3D Product Rendering in Cinema 4D & Octane

1. Welcome: Hello, and welcome to the three D product rendering course for Cinema four D and Octane. This will be a step by step guide on how to achieve photo real product shots covering the whole process, including modeling, texturing, lighting and rendering. At the end of the course, you'll have a professional render of a commercial product, which you can use to show off your design skills in your portfolio and ultimately attract higher paying clients. 2. Sourcing Reference Images: So it's usually considered standard practice to gather references before you begin modeling. In this case, it's very much essential, especially for finding correct dimensions of the product you've chosen. Also, down the line, you'll find yourself coming back to these images to make sure that you've got voto real materials and professional lighting. So before you begin, you might want to ask yourself a few questions such as, what kind of product do you want to create? I usually recommend choosing a product that you have some kind of affinity with. For example, if you're into skateboarding, try to skateboard, you're into sports, music, films, or TV. Try and find a product that will keep your interest in Spark creative ideas during the process. Also, try to choose a product premios that is most in demand in the industry. This is a good way to attract potential clients once you've completed your renders. 3. Setting up an Image Plane: Okay, to the modeling. Before you start modeling, you need to make sure you have a decent image of the type of product you're looking for. One that actually shows the dimensions as clearly as possible. This could be using a really high focal length or if it's a photo taken from a long distance, that will reduce any kind of perspective shift in the final image. The one I'm choosing to use is this one because it's pretty straight. If you look at other ones compared to that, you know, they might be off on perspective, or they might be using a lower vocal language which doesn't actually show the full shape of the product as it would look on paper, if you know what I mean? As close to the blueprint as possible. So we're looking for that. Unless you have the blueprints already, which is perfect, so we can use those. Yeah, so I'm going to be using this one. So let's bring this into cinema four D to begin with. So let's create a plane. Put this two minus well, plus or minus, this will make a difference later, we'll see, which is the right way around. Create a new material, add it to the claim. In the material editor, disable color and reflectance and just add luminance. This will remove any shadow so the image will look as clear as possible. Grab your image and put it in here. One. Another thing. Sometimes you can't really save an image properly or it might ask you to save as a web P which doesn't always work in Cinema 40. It probably won't. So a good practice is to use the Windows snipping tool, create a new snip and then save that as a PNG, which is what I've done here. Obviously, it's not for marketing purposes, so there's no risk of copyright infringement there. So yeah, once you load it into CMA four D, you can see the dimensions there in the material editor. So 477 x703. So to make sure that's exactly the same dimensions as the plane, let's put those numbers into the plane dimensions. So wit 477 and seven three. That's the same shape as the image and size is the image, so great. You can see that image looks a little bit lower resolution. So to fix that, you can go to viewport, texto preview size and just put that to a higher resolution there and it looks a bit clearer. I think one k is good enough here because image is only just under one k, so that's perfect. Okay. If you have yours upside down, you might be on the plus the axis. So if you have it on minus minus. Then, it should be in the right position. Let's move this back so it's out of the way. When you look at it through your front view port, pressing A to go shade of no wire frame. You can bring this up here to try and match the bottom of the bottle with the base grid there. Okay. Now we've got this in place. Let's start modeling. 4. Modelling the Bottle: So let's start by creating a cylinder. As you can see, it's not really matching the proportions of the image. So actually, what we're going to do is we're going to do this at real world scale. There's a reason for that, and that is when we come to texturing and adding transparent materials. The way the light bounces through the plastic will depend on the actual size of the object itself. So a pill bottle like this would be, I guess about 8 centimeters high. Let's put that in there. And then possibly across, let's just say 5 centimeters, radius would be 2.5. 2.5. Okay, so that's a lot smaller than in the reference image. So let's just press T to scale it down. This will scale it proportionally. So as long as you have these original dimensions in the right place, it won't really matter. As long as you scaled it proportionally down, and that's just by using the default scale tool and just clicking and drag anywhere in the window. To resize it. There we go. And make sure that make sure the cylinders in the center of the scene and try and match the reference here and here to the size of the cylinder. Okay. So we're going to start modeling this. The cn that's 8 centimeters high, so let's put that up to four to make sure that's at the ground plane as well. T has changed now, so we need to bring this back up and just try to match that with the bottom of the cylinder. Right there. Right. Let's go into perspective view. References all the way over there. Doesn't really matter, but let's just bring it a bit closer so we can see. We're going to try and keep the polycun as low as possible for the time being because later on, we're going to be subdividing it, which will smooth out all the polygon surfaces. So for the time being, the rotation segments, 16 should be enough for now and it will make it easier to model two. Height segment four is k by default. So let's just press that we'll make it editable. Going into the front view, let's press N B to enable the wire frame. We need to match this up with the image with the background image, but when we press N G, for example, we lose the image on the reference texture. So a way around this is to use a display tag, which is in render tags display, if you right the Conder model itself. So go in here, press and then lines, and that will make the cylinder i frame while keeping the plane with the image. A visible. Okay. Right. Okay. So to start modeling. Let's go into edge mode. Press U L to use which will select the edge loop like this. We're going to select the bottom edge loop right there. Press to go to Bevel, and we're going to try and match that to the image there. Add a few subdivisions. I'm using three for now. Maybe 6.5. Maybe 8.8. That looks about right. Okay. All right. Let's go to the top side. Do the same thing again. S for bevel. And then bring that down, so it matches more or less the reference image. It's using the same settings as before, so there's no need to change that too much. Let's just add one more subdivision. That should be okay. Right. Okay, looking from the bottom, the actual bottle wouldn't be perfectly flat like this, so this needs to kind of come up. It needs to be raised slightly. Let's add a couple more subdivisions here. So go to Loop Path or K L. And then go to vertex mode, select the middle vertex. Go to soft selection, enable, and then add that to about one, let's say 2 centimeters. That will add a fall off to the vertices you're selecting. There we go if we just raise that slightly. Then that's looking more realistic already. Okay. Brilliant. Next thing we need to do is add some kind of neck to the bottle. So that just