Model a Soda Can in Cinema 4D

1. Introduction: Welcome to this course on modelling a soda can in Cinema 4D. I'm Pete Merrick from Cleveland, ohio, and we'll guide you through this class. If you've ever wanted to learn the fundamentals of product visualization, this course will teach you the entire production workflow. From concept to final render. You will gain the skills necessary to create realistic product images. This is a beginner to intermediate course, and a basic understanding of Cinema 4D is user interface is recommended. In this series of lessons, we will cover a lot of topics to give you a solid understanding of the entire process. From gathering reference images and packaging as inspiration. The creative and technical steps involved with the 3D modeling the soda can using parametric primitives and make editable function point modeling and subdivision surface modeling the pop top using splines and conjunction with nerves objects. Creating a custom soda can labeled design with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. And applying materials using the store selections function. Creating a three-point light setup and seamless background will cover cameras composition and depth of field. Rendering using Cinema 4D is physical render engine and specifying Render Settings. Post-production techniques in Adobe Photoshop including blurs, sharpening, and vignettes. Three bonus lessons are included covering an array of composition in modelling, in additional post-production techniques. Ready to learn the entire product visualization process and roll today on Skillshare. 2. Inspiration: Before we jump into the 3D environment, Let's take a moment to check out some soda cans designs and some packaging that we could use as inspiration for our own work. This website that I'm on right now is called packaging of the world. If you go to Categories, beverages and soda, this will bring up a whole, whole bunch of different soda cans designs and you could check some of these out, get inspiration for the shape of the can, for the types of graphics. Use the topography, the illustration, that kind of stuff to gain some inspiration for your own work. So this is a cool little packaging design. Pretty different from most of the soda cans that you see on the market. If we go back, there's some other ones as well that are pretty nice. Here's a nice colorful design that utilizes 3D renders and some photography. You can also gain some inspiration for composition, for how they're rendering out the camera views of their different soda cans, how they're compositing different elements like some of these circles behind here, the layouts, the additional photography that they're using, that kind of stuff. It's really nice. Let's check out some other ones. Here's a cool one that just uses illustration. The entire soda cans, just a little bit of texts. But these look really nice. There's a really nice consistent field throughout all these canned designs. It's just one big graphic that they used, which is pretty cool. Go through here, check out some of these cans, gain inspiration, and try to define some sort of direction for your own project on through create an inspiration board for myself. While I'm modeling that way, I have some reference and it'll help me to create my own soda can. Once you get some inspiration, let's go through and find some reference images that we can use for modeling our Can. We just do a Google search? We can go soda can, front view. Go to Images. You'll find a whole bunch of images of just soda cans that are straight on. So you want to avoid images like this where you have a little bit of curvature to the top and the bottom. It's going to make it a little bit more difficult to model. You want to look for stuff that's pretty straight on and this has a little bit of curvature than the top and the bottom, but I think this would be a good one. So once you find some images, reference, if you could just right-click Save Image As saving this to your desktop, whatever. Then from there we'll import that image into Cinema 4D and start modeling. Other things that you might want to consider. Downloading our nutrition information. Just do another search. You'll find all kinds of little nutrition facts and stuff like that. You might want to even search for a PNG, so it's a transparent file that way it would be easier to composite into your design. 3. Modeling: The first thing we're gonna do for the soda KM project is create a project folder for ourselves. If we right-click create a new folder called a soda can. Let's open this up and we'll create three additional folders. One will be called scenes, on other one will be called renders. And another one, textures. You can place the files that you've downloaded for inspiration for the front view in this Textures folder. So now let's go into Cinema 4D. One thing that I wanted to point out real quick Was there are a few soda cans in the asset browser. So if I go into asset browser type in soda, you'll notice we have this, Can we have this CAN. One of the things that I wanted to mention is I don't want you to use either one of these two cans for this project. We're going to model this from scratch. These are perfectly modeled. They look really good, but you shouldn't use these for this project. I want you to learn from the ground up how to build this project yourself. The first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna go into the front view. And we're going to go up to View and configure down here in the attributes manager, right where it says back this back tab, there's this image tab. We can click here. We can go ahead and locate our front view file. Once we look at our file, we'll hit Open. Now what we wanna do is we want to scale this down to real-world scale. This grid is getting a little bit cumbersome to look at. You know, there's a lot going on. So I'm just gonna go to my, my filter and turn off this work, work plane. Now it's nice and clean. Now I'm going to use a cylinder to scale this image. So let's make this cylinder height about six inches. As you could see, that reference image is way too big. Make this CAN about six inch height. And now we're gonna go back to View, configure. And now I'm going to scale this image down. So the height of that CAN is about the height of that cylinder. Here we have 19, Let's try 20. And that's looking pretty good. And then I'm gonna take this cylinder. I'll just grab these little nodes right here. Just make it smaller until it lines up with that image. Now we want to put enough height segments in this so we can cut into this and shape the can. So let's just say we'll need 1234567. Let's just put an eight segments. Segments. Now what we're gonna do is we're gonna make this CAN editable. All right, Well before we do that, let's go ahead and increase some of these rotation segments. Right now if we take a render, you'll notice these edges are really jagged. Alright, so we're going to increase these rotation segments. Right now they're at 16. Let's just bump that up to 24. And that's going to make our soda can a little bit smoother. At this point, we can make it editable. This button right here is the Make editable function. Or we could hit C on the keyboard. Right now we no longer have access to these attributes down here, but we have access to the points, lines, and polygons. 