kind of
noise or displacement to their character
they have a boil or some kind of
undulation of displacement on their
characters so we can do that using our
displacer x' now we have the one that's
just the overall displacement and then
we have our displacement that we added
to the bird body that's kind of adding a
little bit more noise to our the body of
our bird
so to animate this and create that kind
of rolling oil as two 2d animators like
to call it we simply have to go in to
our our noise here and just animate the
seed you can see as I'm animating the
seed not only is it kind of distorting
and changing the look of our geometry
but it's also slightly changing the the
sketchy texture on top as well as the
sketchy outlines we have here though we
can now go ahead and let's keyframe this
so we have we have both of our displacer
is both of our noise we're just going to
set a keyframe for seed and I found that
if you do it like maybe every seven
seconds and I'll just set another
keyframe go to frame 14 move up a seed
another keyframe now what we can do is
go into our timeline here's our timeline
and you can see we have our noises and
right now the interpolation is just set
to
the curvy interpolation the spline
interpolation oh that's you this this
kind of interpolation by default what we
want to do is do a stepped interpolation
so it's just going to kind of sub clip
from
CEDA seed instead of rain uh just keep
keyframing this and going one seat up
and one seat up what we can do is select
both of our seeds so both of our seeds
here and for after we can go from
constant and we can just go offset
repeat so that's going to continue and
keep going up one value in our in our
seed or whatever values here as it goes
on in our timeline our repetitions we
have to increase here because right now
it's only repeating the the offset
repeat once we're only getting these
four steps we need to make enough
repetitions to actually last us that get
to the end here though
if this is enough so we have our
undulation that's if that'll get us the
end of our animation here or and
actually you know I think the bird body
displacement
I think his body's getting way too
wobbly a little bit much a little bit
goes a long way and that was a lot a bit
so let's go and let's preview render
this guy ooh 350 and
fifteen frames per second because what
you want to do that also helps out this
render is rendering at a lower frame
rate I'm going to get our preview going
but we're a preview go
a picture manager nope let's do this
again make preview oh it's still running
it's still going
that's that's still cranking away so
let's let's just kind of recap what we
did here so we wanted to add more make
this a little bit less
computer-generated we wanted to go a
little bit further than just our cell
shader material and create a new kind of
sketchy material using the art shader
and we created that by kind of basing it
off of our cell shader right here took
this image brought it into Photoshop
sketched it up a little bit smudged it
up and you know even just smudging it up
a little bit I think really adds a
little something to it it's you know
again a little bit goes a long way here
so let's keep talking about what we did
here we distorted our geometry by kind
of simplifying it by using our display
tag and bringing down the level of
detail we what else do we do we we added
our sketchy outlines by going to our
sketch materials and adding some
distortion noise to our thickness as
well as our opacity and then cloning our
strokes to kind of add this nice sketchy
overlay to it you can see the difference
here so you can again there's tons of
stuff you can play around with inside of
the the sketch materials that can add
two different kind of sketch outline
looks and then with our displacer we
keyframe the noise on our the seed of
our noise to create this rolling boil
kind of look that you'll find in a lot
of 2d animation these days and then we
made a preview in our previews done and
let's see what we got there we go
so we have our little bird and he is
just boiling you got the nice little
rolling boil so even so just having that
seed a kind of being keyframed
adds two distorts not only the outlines
here because it's distorting the
geometry it's also distorting kind of
moving around are sketchy texture
though just by keyframing our seed
everything every aspect of our little
cartoon bird here is having that little
2d boil effect which i think is really
really cool and our bird is happy he's
sketchy he stylized he's he's he looks
more handcrafted you can call him a
hipster bird he might take offense to
that because he's he's organic he's
renewable he's handcrafted he is
small-batch a craft bird but yes so
that's using the art shader sketchy
materials and displacer to create some
fun sketch looks inside of cinema 4d
thanks for watching everybody and I'll
see you in the next tutorial