goes straight up directly, okay? Let's go back to face mode, select the cylinder, and select the top faces just in a row like that. Let's turn off soft selection. Go back into front mode, front view. And just drag that up. Let's add another subdivision here for the neck of the bottle there, the thread. And we'll come back to that part later. Okay. Come to the top. B in face mode. Let's delete these faces. And then if we select all the faces, go back into move mode, right click, go to extrude dose in until this top part is about the width of the neck of the rim of a bottle. So there's on one side showing, so let's go to intrude options, go create create caps, and it will fill out all the caps that you originally had. So that's looking like something. Like a bottle at least. Let's level these edges because they're a bit sharp. U in edge mode, U we'll do the same with this top one and this inner edge here and this other inner edge. Let's go to M and velo We don't need as many subdivisions just keep it to maybe one or two but minus one there. When we subdivide it, it will all kind of it will all make sense then. All right. Well, let's do that now. Subdivide it. Let's name it first, bottle. And if you hold down t, click on this. Yeah, click on this icon here. If you hold on there, you'll see lots of other options, but we don't need those just yet. Let's keep it on one, one, because it really doesn't make a lot of difference. Well, let's keep it on two because these edges are still in need of a bit of smoothing like that. Okay. Okay, let's just actually disable subdivision for a minute and we'll get this bottle neck ready while we're here. So go back into edge There's a few ways we could do this, but let's just bevel that. Go to face mode, UL, these, these faces. Let's extrude these out of it. Okay. Let's take this middle edge. U L and scale that up of it. Again, we press L there by mistake twice, so actually changes the axis point. So just click up in there again. Let's scale this out of it. Okay. The reference is slightly different, so get these upper edges and the lower edges and also in here as well. Just try to match these to the size of this rim here on the bottle, if you can see that there. It's more like that. And this one I'm bringing out a bit more. With the subdivision, pretty much does it already. Looks a Let's just add another level here. And here. Because nothing in real life is perfectly sharp. I'm not sure what it's doing. Well, if that doesn't work, you can just do it manually. It happens sometimes. Okay. Add a line here. And a line. If you're kind of clipping through your model there, press control D to go to project setting and press display, medium, put it to small, and then you're not going to get that clipping and you consume it a bit more. Let's just do the same under here. Tighten that edge up and then put it back into the subdivision. And there we go, we got the lip there. That looks more or less good enough. Surely, with a bit more time, I would spend more time refining that, which I am because part of the job. Details are very important and just kind? Let's just level this one more time. Ms working now, so. Perfect. Okay. There we go. That's our bottle neck. All done all good. Next, we'll move on to the lit. 5. Modelling the Lid: For the lib, we're going to use pretty much the same procedure, or a similar procedure. Let's hide the bottle first, go into object mode. If you press control and t, then this will change both of the render and viewport visibility at the same time. Yeah. So let's make a lib. Start with a cylinder again. Bring that down. We already have the dimensions pretty much ready so we can just match it to the image this time. Let's try this tag again. If you press control and drag the tag with nothing selected. You can put it on here and just press go to y frame mode lines. So that looks about right. Let's drag that down. We don't need so many height subdivisions, so let's put that just to one. Okay. Just drag that through in here. That changes the height in the few port. Right. So same procedure, press C to go into editable, make the object editable. Let's call it lid. Go to edge mode, U L, and let's just level this top corner. Maybe 0.7 twice. Yeah, maybe 0.6. Let's just see if that's matching. 0.07. That's fine. Let's go down here, go to polygon selection mode. Let's just make this visible again so we can see what we're doing. Select these bottom polygons coach a scale mode, hold down control and then just drag that in. That will just add more polygons as you're scaling it in. Let's do that again, but with a move tool. Control, go to move, and then go to control and drag that up. It's just a really quick way to extrude something sometimes. Control G. G, you can see how far up it is. Make it a bit higher. You can't really see that part anyway, but let's try and keep it roller as much as we possibly can. Okay. Um. All right. Just bevel this again and this. M S, all you can do it through in the menu. And 0.15. A 0.15. Well, 0.015 in this case. All right. Let's subdivide that. This lid part here, we need to subdivide the inner part as well. So let's do that. There we go. Nice and neat. Just drag it out a little bit. The overall size. We've lost a bit of the volume with the subdivisions. Okay. Perfect. Okay. 6. Pills and Simulation: Okay. Next, I'm going to show you how to model the pill. Okay. So let's just idle these. Let's create a capsule. Shrink it down. Make sure it's about the same size as a pill might look in a real bottle. Let's make it a bit longer. And a bit smaller. I guess. Like that. It. Right. Let's isolate that. Go to frame on shaded mode. Looks about right. So we need to make sure this has something exactly halfway down the middle, like an edge there Because we're going to put this to editable. And we're going to grab this bottom half here. And a tiny amount because that's how real pill might look. I guess real pills would usually have wouldn't be quite perfectly equal on both sides because they bit overlapping slightly, so let's bring this up a bit. There you go. Keeping it low poly is good because when it comes to the next step, we're going to pour a bunch of these pills, rename it into the bottle, bullet using rigid body dynamics. Okay. All right. So let's make a copy of the bottle and we'll hide the other one. It's going to be that the proxy we're going to use as a container to turn it into a bullet container, right click, go to bullet, and collide the body. Okay. It's automatically use a static mesh. It's not moving. It's not going to have any animation or motion on it. It will just act as a collide, basically, something for the rigid bodies to bounce off. With a quick test, I'll add a rigid body collider to the first pill there and then press F to start. Just make sure it works. It's not actually colliding properly because this has to do with the scene scale. Many of the problems that come up when using simulation dynamics is the scale of the scene. So All right. To change that, you need to go to press Control D, to go to project. Go to the bullet tab expert. Let's bring the scene scale down to 1 centimeter because that's the kind of scale we're working at. So let's try that again, see if it works. Still, nothing. Strike adding more steps per frame because it's all make it more accurate in the simulation. It's still not working. Let's strike adding the visualization, so we can see what exactly is happening. Collide seems all right. Everything seems to be working fine. It's bring down the collision margin to 1.1. That looks, doesn't it? That looks about right. Yeah. So obviously, the collision margin is Yeah. Something very complicated. I'm not going to try and explain. So basically, make sure you have the same settings as I do here. Maybe put that back to one and see if it still