4. Point Modeling: Now that we have the cylinder editable, what we're gonna do is rename the cylinder. Can. One of the things I wanted to point out was with these live selection tools, Let's go into this live selection. And the default is this visible only as checked on this tool. If I click and drag this top row points, what ends up happening is it only selects half of those points because it's only selecting what I can see in this viewport. If you want to select all the way through your geometry, this visible only should be unchecked. So now when I click and drag and select through those points, it selects the entire row. We can also use this rectangular selection to select all the way through. The visible only should be off by default on this tuple. Let's go back to our front view. And I'll grab this real points. And I'm just going to click and drag by this green handle right here to the bottom of the slip. I'm gonna take that second row points, click and drag by the green handle. Now we'll do the bottom. So if I grab this, you don't want to click and drag arbitrarily. You always want to grab it by these handles. So click this green one. Take that down. Let's do the next one. Take that down to here. We forgot these up here. So we'll go back here. This one kind of close and grab this one, put it down here. Okay, so at this point we didn't really change the shape of the soda. Can. We just align those points with that with that reference image? And we can go ahead and turn off this grid here as well. So if I go Filter work plane, I'll turn that off. Just makes it a little bit easier to see in the viewport and declutter is the viewport a little bit. So now we'll go through and will shape the soda can hear. With my rectangular selection still active, I'm going to select all three of these top rows. Now I'll hit T on the keyboard or grab this scale tool right here. One of the things you don't want to do is grab this handle and just drag this in. Let me show you what that did in the perspective viewport. That gives us this elliptical shape on the top. What we want to do is we want to click and drag in an empty area and scale uniformly. Click and drag in an empty area. All right, we'll do this in the front view so we can line it up. I'm clicking and dragging somewhere off of here. Then I'm just going to line that up right there. And then I'll go through, hit 0 on my keyboard and that'll get me back to this rectangular selection. Select these on the bottom, hit T, or go to the Scale tool. And scale these in something like this. I'll hit E on the keyboard for my Move Tool, 0 on the keyboard for my rectangular selection. Then I'll scale this up again, something like this. And then I'll grab those points on the top, scale, those up as well. And then I can move those into place. Something like this. Maybe these need to be a little bit bigger right here. I can tweak these a little bit. So sometimes it's not going to line up 100% with your reference image just because there's a little bit of perspective to that photograph that we're using for the back. But I think this is pretty good. I think I might want to make that lip a little bit bigger though. I'll just take those points at the top, bring those in, something like that. And then I'm just gonna take these and scale those in something like this. There we go. And now what we're gonna do is we're going to create the top and the bottom. So now we're gonna go into this polygon mode. We'll go into the live selection. And here's a situation where you want to have this visible elements only checked. Let's check out what happens if I grab this. Grab a selection of the top of the soda can. Look at this we selected through to the other side, and we don't want these selected. This is a good, good application of this visible only when you're in the perspective view. I'll click off to deactivate my selection. And I'll select these top ones again. Now we can right-click and inset and click and drag in an empty area and just bring that in a little bit, something like this. Now we can right-click again and extrude, click and drag in an empty area and bring that down. Now in this view, I could probably just grab this little handle. Just bring that up a little bit, something like that. And I think that's gonna be pretty good. Now we're gonna do the same thing with the bottom. Let's stay. This polygon mode. We'll go back to our live selection tool. And now I'm just going to click these bottom polygons. Right-click, Set. Click and drag in an empty area. To do that, right-click again, extrude, click and drag in an empty area to bring that up. Now we can go into this front view. There's bring this up a little bit. Alright, so the last thing we're gonna do here is we're going to set some selections. The way that we're gonna do that. We'll go to our rectangle selection tool. And I'm going to click and drag all of these on the top. Shift click and drag all of these on the bottom. That's going to give me a selection of both the top and bottom polygons. And then I can go to select, store selection. And I can just call this top and bottom. 5. Smoothing: Now that we have our soda can model, Let's zoom in real close and let's take a quick render. You'll notice we're still getting some of these jagged edges around our soda can. What we're gonna do is we're going to smooth this out. Right here. We have a subdivision surface object. If I click that, what I'm going to want to do is take my soda can. I'm going to click and drag the soda can up until I see this down arrow, and then let go. That makes the soda can a child of the subdivision surface. Now what ended up happening is we get this really smooth look to our soda can. Now we're going to go ahead and add a few more subdivisions to this to give it a little bit of sharp edges. The way we're gonna do that is we'll go to soda can and we'll go into our line mode right here. We'll zoom in real close right-click and we'll go to Loop Path Cut. Now what we're going to want to do is just cut a little path here. Cut a little path here. And that gives a nice crisp edge to that right there. We'll cut a path here, maybe another one right there. And then we'll come back into here. This extrusion. We go, let's look in a lot better. Additionally, you see how this can is like tapering in. Now at the bottom, we'll want to add another cut here. Maybe one more right there. Now, at the bottom of these, we probably want to do this in the render, but I'm just going to go ahead and add some of these subdivisions here just to make it consistent with the top. Right down the bottom here, I'll add one and maybe another one there. Alright, so now if we take a render, we can compare that with the one that we took in the intro to this video. Now have this really nice smooth soda can. 6. Pop Top: Now that our soda cans is