Cinema 4D Tutorial - Using the Spline Shader to Create Text as a Material Video Lecture | Create stunning 3D Graphics with Cinema 4D - 3D & Animation

everyone its EJ from I design comm here
with another super quick tip and this
one is how to bring in or how to get
text applied as materials onto your
object so the normal way you would go
about this is making your text in
Photoshop saving it out importing it
into a material and then applying it to
your object but this way I'm going to
show you is actually going to bypass
ever having to use Photoshop to create
your text and having to import it in you
can just make your text and apply as a
material all inside of cinema 4d so just
to set the stage here we got this little
ribbon object that you'll see it's very
popular in a lot of infographics what we
want to do is apply a text a piece of
text or a word as a material on this
little part of the ribbon here so let's
go ahead double click in the materials
and create a new material well name this
text double click on that and we'll turn
the specular off don't need that and
we'll go into our color and under
texture we're going to go down to
effects and go to our little friend that
is alone and no one ever pays them any
attention is the spline shader and
you'll see if I apply this spline shader
you'll see we have an A and a B in our
little preview window here we can
actually change our preview view up here
and change it to a plane you can see
that that's an A and a B and if we go
into our spline shader options we have
this text field and all these other
options here so this what the spline
shader is doing is it applies and allows
you to choose text and apply as a
material so if I go in here and change
it from ABC to say I design and that
will update that that text field there
so what I'm going to do is just change
this to Center and we're going to bring
down the high
here say 60 and we don't want outlines I
don't you can like it but what we going
to do is to get rid of the line width
I'm just going to bring that all the way
down and I'm going to use this fill
color option and what that does is
allows you allows you to you define a
fill color with this fill texture so I'm
going to go to this fill texture and
just go to color and that fills it with
whatever color which is white by default
in that fill texture field so whites
fine next thing we can do is first we
need to actually apply this sucker on to
our onto our ribbon here so let's go
ahead and apply this material onto here
and you'll see that we have it all
stretched out and it's all crazy the one
thing to get this a little bit more
centered is to just change all of these
values here to 50 and that'll kinda you
can see how the centers that even on our
preview window still doesn't help us
very much in our viewport here but one
thing we can do now is we can close out
of this and we can just go ahead and
start manipulating the offset and length
values here to get our texture here
applied correctly so let's use 75 for
offset you and for offset V will use 225
and let's see for length
let's try 50 lengths let's do a negative
for 70 and actually this should be a
negative 50 because we need it flopped
flipped upside down or right side up now
and we'll change it from side to just
the front you can see that that limits
it to just the front side of this ribbon
and
the next thing we need to do is that's
actually way too big so what we can do
is go back into our height in our spline
shader I'm actually bring this up so you
can see it and scale this down even more
and let's see go in here into our
material turn tiling off we don't want
it to tile and then we can just go in
here and adjust the offsets to whatever
we want to get this centered nice and
centered here so let's bring back up our
material editor here and and again you
can still change the height and whatever
you want to do in the spline shader
options change the color what we want to
do is we don't want this black
background so what we're going to do is
just copy this whole spline shader and
just use it as an alpha to cut out just
that text we need to hit paste dope copy
and paste there we go so that cuts a
hole out so if I render this you'll see
that just our text is applied as a
material with itself onto that green
ribbon object there so you can do it
just like I did right here and apply it
as a 2d material but they can go so much
further say you want to use it as like a
bump to create some kind of embossed
text on a piece of metal or something
like that where you have it pushed the
metal pushed out or stamped with some
text so you can actually put use this
spline shader and put it into say the
bump channel or displacement channel and
do it that way so using the spline
shader just brings in allows you to
bring in a text text as a material
without having to you know do anything
in Photoshop save it out and deal with
an extra step you can just use all of
your text
here and you know change your change
your font I just got to copy this and
paste it into my alpha so it's very
simple very easy using the very under
use spline shader and get text into or
get text and use it as a material and
apply it onto your objects you can also
use splines to do this as well so it's
not just limited to text so hopefully
this will get you thinking of how to use
the very underused and very useful
spline shader