works. Yeah, that's fine. Okay. So that's got our basic colliders in the right position. Let's pour these in as if we're pouring it from another container. And this will act as the default position of each pill when it comes to rendering and texturing. To do this, let's create an emitter. And the pill. Well, let's make it small first, nice and small. So on quite small scale here as small as you can, without it becoming invisible. Turn that 90 degrees. Just put this inside here like that and make the pill a child of the emitter. Might as well set that to zero on the position, it's in the same position there in weld space. Then we go to the emitter particle show objects. So when you press play, it will start spitting out lots of these pills. Okay. Let's switch off the visualization here so we can see a bit better. Okay. There we go. This doesn't matter where this can either be on the emit or on the object itself. So we can make the objects a lot faster if we go to 25, for example, 45 and birth rate. And the stop omission, let's put that to 300 because we need to fill it up all the way to the top. And let's make our timeline longer to 300. Now, let's sit back and see what happens. Okay. It looks like it's going to take a while. So let's just do even more let's 800 per frame. Try that. There we go. Just see how long it takes to fill it up and then we can cache it to that frame number. Okay. All right. I'm going to make the pill a bigger. Save a bit of time. And I guess they would be slightly bigger in my life too. Okay. Try that make it even more, 150 per per frame. And let's see. It's spilling up a lot quicker. Okay. That's about there. So let's cache the simulation to about frame 150. And then go to cash. This will bake in the entire animation, so you don't need to simulate it every time. Bake objects. Wait for a bit. Take about a minute, usually. I'll get slower and slower as it reaches to the end because there are more objects being generated. The further it gets through the simulation. Okay. So now if we scrub it through with a time line, it will just play like this. I'm going to call this one, the final frame. C there's no overlapping pills on the side. If if you have anything anywhere that you don't want, then we can get rid of it in the next step, which I'll show you now. So I'm just going to bake these as a single object because everything's position how I like it. We don't need to worry about UV mapping because they're going to have a single solid shader applied to the whole thing. Okay. And middle placomter that will select both the emitter and the mesh underneath and go to connect objects. Okay. Give it a minute. Okay. Maybe very likely for crash. Let's see. It's crashed. Okay. Let's try it. Again. All right. Let's try. Hopefully, it won't crash. I'll do this. Let's save this. Save this as a new scene file for safety. All right. Let's just play that through to the end. Hopefully, no problems. It seems to be playing a bit more smoothly. And let's just try connecting it again. There we go. Well, that seems to have worked at this time. Okay, so we have that deselected. Now, if we isolate this, we'll see all these pills laid out in the way we want them, they might be in a real pill box without having to move every single pill manually. Okay. We don't need the rigid body there anymore. If you do want to want to make the pills, then, well, you know, you can use similar techniques to this firing out shooting up in the air, exploding out like a fountain, anything you want really. But that's the basics of rigid body dynamics that you have there. Let's get back to our original view. Switch off the proxy. Switch on the bottle, the lid. Next, we'll move on to texturing. Before I do that, I'm going to create another scene file. I'm going to save this as it is, create another modeling. I'll call this one dynamic then I'm going to delete everything I don't need anymore. We have that in the file, so don't need the proxy. We do need the label, which I'll be V in the next video. And we don't really need the plane anymore. So, I'll hide that for now just in case we need it again. I don't think we will, but you never know. Okay, it looks like a pretty decent shape. You can go and refine everything. Just take this top part of the bottle and bring it in a little bit more. So go to loop edge loop. And just grab these a couple of you take this middle loop here, press. And then just deselect this one here, and then you can scale that in on the Z x axis, bring that in subdivision. Just to make it match up a bit more tightly there. There we go. 7. UV Unwrap the Label: Okay. Modeling the label. Let's make a copy of the bottle itself. Just the bottle. Click on this little hexagon icon. We can isolate that so we can't see anything else. Let's just grab these main outward facing polygons on the bottle. If we go, L. Select all these edge these face loops. Press invert your selection and press the leap. So we're deleting everything that we're not using. When you look at the original, that's going to be over the top there. When you subdivide it, it will pretty much match the dimensions of the original bottle. First, we'll have to actually drag it out a little bit. So it's not overlapping it. Okay. Back into The isolated view. Let's just deselect the subdivision. We have the bottle. Well, let's call this label. We have the label there. We just need to make sure the UVs are correct. So when it comes to texturing, everything is going to be where it's supposed to be. Press U V edit mode here. If you go to textures up here, you might need to drag this out to find that menu. Press UV map, and that will show you the actual UV mapping. On the model itself. So as you can see, they all need to be perfectly square. On the model itself, they look more rectangular, if we just go to normal model mode, no wire frame. All we need to do is shrink these vs down to make sure that they're all square on the model. Let's go to polygon mode, select. There's a little tool here, UV transform. This will save you a lot of time. Hold down shift on the bottom part here, and So if you find it, it will switch between scale and rotation and position, but make sure you've got the actual scale part like highlighted there. And then holding down shift, just drag that up. Until these look square as they possibly can be. If you scale it out of bit as well, you know, scale it out proportionally, then you can see a bit more clearly how square they are. You know, that looks all right. I think maybe they need to be a bit a bit less square. I mean, that needs dragging a little bit more, so I did that a bit too much. Let's just try again. Yeah. Looks good. So just bring that to the middle somewhere. And this will allow us to export this image, this UV map into another program like Photoshop. Where are we? This one. To do that. It's not the most straightforward procedure in cinema four D. In other programs like Myer or three D is a lot quicker, a lot more straightforward, but cinema four D still tends to kind of lag in this area. It doesn't tend to be used for modeling as much as some other three D packages. The best way I found to do this is to create a new material. So just drag that up. Add this to your label. Okay. Go to Window. Lay manager, window, color settings. In your material, go to texture, create a new texture. Make this the dimensions that you want it to be. So we're going to call this label. Doesn't make a lot of sense, but this is how it's done. Press. This will create a new background. Go into layer in the UV edit window, go to create U V Mayer, which is what this is. In your color settings, change that to a light green, a color that's not going to get used so much in the scene itself. Then we go to right click texture save texture as we're going to save it as a PSD file, which we can use to edit