modeled, let's go ahead and focus on the pop top. If you recall from the first video lesson, we took, we took this image as the inspiration and the reference for our soda can pop top. We're going to use this image as reference while we're modeling. I'll just push this over. In Cinema 4D you, what we're gonna do is we're going to use some splines and extrude nerves to create that pop top. What that means is, let's say for instance, if we create a rectangle and there's perspective view, right now if I take a render, that rectangle does not show up, that rectangle needs another object in conjunction with IT to actually create geometry. Right here, if we click and hold that there's this extrude object, we can take this rectangle, drop it inside this extrude, and now it created a piece of geometry with that rectangle. If I take a render, now get a piece of geometry. You need a spline and an extrude NURBS in conjunction with one another to create geometry. Alright, so let's go ahead and start on that pop top. If we go to the top, I'll create a rectangle. And as you could see, this is really big. I'll go to my Scale Tool and I'll just scale this down. Something like this. I can make this editable. I think this is pretty good. I could hit C on the keyboard and that's going to give us access to these points. I can go to my rectangular selection tool and I can just move that up, these down a little bit like this. Move those up as well. That can grab all these points and hit T on the keyboard, that scale, I can scale this in. There's our rough shape of our pop top. And as you can see in the perspective view, it's getting lost right in the middle of our can. It's hard to see this spline, but that's okay right now. We'll turn the camera off in a little bit. But right now I'm just using that CAN geometry as a reference for how big this should be. All right, so once we have the basic shape of this, I can go ahead and start adding some points. If we take a look at this image again, you'll notice this thing kind of curves up. It comes down, it tapers in, and then it curves on the bottom again. So we want to try to make that shape as close as possible. The way that we could do that is we can start adding some points. If I go to my, if I go to cinema 4D and I right-click, There's this little function called create points. And then I'll click and drag, not sorry, just click one time to create a point. And I'm going to create two more points on the side here. I'll create another point down here. Now I'm going to, now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to make sure all these points are lined up. I'll grab these two points, hit T and scale those in just to make sure that they're totally lined up. I'll take these two points, hit scale, scale those down. I'll take these two and scale those. They're perfectly lined up on each side. Right? Now. I'll go ahead and grab these and hit T for scale. Scale these in something like this. And I can grab these two points and pry, bring those down a little bit more, something like this. Then I'm going to add two more points right in the center of these. So let's go ahead and create points. Boom, point here. All right, that's looking pretty good. Let's take this top point, just bring it up a little bit. Take this bottom point, bring that down a little bit. Now I could chamfer these edges on these corners. If I take Shift select these four points, I'm going to right-click and do a chamfer. I click and drag in an empty area until I get those nice rounded corners. All right, let's go back to our rectangular Tool, rectangular selection. Grab these top and bottom points, and I'll right-click and just say soft interpolation. I can click these individually. Go to my move tool. I can just move that down a little bit just to give that a slight little arc like this point, bring that up a little bit. And then these two points, I could just go ahead and scale those in. Right-click and do soft interpolation of those points as well. This little hard corner, I'm gonna do the same thing with that chamfer. I'll grab these two points. Right-click chamfer, click and drag in an empty area and just make that smooth. All right. Now, I still can't see that spline. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and turn off my soda. Can. These two dots right here, if I hold down option on a Mac, click once, click twice. That turns off my soda Canada viewport that out. Let me easier see this popped up. Okay, so now we have the basic spline. The other thing that we're gonna need to do is create this oval on the top. And then an additional spline here on the bottom. The way that we'll do that is we'll start with we don't want to be in the perspective. We want to be in the top view port. We'll start with a circle. Again, the circles coming out really big in comparison with this pop top. So we'll just scale this down. Then I'll move it up, scale it a little bit more. Now what we can do is I can make this editable. Then I can grab my Scale Tool and just scale it in one direction. Something like this. Maybe up a little bit more. I can move that here. Alright. Now we need a little rectangle down here. I'll create another rectangle and the top viewport. And again, this is really big. So I will scale this down, something like that. And then I'll move this up. That's looking pretty good. What we could do is we can make these corners a little bit round with a shame for function again. Let's go ahead and make this editable. Then I'll grab all these points. I'll right-click chamfer, click and drag in an empty area. And that chamfers those little corners. Now we need to connect all these splines. I'm going to take these first two. I'm going to right-click. Well what I did was shift select these first two right-click, connect objects and delete. That's going to make one object out of those. Now grab these two rectangles. Right-click, connect the objects and delete. Now I can go ahead and use that extrude function to actually make a piece of geometry. Again, remember when I take a render, this does not create geometry in and of itself. These splines. You need to use it with an extrude. I'll go ahead and create an extrude. I'll take my rectangle, click and drag and salt until I see that down arrow and let go. Now that extruded it a lot. Let's go back to this extrude. Let's start with an offset of one. Again, that's pretty big. I'm going to go up here and just start tweaking those value. Maybe it's 0.05. That might be pretty good. Let's go see it. Let's see how this looks in relation to the size of the can. Now go back to the subdivision surface. Actually, I'm going to rename that subdivision soda can. I'll turn this back on by holding down option and clicking these two dots. I can take this extrude and just move this to the top of the can. And I think that's probably pretty good. What we're gonna do is we're going to round these edges as well. Let's go into this extrude. Let's go into these caps. I could start increasing the size of this cap. Maybe now it's a little bit too big so I can go back to my object. Instead of 0.50.05, maybe as 0.025, maybe even less, 0 to about 0.105.01. There we go. I think that looks pretty good. Now we can just take this and just make sure that it's laying on top of that. Can you're having a hard time seeing this. You can also go to the display and go display garage shading lines. That's going to show us our lines. So if we drag that down now it's laying right on top of that. That's looking pretty good. It might be a little bit too small. Actually, I could take this and I can just scale the whole thing up. I think that's looking a little bit better. Alright, let's go ahead and rename this pop. Top. 7. Top Details: Now that we have the pop top created, let's go ahead and create some more of these details in this top, like this Oval ring, this ring here, and the rest of this stuff. If I create a rectangle, Let's scale this down. Now what I could do is I could create another spline that it gets sweep around this rectangle. So if I create a circle, I'll make that really small. And now if I take a render, you'll notice Nothing renders. Because we need to use these splines again in conjunction with some sort of NURBS object to make them build geometry. If I go here and hold this down, Let's go to sweep. And I can take the circle and this rectangle, shift, select those, click and drag until I see that down arrow. And now that circle swept right around that rectangle. Now if I take a render, I get a piece of geometry and I can go back and I can scale this down if I wanted to make that circle a little bit smaller, I can scale this rectangle, that kind of stuff. All right, so let's go ahead and turn our soda can and pop top back on. What I'm gonna do here is go into the top view again. And I'm going to create a circle spline. I'll just scale this down. Maybe something like this. And I'll just move this down as well. What I could do here is make this editable by hitting C on the keyboard. Now I'm going to go to my Scale Tool and just scale on one direction to create an oval. I could scale this even more if I need to. Something like this. I'm looking at my reference image. I think this is looking pretty good. All right. Now in the perspective view, we want to create an additional circle. Again, this is really big. I could turn off both my pop top and my soda can. And let's just bring this down to one. You'll notice that this circle is really big. So again, we're gonna have to scale this down, let's say 0.02. Maybe that'll work. I don't know. We'll try it out. Now. I'm going to go and create a sweep nerves. Take both these circles and drop it as children in the sweep nerves. And there we go. Good. Turn this back to garage shading. I could take a circle, maybe I can make this a little bit smaller. There we go. If we take a render, now we get some geometry. Again, this geometry is a little bit jagged. So we can go into this circle and we can increase this number to smooth this out. Now, when we take a render, you'll notice we get this really nice smooth oval shape. All right, Let's turn everything back on and we can take the sweep. We can just push this up here until it intersects that pop top. There we go. Now we have that little detail. Now, you're going to have to try to figure out how to do the rest of this stuff. So, you know how to use an extrude and you know how to use sweep. All right, if we look at this reference image, we also have this additional circle in here. So try to figure out how to make that with a circle and an oval. And then you can use a pen tool to create this shape right here. And then use a sweep nerves with a circle to create that as well, the geometry for that. So let me just show you the pen tool real quick. The pen tool is right here. What you want to do is go into your top view and you can just start drawing the basic form of this. Once you get that together, you can hit Enter and then go into the point mode. In the Point mode, you could start selected these, selecting these points. You could do a soft interpolation. You can rotate that around. You can move that points. Go to the next one, the next to do soft interpolations of those as well, until you get that looking pretty close to this, then you would create an additional circle and put both of those in a sweep object. All right, so I'm going to have you go ahead and try to figure out how to make the rest of these. And you should have a solid grasp of the tools by now with the sweeps and the spline tools, using those in conjunction with the pen, you should be able to figure out how to make these at the top. 8. Label Design: Getting started on our labeled design, we can refer back to some of these inspiration images that we saved and try to come up with our own design for our soda can. For your design, you should probably have a name, some graphics, that kind of thing. So a pretty consistent color scheme throughout. One of the things that I did was I went on this website called free download.com. And it's got a bunch of vector, vector images and illustrations that you can use. So I'm gonna do some sort of fruit drink in Photoshop. I'm going to go File New. And I'm going to create a file that's 1200 by 800 pixels. I'm going to start creating my design with this. If I go to Adobe Illustrator, I could pick one of these illustrations, hit Command C and then jump back over to here. And then just go File, Edit, Paste. And I could just do pixels and maybe make that a little bit bigger. And then I'll just push this over to the side. And I'm going to create some sort of like background color. What I could do is I can just pick a color from in here by hitting I on the keyboard that gives me my Eyedropper tool. Then I'm going to just create a circle around this using the mark key. Something like this. Go select, Select Inverse, create a new layer. Hit G on the keyboard, and just fill that layer with that color. Probably want to keep your layers all nice and tidy and organized. So I'm just going to call this illustration. I can spell that right, straight. And then color. I'm going to import some additional things into my design. So I'm just going to import a barcode in here as well. If I go to Select Color Range, I'll select this black. Then I'll just click and drag into my document. And then I'll just scale this down. There we go. Then I'll just rotate this around. Keep this super simple. So now with this barcode, I can go ahead and lock these transparent pixels using this icon right here. Then I can pick some sort of like yellow color and make it a little bit lighter. I can just paint our code. Maybe I wanted a little bit more yellow. Something like this. There we go. I'm going to keep this design super-simple. And this is the design that I'm going to use for my soda can. I'm going to show you other designs that I've made. So here's one can design. And then I just went ahead and duplicated that design and just populate it, populated it with different illustrations in different colors. Here's one for an apple, Here's one for an orange. Q0, strawberry, cherry. So feel free to make a few variations of your design as well. So go ahead and pause the video and spend a few hours creating a really nice labeled design you can include, again, illustration, some really nice topography, a name for your label. 