in photoshop or after effects. Let's do that. Label PSD. I'm going to be using after effects because I find it a lot quicker to work with. Let's just say if that worked okay. And Okay. Label, PSD, and we want editable layer styles, yes. Four K, Yes, label. Yeah. Although we go, there's a label. It didn't take the inside edges, but in this case, we don't really need them. Because we're just going to be matching the label to this part here. Let's make this a bit more visible. So like we had before. Let's just generate a fill. Nice and green. So it's easier to see. And then we're just going to put our texture graphics and stuff for the label of the bottle in this green box here. Now we know where to put it. Okay? 8. Texturing the Label: So for the label itself, this is what I've come out with. Well, yeah, this is with the mass version anyway. So this is just me throwing together something. I'm not really graphic designer, but I just thought I would copy a few other people's ideas and, you know, put something together for the sake of the course. I called it F supplement because I don't know Fs is banished for strawberry and, you know, was a bit bit dry on ideas and that side of things. But as we say, I was making it up as I went along so. You also need to when you do this, you'll need to actually copy this twice and create a mask of the actual label itself. So this will stand out from the from the bottle. Okay. So once you finish your design, you might want to do it in after effects or even in design photoshop or online using Canva, as templates out there for free. When you've got something that you're happy with, and as long as it's within the UV guidelines that you've just created, it should import into cinema four D pretty straightforwardly. Okay. 9. Texturing the Lid: For the lid, we're going to be adding these little ridges, slightly better grip than this kind, even though it looks kind of funky, but that's obviously not being subdivided that model, which is a model, obviously. And a nice little detail like that will help sell the realism of the model. So it's a good technique to know, and we're going to be using displacement maps. I'm going to be doing this with as little UV as possible because for a model as simple as this, it's not really necessary. So yeah, let's disable the subdivisions, go to lid. The ridges are going to be we're actually going to make two materials, with the displacement and one identical but with no displacement for the top part and the inside part and the bottom part. So the first material, it's just going to be a glossy material. So if we go to octane material creates glossy. Go to the lid, apply it there. That's an old one. Just set this to black. And if we can kind of get a rough idea. Well, we can change these later. It won't take too long to do, but just make it look more or less plastic there. Put the roughness about say 0.6. A 0.6 for now, we can check it. We can adjust it later. So that's going to be flat. Another material called corr Okay. So we're just going to use a couple of texture selections to assign both materials to a different part of the same model. So subdivisions off to polygon mode. L select these two parts. In fact, does it go all the way to the bottom? No, it doesn't let's create another another subdivision there. So we go to a loop path cut to about a little bit higher than there. Somewhere like Okay. Let's say about there. Okay. And then we only need to select these middle parts and the top part. It goes more or less to the top. Yeah, that's about right. So let's deselect this part. The only parts we have this is, the only parts we have selected now are the parts that we want to apply the displacement to. Okay. Let's go to select Store selection. Call this one D. Then go I invert selection, D select it, select it again. Otherwise, it will keep selecting the other selection tag. It can be a pain, but you get used to it. Go to select again, store selection, call that one flat. All right. Let's just add we've got the flat one here. Just add the grit as well. Let's put that in here. So make sure we've got the right selection tag applied to the right material. Okay. Just move those more in order, so we don't get lost. All right. So For the grip. I'm going to do this all in cinema four D procedurally. So let's go to displacement. Well, first, let's go to the node editor. Displacement. Set that to about two k. We're going to well set this quite low not 0.05 because it's really low scale anyway. So Go to texture. We're going to need a baking texture for how we're going to do this. Because we're going to use a 40s procedural texture generators to just create some stripes, which we're going to use as the displacement information. Let's go. Texture is going to be. If I can remember. Let's try here and set this easiest to see. Go to surfaces and tiles. There it is. We can almost see what's happening now. Figure out to get. I guess the right length would be would depend on the, you know. On the circumference of the lid, but I'm just going to eyeball it because, you know, we're artists, not mathematicians, not necessarily, not all of us anyway. Set these to white. So we're just using black and white. It will take a while to update using the baking texture, but this is just part of the does make it simpler in the long run. Let's just see. So ties color one tile is going to be b one is going to be white. Okay. No, I don't even think we need the baking texture in this case. Let's just try without it. Yeah, I don't believe we do need it in the end. So let's just scale this global scale, set this like 500. For now, remove the bb, remove the grout If it's like a real tile, w UV scales that to be high or low. That needs to be lower, call that ten for now. And this needs to be super high because we're just going to have stripes this way. There we go. So set scale lower. It's doing something, isn't it? Set that even higher. Don't need to be there. Very much. Delete this baking texture. Put back on subdivisions. So it's coming out, we want it to go in. So let's just invert these instead of white, we'll call that gray because gray Gray has no effect. 50% gray will have zero effect. We want this to come inward set that to value zero. So that's the effect we kind of have overlapping on itself. This is to do, actually, yeah, this is to do with the epsilon, which can be very awkward if you need to obtain. If you're in path tracing or or in direct lighting, the epsilon will do something if you decrease this, then you'll get rid of some of these terfacts that you're seeing there. Very helpful thing to know. Sticking in or out. Let's try changing the displacement value. Still coming out. We wanted to go in, don't we? So change the mid level. That's more like it. We can blur this as well. It's a bit smoother. Yeah, that's nice. Right. Let's make these tiles a bit more fine. So at the moment, it's at 1%. Let's call it 0.1%. Try 2%. 