9. Texturing: Once you have your design finished, what we're gonna do is we're gonna go ahead and go to Image duplicate. And now I'm going to call this 01 Nana. I'm just going to go ahead and flatten this image. I can go file save as you want to save it as a JPEG. Your textures folder, save as JPEG. Me, go back to your original document and do the same thing for all your other designs. Now inside Cinema 4D, we can go ahead and apply that label to our soda can. Alright, let's go ahead and take our pop top and hit Option G. To group this together. We'll call this pop top. We'll go back to our soda can remember when we created the selections on the top and the bottom. That top and the bottom is going to be Chrome. And the rest of this is gonna be our label. All right, let's go ahead and go into the material manager and we'll create a new default material. And I'll call this banana or labeled or wherever you want to call it. So going into the color mode, and right here where it says texture, where you have these three dots. And let's go ahead and click that. And we'll locate our banana texture. Let me just hit no. Now I'm just going to drop this, my soda can. And you'll notice the entire thing gets this banana texture. The top and the bottom. I'll get it. So before we move on and just go ahead and create a new default material, we'll just call this chrome. We'll call this Chrome. You can also find some really nice metals in the asset browser. So if you go into asset browser and material, you could search for metal and use any of these materials that come up for your top and your bottom. But we're just going to create this from scratch. Double-click this Chrome, and I'll go to my Transparency. I'll right-click the default specular it removed. And then I'll add a reflection legacy. And that gives me this really nice chrome look. I could take. I could just leave this as it is. Maybe bring that down a little bit. Make sure we can just leave it at the default for the time being. Now this Chrome, we can drop on the soda cans as well. And with this material selected, you'll notice down here there's a selection field. All I need to do is take this triangle and just drop it and just drop it into the selection field. Right? Now we need to tweak the, the actual label. Let's go into here. And instead of, so we'll select our label right here where it says projection. Let's just try a cylindrical projection. Doesn't look too good of a cubic injection. This one might work. Let's go ahead and select this label, select the soda can. And let's go to this texture right here, this, this little checkered icon. And if we go to scale, just scale that down. There we go. I can just move this over a little bit until that's centered. Scale that up and move it over. And it's looking a little bit elliptical right now so I can go back to T. Scale that down. There we go. Scale it back up. Move it over. That's looking pretty good. Now we're going to want to texture this pop top as well. And it looks like this pot top is kind of flipped it around. So I'll just take this. Just rotate it 180 degrees. There we go. Now we're going to want to take that Chrome texture and place it on that pop top. You'll probably have more detail in your prop top than this one. And now we have our soda can. There we go, and it's textured. So let's go into this banana texture and where it says reflection. Let's go ahead and again, remove this default specular. And we'll add a reflection legacy that's gonna give us a chrome look. I could take the brightness way down because we want some sort of reflections in this can. Additionally, we can go ahead and add a now texture in here. That's going to give us somebody bit more realism and bringing the mixed strength down a little bit as well. All right, we might tweak these parameters a little bit as we go, as we develop lighting and that kind of thing. But for right now, we have a textured soda can and it's looking pretty good. 10. Environment: Let's go ahead and start creating the environment and lighting for this project. So we'll take both of our pop top and our soda can. We can right-click and group these two objects together. We'll just call this soda can. Now what I want to do is we can get rid of this background image. So if we go view configure again, we can just turn off the show picture. Let's go to the soda can. And now I want this to be all the way at the bottom of this cam. I'm just going to depress this enable XY tool. And I'll just move this down that up at the bottom of the can. Get rid of that or get out of that mode. And now we'll just push this up. So it lines up with this red line on the bottom. Alright, so now we're going to create a really simple plane. So we'll go to our parametric primitives plane. We can resize this if we need. I'm just going to leave this at the default. Now we're going to create a material for this. I'll create default material and I'll just call this could turn off the color reflectance. Remove our default specular, add a reflection legacy. And I will add a for now to this. I'm going to wear this texture is clicking this little down arrow for now. And now I can click this for now. I'm just going to change this color to a darker gray. And I'll change this black again like a darker gray. So we have a little bit of abbreviation here. Alright, I'll take this and maybe we could take this specular strength down and take this reflection strength down a little bit as well. What we want is just some, a little bit of blurry reflections in the floor plane. So that's what we're creating right now. I'll take this, I'll drop it on our plane. I'll change this to a cubic projection. Alright? So at this point, if we take a render, Let's see what this looks like. Now we should be getting some sort of reflections. Floor. Get this little reflection and you'll notice that we're not getting too much, too much reflection on our Chrome right now because it doesn't have anything in the environment to reflect. Once we add lights will start getting some reflections back into here. All right, so let's go ahead and create a light source. So if we go down to lights, I'm going to create an area light. And I can go ahead and name this main light source. Since we have this dark plane as the floor, I'm not going to enable shadows. I'm just going to leave this as it is, leave it as an area light. And maybe this color we could just make it a little bit more yellow. Something like this. Now, we can go up to our cameras. Use camera select object. Selected object is camera. Cameras, navigation. Use cameras. Selected object is camera. Now what's happening is we're actually looking through that camera, or we're looking through that light as if it's as if it's a camera. And the reason I'm doing that is just so I can position this light little bit easier. All right. I just want to position it somewhere like right here, something like that. And now I can go to camera, use camera, default camera. All right, let's take a quick render. And now we're starting to get a little bit of a little bit of reflection in this. So if I go and I look at my light source, let me go to details. I can shape this shape, this light source, something like this. Let's go back to our front view suit that's looking like. One other detail that I want to put in here is showing specular and showing reflection. Now we're gonna get this really nice highlight on the side of our can. Let's see what it looks like when we turn off Show and specular. There we go. Now we have this nice clean reflection in our, in our Can. I could take this and I could start positioning this. Maybe we bring it down a little bit more this way. Let's see what that looks like. Let's look in pretty decent. Let me go ahead and take out some of the rotation out of this. So I'll take this down to 0. And now we're getting that specular highlight. Are that reflection really nice and straight? And are can I can go back in here and turn up the intensity. So maybe a 130. Take another quick test render. That's looking really nice. Alright, so now let's create some additional lights. We can create a fill light on the left and a fill light on the right. I'll take this main light Command C command V. And I'll go ahead and rename this fill light for this one. And go ahead and again, use camera. Make sure I have the fill light selected. Use camera selected object, this camera. I'm just going to position this on the side of the can, something like this. And then I can get out of that view. Default camera. I'll change the color of this light and maybe it's some sort of like reddish color or something, kind of distinguish that. Let's take another quick render. Now I'm getting this nice light over here. I'm going to push it further to the side as well. Maybe something like this. Take another quick render. There we go. Now we're getting some nice ambiance light on the side. I'm going to push it back further in space. Let's just 0 this out as well for this rotation. Take another render. Let's look in pretty nice. And I'm going to create an additional fill light on the other side. So command C, command V, and I'll call this fill light to my perspective view. Again, I'll go Camera. Use selected object is camera. I'm going to go to the other side of the soda, can position this light, something like this. I can 0 out this value. There we go. Let's go back to our default camera. And let's take this color and we could play around with some of these fill colors. Maybe this one's more of an orange, something like that. I don't know. Take a render, see what that looks like. That's looking pretty cool. Now, this chrome on the top and bottom is still not looking like chrome. Let's go ahead and try to tweak some of that, that color. So if I go to this Chrome, I can enable the color. And let's just make that a little bit brighter. There we go. I can even bring down this brightness, this reflection. Go. Now we're going to get a little bit lighter top and bottom. That's looking pretty good. I could take this fill light and I can play around with some of these parameters as well. Maybe change the color, maybe bring it down this way a little bit further while I look over here to see how it's affecting that that reflection, I can even make it a little bit wider to make that reflection wider. Let's see what that's looking like. If I take a render of this, that's looking pretty nice right now. All right. 11. Composition: All right, Let's go ahead and group our environment and lights. Call this lighting. Now we can import a camera. Let's go ahead and create a camera. The perspective view. Let's go ahead and create a camera. We can look through this camera by pressing this little icon here. I'll call this camera over one. I could just back this up a little bit. Something like this. Rotate that a little bit. I can take this rotation off, just kind of gives us a nice straight on view. And now we can reference some more images as far as composition goes. How you want to compose your images is completely up to you. You can go online and search through other, other examples of how people are composing their 3D renders. This is a nice little view right here. It's just real simple. Here's one where it's floating on these like little, little boxes. These are just lined up right next to each other, a row of soda cans, different configuration. So how are you going to compose? This is up to you. I wanted to show you a few of the compositions that I set up for this project. Just to give you some ideas for your own compositions. Here's one where it's kind of like a V configuration or the back soda cans are faded out a little bit. Here's another one looking down with some soda cans surrounding it using the cloner and the back. Here's one where I imported a banana from the asset browser and just rotate it around. This can straight on view. Another one with multiple soda cans designs. Here's one using a cloner and I'll get into this in a later lesson how to create something like this. Here's another one. Those might give you some ideas of how to compose your shots. Go up to my render settings right here. And instead of using the standard renderer and go ahead and change this to the physical render. We can go into this physical render tab. And I'm going to enable this depth of field. I'll show you what that's gonna do in a minute. Now I'm just going to go ahead and lock my camera. I'll right-click rigging tags and protection. All right, I'm going to duplicate the soda can, but instead of hitting Command C, Command V, I'm going to use a render instance. If I go to here, an instance that creates a duplicate of my soda can, I'm just going to push this over. And I'll duplicate this again. I can hold down Command click and drag to create a duplicate of that instance. And I'll take both of these. I'll just push these back in space. Something like this. I can do this in the top viewport as well. Something like that. Take this one and just push it over. Take this one over the other way. I'll just create two more instances of this. And again, how you compose your shot, that's completely up to you. Just throw this one back here. I'll take this last one and put it over here. So right now if I take a render of this, you'll notice this depth of field and made everything blurry and it's increasing our render time. For test renders. One of the things that I recommend doing is turning down the size of your test render That's going to make everything go a little bit faster. So if I go into my render settings under Output, Let's just lock this ratio and we could just start with a width of 600. And I'll just show you demonstrate how fast it's going now, since it's half the size. Our previous render took 14 seconds. This one is taking four seconds. When your test rendering, it's always a good idea to test render these smaller. All right, so now getting to the depth of field, if I go to my camera and I go to the Object tab, there's something called a focus object. What I can do here is I could take this little eyedropper, click