0.1 0.5. Otherwise, we can't see anything at all. Okay. That covers the basics of it. Add a bit more smoothness, a bit less displacement because it's quite aggressive there. Okay. And when it comes to coloring, everything, it's all kind of come together. You've got your grip there. You can even take this top edge up of it as well because with the subdivisions, or just add another edge here to tighten that edge of it. KL. Let's see how that looks. That looks better. Okay, and there's your lid texture. Obviously, when we go back to coloring these, we'll have to do it both at the same time, but it won't take very long. This is just for basic workflow. Cool. 10. Applying the Label Texture: Okay, now we've got the label ready, the label designed and printed. We can add that to the label match here. Let's make that visible again. We've got the old UV material there. That's just likely so we can see the only parts that we need. Let's create a new material. Diff call that label. Put this onto the label basic node editor Diffuse image texture, create a new image texture, and his label. How's that worked? More or less. Because there are some parts that we don't even need that's still on the label, so we need to mask out the parts that we don't need. Luckily, we created a mask a mask texture, a mask texture for that. That is the label. There we go. So there's a label. We're getting there. Doesn't look too bad when it's inside, does it? Okay. We can add a couple of adjustments to this if it's slightly stretched, so let's go to transform. We can apply this to both of both the mask and the diffused texture. And then just stretch, squeeze this in a little bit because some of the texts a bit distorted there, I believe. That should be all right. Maybe we don't need that at all, we put these two clamp on you, then it shouldn't be repeating that way. There we go. So it's not repeating that texture and also the mask, that wants to be legacy gamma one and so that's a float Because it thinks it's a color texture in a certain color space, which is a different story altogether. If you know, you know. So, this one still needs to be 2.2 the colored and that's not a float. That's just a normal texture. But this one is a float. Black and white values are usually floats, roughs metallic, anything like that. Set it to float and set the game to one. Anything else, color texture or linear color space, so set that to 2.2. And it's a normal texture, a normal map, but a normal type of texture. Okay. There we go. 11. Creating the Bottle Material: Okay, so we're going to be looking at the transparent plastic material in this video. To begin with, we want to remove all the lights from the scene, all the default lights. So to do that, go to octane settings settings, environment, set this to black. Now if you render rendering the image viewer, it should all go to black. If you still see some red kind of light there, that's coming from the image plane that we used earlier. In fact, we can actually get rid of this now. Okay. All right. Let's get organized, put these into a null, called the meshes. And before we create our first light, let's make a quick infinity plane. This is the kind of thing that we'll use in photography studios to remove any kind of artifacts in the background. And so I'm doing that by creating a polygon, stretch it out a little bit press C to make it editable edge mode, move hold control, and then drag this up. And then take this edge here. Right click, Bevel. Then we've got a bit more fall off on the background there. Less jagged. That will make more sense when we start rendering it. Before we do that, let's just create a camera. So go to objects obtain camera. Make sure that's enabled. Go to set the focal length to 50 millimeters. That seems to be the standard with a product shots like this. Let's just make sure that's pretty much central zero one -90 degrees. There we go. That's pretty much flat. Okay. We can always change this later. Actually, before we do anything else, let's just change the aspect ratio of the render view. That's going to be set this to ten 80 by ten 80 for now. Now I'll update in the window here. Let's create a dummy light. This is going to be a practice light that we're going to be using to test the actual bottle material. So if you have the latest version of octane, you'll have this octane direct light, which I'm going to use. If you don't have that, you can you can use anything really. You can use Well, yeah, I would go with the octane daylight and just move that around until it looks about right. We're going to be working with path tracing mode. That's PT. And just quickly going to You render settings and just set that a bit lower. 1,000 for now? Okay. Okay, let's start creating the material. So go to materials, create, Specular G material editor call that bottle. And drag that to the subdivision part there. As you can see the refraction looks a bit crazy there. It's a bit too much distortion there. The reason for that is when we modeled the bottle, when we extruded it inwards, we were actually reversing the polygon. So all the normals of the bottle of each face are facing inwards rather than outwards, which is why it's causing this artifact there. So to fix that, we'll just go to bottle face mode, select. I'm using Shift C. It brings up all the commands and all the tools in the application. And then go to reverse normals. I'll take a minute to warm up. If it's the first time I used it in your session, and then go to the command here, Command mesh, reverse normals. And that's fix that part. Right. So it looks, you know, it looks good as it does, but it doesn't quite look like plastic. To me, that looks more like glass. So what's the difference between glass and plastic? Well, you might want to change the roughness for a start. But that's more for clouded plastic. That's not really effect that we're going for because plastic will change its visibility based on how thick the plastic is basically. Anyway, I'm going to be using subsurface scattering to achieve this effect. So going to medium, scattering go back to the node editor. I'm going to create an absorption float texture. Add this to scattering as well. Set this to one for now. And in your scattering medium, you can actually decide on the density like the thickness of the glass itself of the plastic itself. Less density will be far more transparent, higher density, it will get more clouded. Another thing we need to do here is to make sure we have enough specular depth in the render settings or some of the details are going to get lost. I usually use about 24 samples. You can see the difference from a low. Yeah. So there's no transparency there at all to slightly higher. Then you're not going to miss any potential detail there. Okay. I'm going to keep this at let's try one 50. It's slightly more clouded at the bottom, but let's say 125. Okay. That does make a difference. It's hard to notice from there. But if you remove that. I'll just do a quick compare so you can see the difference it makes store in the buffer. Plug this into the medium again. Well, it's quite subtle at this level. If you find yourself using plastic acids like this, it's going to be much more noticeable. The more you do it. So you see that looks more like glass. It's way more sharp, the refraction in there. And then with the plastic, we have you know, it's a lot more smooth. There's a fall off over the distance through the object. So, let's go with that. So disable the render buffer comparison. That will take a bit will take a bit longer to render with scattering, but it will also look a lot more realistic. Okay. If you want to change the color of the plastic. You can actually replace the float texture with with an RGB spectrum. Which, with no color at all, with white or black, it will be the same as a float texture. But if you start adding a bit of saturation, and that will tint the plastic itself. But we're going to keep that with the basic float texture for now. So there we go. Okay. 12. Creating the Pill Material: Video, we're going to actually look at finishing the materials for the scene, which are going to be the pills itself. Let's create a new material glossy material. Call it pills add it to the pills. Let's just remove let's just hide the bottle on the label for now. Add the lid as well. You might think, well, if you want a white peel, that would do. That's fine. But really, all you need to do is kind of change the color to something that sees the product type of product to trying to promote I guess with a strawberry a strawberry bill or a red bill. Red might work the best. So I'm just going to add the bottle to see how it works. See how it looks inside. To me, that looks all right. B, even make it pinkish. But I think after a bit of testing, I think red looks best. Let's just add a bit more roughness to it. 1.1. It's not completely reflective. Actually, try 1.5. That's more rubbery. That's not quite right. 