and drag and just click this first soda can. Now my camera is going to focus on this and blur everything else out slightly. So check that out. Now, this is completely in focus and the rest of these are getting more and more blurry as they recede in the background. Let's just say this is our composition one. I'm not really liking how much dead space there is on the top of this. So I'm going to delete this protection tag. This camera and just lift it up a little bit. Sorry, push it down a little bit. And I could push it a little bit closer to the scene as well. Kind of digging that right there. Again, let's take a test render, see what that looks like. Now we can go ahead and lock this camera, rigging tags and hit protection. So let's take all these soda cans and take those, and I'll just call this soda a one. And now what if we wanted to create a variation of this? What we could do is we could duplicate this first showed again. I could throw the rest of these off. Now, I'm going to duplicate this one more time. Command C, command V. I can just start importing, making new materials for this label. So if I take this first material, hit Command C, Command V. Now what I can do is go into my Color tab and I can choose a different design. Name, this peach. Now in this soda can, I'll just go ahead and take this new labeled design and drag it over the old one. And I have a new design here. And I can continue doing that for the rest of my designs that I created. And if you only have one design, totally fine, you don't have to do this step, but I can go ahead and duplicate this. Again. Go back into my Color tab. I can choose the next one. Replace this one. Go ahead and move that over. I could do that one more time. For however many soda cans and labels that you created. You can go ahead and duplicate these. There we go. Now this one's orange. I'll take that and I'll replace that other graphic. And there we go. Move that over. So now I could take all four of these and I can drop them into a MoGraph Cloner. With this cloner is gonna do it's gonna duplicate all these cans. And you can't really see it because they're all kind of pushed apart over here. You can see it here in this view. What if I just go to my linear mode? I can 0 out the y. Maybe I could take this camera and duplicate it. Call this to look through this camera, delete this protection tag. And I can just push this camera back in space. Maybe something like this. Now I can go back into this cloner and I can just start increasing some of these numbers, increasing the count. I could take this cloner, push that over. I can make as many of these objects is I wanted. Here's the composition too. Let's take a quick render of this. Let's put a protection tag on this camera. Let's see what that looks like. On this camera too. We're also going to need to focus that depth of field on the soda cans. So let's go back then this camera. And right here where it's where we have this focus object. I'm just going to take this picker and pick this. 12. Rendering: Now we're ready to render out our final images. Let's go to our render settings. And now we can change this output back to, let's say 1202 thousand however big you want to render it out, but keep the film aspect ratio at 16 by nine. And now we can go to the physical render tab right here and right here where it says sampler instead of low. You could turn this up to medium or high. And of course that's going to increase your render time, but it'll look a lot better. Okay, now we're gonna go to this multi-pass tab. And I will add image layers prime, not going to need all of those in our final render, but we'll get you set up some of those. Now I'm gonna go back to my first camera view. Turn off this cloner. Now, let's go ahead and specify a safe path. So we'll click Save. And I don't want a regular image, I want a multi-pass image. And I'm going to specify where I want the safe to go to my soda can renders folder and I'll say first, initial last name, soda can, and view number one. All right, now I can just hit Render. And that's going to render out this multi-pass image, which we will adjust in Photoshop. In the next lesson. Once the first one is done rendering, what we're going to want to do is go ahead and render out our second view. I'll turn off the soda cans, turn off, turn on these. And I'll go back to my camera to go back to the Render Settings and then save. Now instead of a one, I'm gonna do O2, hit Save and render that out as well. 13. Post-Production: Now that we have our two renders complete, let's go ahead and open them up in Photoshop. Here's our first view. Here's our second view. Alright, so let's go ahead and start tweaking some of these. If we turn all of our multi-pass layers off, we can go ahead individually and see which layer is that we'll need. I think the only one that we're going to need is a reflection. So reflection contains some, some information. The rest of these we can get rid of as well. One of the things that you can do with these multi-pass layers is let's say for instance, if at this point you wanted more reflection in your soda, can, you could take this reflection layer, it could duplicate it. Now you're getting twice the amount of reflection than you previously had. So that's one thing that you could do with these. Another thing that you could do is you could duplicate that reflection later. You can make a slight little bloom around your reflections. So the way that you could do that is go to Filter blur, Gaussian blur. Now if you zoom in, you'll notice you're getting this little bloom around these highlights. So I have a radius of 2.6. I'm just going to leave that as it is. And I can just call this a bloom. That's probably a little bit too much. So I'm just gonna take this opacity down. Let's say something like 2530% or something like that. Just to give it a little bit of little bit of bloom on those highlights. Another thing that we could do is we can add some sharpening to this image. You'll notice if we zoom in, we're getting these edges that are looking a little bit a little fuzzy. If I hit Command a on the keyboard that selects everything, then I can go Command Shift C, Command V. Now with this, I'm just going to name this Sharpen. And then we can come up to Filter Other high-pass. And I'm just going to leave this radius at one. So you'll notice a kind of give us a little outline of the soda cans. And I'm going to take the Sharpen Layer and put it on overlay blend mode. So if I zoom in really close and toggle this on and off, you'll notice how much sharper these edges are getting just by adding that little sharpened layer. We don't want that on the back. Soda cans. I'm going to create a layer mask and then I can paint with black as my foreground color on these back ones. So this is a really subtle effect. You just want that on the foreground. Now what we could do is we can bump up some of this human saturation. So if I create an adjustment layer, hue saturation, I can go into my saturation and bring those colors up a little bit. If we toggle that on and off again, it's a subtle