1.2. Let's try 0.15. There we go. That looks fine. 13. Lighting: Looking at lighting now. Let's get rid of this direct light here to begin with. And we're going to be working with a three point lighting setup, which generally consists of three lights, your key light, your fill light, and your back light. This is the most basic lighting setup in any photography studio, and this is what I'm going to be using here. And it usually works 90% of the time. So let's have a go. Objects, lights. We're going to be using area lights. I'm going to create a target, and this is going to be pointed directly at this null. So that means if we let's go into a perspective here. Camras perspective. Just close that window there. When we move this light around and shrink it down a bit of a bit too big. This is always going to be pointing at that knoll there as you can see. Okay. So usually for well, the basic principle of lighting, a small, smaller the light, the harder the shadows. I try to show a bit more clearly how that would work. So really small light, quite sharp shadows. Even smaller, even sharper, but we need to account for that with the brightness. So the intensity of the light. Yeah. Me even brighter can see. Yeah. Quite a sharp shadow because it's quite a small light. That's why sunlight or direct sunlight usually has much sharper shadows because it's coming from a really long distance, relative to the earth the actual size of that is very small. Even though it's about 1,000,000 times bigger than the earth. But anyway, The opposite of that is the bigger the light, the softer the shadows. So if we set this to something quite low like ten. And you'll see when I start increasing the size of the light, shadows will get a lot smoother. So this is a good thing to know, one of the basic principles of lighting. I'm going to call this the key light the main light? I'm going to set that slightly above the subject and slightly in front. So going to be more or less behind the camera, but slightly above the subject. So let's push that up to say 50. Maybe that's too hot, try 25. We don't want to get too much of that white washing out because it's going to be burning too hot. Another thing we can do is to go to this label itself and reduce the gamma the power slightly. I get a little bit less white. Just for now. We'll come back to this with some other techniques later, but I say that's 0.9. I should do something. I bring this down a little bit more so 20. Yeah, that's our main light there. I bring it down, then we're going to get different parts of the bottle highlighted and so forth. Yeah. This will work for now. The next light we're going to use is the fill light. I'm just going to rename that. Switch off the key light. And we have only the fill light, bring this onto the other side. Bring this onto the other side of the scene. You're the one still there. Take this is a lot bigger. So it's going to cost much softer shadows as opposed to the key light, which has more defined shadows. In fact, I might go and make that even smaller of it in a minute. But yeah, the fill light. That this far away. Soft shadow there, maybe even bigger. Yeah. Let's turn this down to say five, which just barely visible, but it will fill out any of the dark shadow areas that we can that are getting lost in the rest of the lighting setup. So let's try this with the key light. With the fill light he's doing something there. Subtle but 1.5. Yeah. Also for the key light, I'm going to make this even smaller really define the shadows. Smaller and the noise brighter. If I bring this around towards the front of the camera, maybe a bit higher up. Still. Then the shadow will be within the scene as well, so it's not going to be disappearing when it comes to render times higher up, then Yeah. What about that? And we're worried about 75. I think this is back down to 50 was good. This even say one. Okay. All right. The next part would be defining the actual shape. It's called creating a rim light or a back light, which we can use to make the product or the object, or the subject stand out from the background and really show the contours and all the shape of the model itself. We just take another one, call it rim light. Bring this down. Let's get rid of this target because we can rotate this ourselves. Switch off the fill and the key. I'm to delete the direct right there too. Okay. Let's bring it a bit closer. You can see this is interacting with the edges of the bottle. If we move the camera a bit higher as well, we'll see the effect it has on the top of the bottle too, which can be good for showing as much as we can. Keep this as it is for now. So we're just going to be focusing on the sides this side of the side of the lid mainly. That could be a bit too high, maybe a bit too big. Take a bit of fiddling this kind of thing. Sure it's straight. Zero to zero, one, as. Okay. Let's make it invisible. Here we go. And maybe a bit less. Let's depend on the other lights as well. So fill, key light. We can see that's intersecting with the ground there, which we don't want. So let's just make this a bit smaller. Since we're concentrating on the lid, it doesn't need to be over the whole bottle. There we go. We get some good highlights on the corners there. Maybe even a bit brighter. Maybe 165. Yeah. Looks like something. Lastly, the background is a bit gray looking. So I'll just make another light. Well, we can use we have a floor light, we had a floor plane somewhere. Yeah, I have got rid of that. Let's just create new material, call it a diffuse, call this add this to the polygon, call that even though it's an infinity plane, we'll call it. So that's a white. I think 0.95 is good. It's just get this rim like, maybe make the rim like even smaller so it's not coming into the affecting the ground too much. Yeah. That's actually what we're here. Let's just make the label a bit lower cause there's a big gap at the bottom that's kind of bothering me. So maybe we put the lebl back there. Okay, looking good. 14. Texturing the Label: Okay. Another thing I forgot to mention before. Let's just look at the label itself. It's kind of a flat material there. There's not much detail. It's just like white and the color. So we can make that look a bit more papery by adding some extra details and fibers to it. I've found some or the best place defined assets like this. I would recommend is Quicksel bridge from Quicksel Megs guns. There are a turn of three assets here, which you can use in cinema four D on real engine or, you know, Blender, I guess, most of the three D packages when it loads. I have these already just downloaded to my hard drive. So in my label here, when that loads, I'll show you a bit better. I might need to try that again. Um, Yeah. So at the moment, we just have the diffuse and then the opacity mask there. But we can add a bit of roughness and add a bit of, you know, normal detail to it as well. Here we go. Well, anyway, here's Quixel Bridge. To make it run well, I just look at this quickly first. To make this run in cinema four D, go to export settings and then make sure you have the cinema four D plug in installed. And there are all sorts of different programs you can use and it can export them directly. And then your export settings need to be sorry, download settings, you need to make sure you have the PPR roughness workflow working, so albedo metal and normal and yeah, sometimes displacement and sometimes capacity if you need it. But yeah, that might take a bit of filling to set up an account, but I definitely recommend taking the time to make that work. Another thing, if you're using octane, if you have the standard renderer enabled, it will import it as a standard material. Which will take a lot of fiddling, to update it to an octane material. So but they've actually implemented a way to do that quickly. So if you go to octane render there, make sure that's enabled before you import it, then the whole material is going to be set up for octane rather than the standard renderer. Okay. Something to keep in mind. But for now, I already have these materials, these textures on my computer. Here we go. That one was roughness. We need to make sure roughness is gamma at one, and that's actually an information texture. So this is f zero is no effect, one is full effect, or black is zero, white is one. So if it's white, it will have a full effect of roughness. If it's black, it will have zero roughness, and that's the principle of most of these float textures. Let's normal as well. Image, normal. And then if we look at the render here to see if it makes any difference. So, it's making some difference. Yeah, the lights being more diffuse, is being spread out more evenly. It looks less like cartoony and, you know, render. So it looks a bit more natural that way. Which is what we're going for. Let's go back into the camera. We could change the the tying of the textures as well to make the detail of bit more fine, but I don't think we need it in this case. Just do a quick test. Transform. So use a transform node, plug it into both the roughness and the normal and just see how you can see if you bring it up, it will know a broader detail. We bring it down. It will be finer, but I think in this case, we're fine with the default settings. Okay, quick look at the lid. Now we've got a light setter. We can just make sure the lids, right kind of plasticity. I think this looked better at not 0.5, actually, the roughness. Same on the lid grip because we did these two separate materials so we could avoid UV mapping. Um. Yeah. I think that looks better. Okay, so that's your label material, your lid plastic material, and your bottle transparent plastic material along with the pills. Let's add a couple more details just to sell it a bit further. We'll do that next. 15. Adding Scene Elements: Okay. Before we bring anything else into the scene, I'm just going to try to make the background a bit brighter because it looks a bit gray at the moment. And we want that to stand out a bit more really emphasize the product itself. A quick way to do that is to actually make this infinity plane hit the background a lot closer, so it's reacting more with the lights directly. So just going to scale this down. Bring it in like that. Scale it in as well. So that's having an effect already? Yeah, we're going to avoid the shadow bending at the wall. I mean, you might want the shadow at the wall as well. As long as it sells the product doesn't make a lot of difference, what you do with it, but yeah, this is one way to achieve that look. I'll be adding a few more effects afterwards. But first, I'm going to add just a couple of extra elements to the scene to, sell it a little bit more. Most of these are renders have got some kind of fruit involved, something to sort of illustrate the kind of flavor, or the kind of You know, boys replicating, make it look a bit more inviting, something familiar, something natural and healthy, which is what it's trying to be associated with rather than, you know, a chemical diet pill, which probably is what it really is. So let's have a look. The B well, I found a nice strawberry free strawberry on a sketch fab If you don't have an account here, I recommend you and you create one because you can sell your own models here and you can get a lot of free models as well and some good paid ones too. This is one I'm using. If you want to go really high end or if you want to splash out a bit and invest it, then CZ trader, I'd recommend you can get some really nice models of strawberries and all different fruits there. So anyway, once you've got that there, just click download. I've already got that on my drive, so I will bring this in. Strawberry. I think Morango is Portuguese for strawberry or is it Italian, I don't know. One of the two. So some of the stuff that came in with it directional light text group SeocaG rid of those? Rename it. Straw very All right. There we go. We've got a bit of a metallic strawberry there, so it needs some textures. Most materials will come in by default as the standard cinema four D renderer, but you can update those quickly. Just to convert those materials to octane materials, just go materials, convert. What you've done that, usually just press, remove unused materials in the material menu. Then you get rid of unwanted data that you're not using. There we go. It looks even more cyber punky now, but that's not what we want. So let's go to the node editor of black material. Get rid of this these material layers. Keep this texture image texture node. And then let's load in the. So just as the two textures here, a bump map and a color map. So we'll add the rest of the details ourselves. Pump Okay. How does that look? All right. Is this come out as a diffuse or as we need a glossy material because strawberries are a bit more glossy. Got some moisture under the surface and stuff. You could go with full subsurface cattering on this if you want. But I'm just going to keep it simple because it's more decorative. It's a bump map, you don't want that to have the linear gamma, keep that to one. If you want you can change that type to float as well. Save a bit more data. You got a nice juicy strawberry there. Shrink it down a bit. Take that. Just squash. Just put it down on the floor. Because bigger maybe. Yeah, bigger even how big a strawberry is competed this bill. Bottle bit high. Yeah. Luckily, there's only one of these if you were using more than one strawberry or a few different Objects. You could try using this does something or even this tool. Oh, hang on. This one has a Yeah, for some reason, this strawy is animated. It's not even animated, but it has key frames all over it. So yeah. When I try and move it, it will just not update unless I delete those keyframes. Start again. Well, let me just try with this tool quickly. Quite a new tool in clima four D, so let's just see if it works today. Put this on the floor. Oh, we go perfect. So yeah, this is the dynamic place tool, so kind of creates a temporary rigid body. While you're moving your object. And it can just do all that kind of boring repetitive fiddly work for you. While keeping it all natural and where it should be. There's a bit of a gap there. That's because of our scenes goal. So that's a nor 0.1 happens. That's a point, happens that's more like it. We can just adjust this afterwards. This is not for animation or anything, but Yeah. Okay. Just going back to the normal the move tool. For some reason Y is locked, so just unlock that. Bring this down. There we go. Strawberry. So it's hugging the bottle. Brilliant. Okay, looks good. 16. Cleaning the Scene: Okay. Before I move on to the render settings. I'm just going to make a few refinements here. I think the strawberry, maybe the bump was a little bit too much. So I'll try saying that to not 0.01. 0.005. It's hard to notice there, but I will make sense a bit later. Another thing, I still feel it's a little bit too gray, a little bit too washed out, so I think we can boost the color contrast a bit more. Good way to do this is going into the camera image and you can adjust the exposure here. That's a bit overall, and then the gamma I can play with these saturation as well, definitely. What I tend to do is work with one of these LUTs that are built in here. The one that stands out mostly for me, is this one, the DSC number five. It's really kind of boost the contrast and everything. Yeah. Another thing that you will see rendering white products against a white background is that often it will be difficult to differentiate the product itself from the white background. And most clients will ask to have it against the white background because, you know, Amazon shop if they use all of that for you know, the basic images. So how to get around this, even though it's not fully it's not too bad there. I mean, it's purely white backgrounds. But we are going to make it purely white later. So let's just have a look at this for now. If we go to this material, we can create a fall off. So as the color goes towards the edges here, it will fade off into a darker color. So I'll show you how to do that. Going to label node editor. Okay. Okay, I'll start with a fall off. And this is basically the basic principle of what we're doing principle. Put that in to the diffuse as you can see it is kind of black. But if you look at the edge here, it's actually whiter. We can change the skew factor here, this is like a fernL effect based on the camera angle to the object. In three D, it's helpful. If you reverse those values, so minimum one maximum at zero, And you can adjust the fall off there with the skew factor. Make sure this is on normal versus i can change different modes do different things don't really know what they do. I'll keep this relatively low so well, not too low. So it separates the label from the background. I think six by the f is a good number. And maybe the maximum value can be a bit higher. It's not going to black, essentially, but more of a gray. Maybe 0.1. Okay. So now we just need to multiply this by the texture. So I go to multiply No. White is one multiplied by white is one multiplied by black is zero, so it'll actually when it wants to. Well, that's funny because I use the roughness instead. So let's try with the diffuse. There we go. So quick comparison That's with it on. That's s it off. Hard to tell there. You know, I'll make this even kind of wide to fall off as well. Make it even more keep that to zero, actually. Yeah. So it does something. And that will definitely make more sense in sins with the white products. Yeah I think 0.2, that's fine. 17. Choosing the Render Settings: Okay. So let's have a look at our render settings now. Go to settings. I have that 1,000. That's fine for, you know, maybe a two k or one k image. I clamp, that's way too high set that one specular depth there 24 Rap salon. You know, we don't have any of those artifacts this time, so just keep that at 0.1 as it was. And that's really all we need to do in here. Those are things you can do with adaptive sampling. It's supposed to speed at render time, but I don't really find it does very much. And there we go. That will be our initial render. You can even just this? I mean, you can have it stand out a bit more the background can be even whitter This is in the scene itself. So this is not even going to be our final render fully. This isn't going to be our alpha channel background. We're going to do two renders, one against a studio backdrop studio background like this. And then we're going to do against a transparent background, but keeping the shadows, so we can add that to a different to a white background imposed in after effects. Okay. So before you do that, let's just get a render of this one first. Lock that ratio, save it somewhere. Renderer render to picture you are there. And then wait for, you know, how long you have the patients. This one, I'll take about 3 minutes. I'll come back to you in a minute. 18. Using a Transparent Background: Job. Turning removing this white background and just keeping the shadows. Okay. So to do that. Let's go to the floor material. C on common select shadow catcher. Okay. Let's just render that. It will all go black. Okay. That's because we don't have the afaanel switched on. Okay, Afaanel There it is. Okay, so this is shadow catch, shadow catch off. So this is the actual material itself. And with this switched on, it's only be catching the shadows and everything else will be just in the background, all in the upper. One thing we lose when we do this is some of the color information at the back. So you see the refraction changes here? Because it thinks the background is black now, which it is, but you know, that's where we set the background. You know, it's not unreasonable, but we have to tell it the background is white, even though you know it's black. So how do we do that? So we go to objects texture environment, pretty straightforward. We've got a nice white background, but it still thinks the environment there and the background there is white. So we need to change that to visible environment. Then we go to refractions. I keep the refractions from the original material and then switch off back plate. And there we have the same setup with the white backgrounds, but with the alpha channel, and everything where we want it to be. The strawberry looks a little bit more funny there. So let's just edit that a bit. If the specular specter is fine, the bump could use a little bit less bump on there. It's quite a sensitive number of this is, sometimes pool will do more there. Yeah. I think that looks good. I feel like that's standing out too much as well, sometimes from the pills. I feel like that could be a bit less saturated. Drawing too much attention away from the bottles. Let's create a color correction node and then just desaturate it slightly. 59.8. There we go. Complimentary Okay, once you got this rendered. Well, you can render this one out now. Just give it a name, bottle one Alpha. In fact, I'd usually use a PNG for with the Alpha channel. Without an Alpha channel. JPEG is fine. JP is small enough and they don't take up too much space on a computer for this kind of thing. Yeah, if you're doing high end V effect shots and stuff, then opening XR. But for this one, PNG with alpha, make sure you have Alpha channel enabled there as well as in opting settings. And, let's do a render. I'll come out black on the screen, but once it's been exported, once it's been saved, the paura will be there. So let's check it out in after effects in the next video. Okay. 19. Adding the Background: Okay. Back and after effects. We've got a bottle alpha that we just rendered. One K image, ten 80 by ten 80. It's right kick that, create a new composition. So as you can see, the transparent background has come in there. Perfectly fine. So now we can actually create a white solid background. Put that to the back. And there we go. Not too different from what you see on the website. The websites, tropif Amazon. Looks perfectly good to me. Let's boost up the color a bit. It's a little bit too dark still. I expand out a little bit more. There we go. Since we have this fall off it's just blending straight into the background. A bit more saturation. Yeah. I'm happy with that. 20. Final Thoughts: Okay. So that's the end of this course. I've gone through all the procedures and all the process and techniques of modeling and texturing and rendering, along with lighting, a very important skill in three D product rendering. And yeah, hopefully it's made your life slightly easier. Hopefully it's answered a lot of your questions. If you do have any more questions, or if you have any questions whatsoever, then please don't hesitate to leave it in the comments or drop me a message or an e mail. Also, if you have any requests for other courses, then, you know. Yeah. You can give me a shot on that as well. All the resources I've mentioned, I'll add to the information to the description of each video. And yeah, well, I really hope this makes a difference in your career, and you can send this to potential clients, get some marketing, get some promotion, a bit more exposure. Yeah. And if you get new client from this course, then yeah, good to know. All right. Good luck.