effect. And I'm going to take that down a little bit because that's a little bit too much. Just making those soda cans a little bit more vibrant. Again, on this one, I'm probably just going to go on this layer mask, hit V on the keyboard and paint with black on these back ones. Because I want this foreground one to be just a little bit more vibrant to draw attention to it. Another thing that we can do is we can add even more blur to these background cans if we wanted to. So if I turn off the sharpen, I can go Command a, Command Shift C on the keyboard command V, to copy all of the layers to one layer on the top of the layer stack. And I'll call this blur. I can come up to Filter blur and we could do some sort of motion blur. So what if we did an angle of 90 and we just took this distance way down, maybe something like this. I can create another layer mask. And I can just mask out with a soft brush painting with black. Maybe these first three, the ones in the background really get blurred. We're creating this really dramatic depth of field effect. Here. If I over painted, I can go ahead and paint with black to get some of this motion blur back on some of these backend soda cans. This sharpening back-end. So here's what we started with. And here's where we're at right now. So just really tiny, small little effects. Now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to create a vignette. So I'll hit the I on the keyboard. That's my eyedropper tool where you can come over here to grab it and just grab a dark color from this background. Now I'm going to create a new layer on the top of the layer stack. Just call this vignette. I'll hit G on the keyboard or grab this paint bucket and just fill that layer. Turn this onto a multiply blend mode. Turn the opacity down. And now I'm going to create a layer mask on this. I'll go up to my rectangular marquee tool. Maybe just creating mark here on this first soda can Select, Modify, Feather those selection maybe a 100 pixels. And now on this layer mask, I can paint with black. To just emphasize this first soda can. Toggle that on and off. I could probably even paint a little bit more on this foreground. Just to really emphasize that one can. There we go. The last thing I'm gonna do is create some sort of like green. So as it gets C right now we have this really perfectly rendered image and there's really no green in this image. I'm going to take this layer, duplicate it. I'll get rid of this mask. So I'll go Layer, Layer Mask, Delete. And now on this layer, what I could do is I could turn this onto a normal blend mode and turn the opacity all the way back up. Let's go to Filter Noise. Add Noise. And we want this on Gausian monochromatic and above 4.8 setting is, if I could just take this, I could take this, put it on a colored dodge blend mode. That's giving me a little bit, little bit of grain. I could take this down and then opacity, just to be pretty subtle with this, don't overdo it. Now we have the first image completely done. So we started with this and we're ending with this. Another thing that you could do is you can go ahead and change some of these colors a little bit. What if you created a Curves Adjustment Layer? And we can go into the blue channel, we can turn up some of these blue values in the shadows. And if we go to red, we can increase some of the red values in the mid tones. So another thing that you could do just to kinda give it a little bit more life rather than just having this black background. And that's got a little bit more color. And that's completely optional if you want to do that. Once this thing is done, you would go over to your U2 and do the exact same post-production effects on here. Once you're done with both of those, Here's what you're going to want to do. You're going to want to duplicate this image, duplicate. And then you'll take this image and you'll flatten it. And the layer, layer manager. Now, you'll notice down here it's linear color space. Let's go ahead up to Image Mode. Change that to eight bit. Then we can convert this linear color space by going Edit, convert to profile, and choosing a working RGB. Now you have a finished image right here. You do the same thing with the second one. 14. Bonus Lesson 01: Cloner: In this bonus lesson, I want to show you how to create a composition like this. In Cinema 4D, what we're gonna do is we'll duplicate this corner and will turn off the first one. We can go into our lighting. We could turn off our plane. Now with the second corner selected, we can just name this car to, you could do is get out of this camera view so we can freely rotate around the scene. Now with this Cloner, instead of using this linear mode, we can use the grid mode. So now it's going to give us a lot more clones. All right, so here we can take the size down. We can take this size down. So these things are closer together. Alright, now we can start adding additional clones. Something like this. Make these come together a little bit. Maybe I'll add another one this way. There we go. Now we're going to use a MoGraph Effector in conjunction with this cloner. With this cloner selected, will come down to this little icon right here, click and hold. And then we'll choose a random effector. What that's gonna do, it's going to blow these things apart with this random, with this random effector selected. And we'll go into parameter. And you'll notice that it's offsetting the position x, y, and z of each individual clone randomly. So we could take this, we can bring this down, bring these a little bit closer together. Something like this. Now we can take both of these random cloner and cloner and bring it farther back in space. So the lightest hitting all the fronts of these. So what this random selected, we can go into rotation. Now we can rotate all the cans randomly as well. From here we will define another camera view that worked for us. So we can take this and offset these a little bit more. Then I would create another camera view here. When I'm happy, like the camera view and take another render, I wanted to show you one other trick with this to get this really nice sort of motion blur happening. What I did for this particular image is I'm just going to flatten this real quick. Then I'm going to command a command C Command V to duplicate that layer to get that motion blur, all I did was I went to filter blur, radial blur, and I choose, I chose the Zoom setting. And you can play around with different amounts up here. Now, this is going to give me this Zoom type of blur. Then I can create a layer mask. And I can paint on that layer mask with black. That's gonna get rid of some of the parts that we wanted to focus. Pretty, pretty straightforward. You get this kind of look. 15. Bonus Lesson 02: Cloner: In this bonus lesson, I want to show you how to create a composition like this. Let's get back into Cinema 4D. We could turn this off. I'll duplicate this original cloner. Turn that on. So right now I'm going to reuse this cloner and I'm going to bring these a little bit closer together. They're almost touching. Go into here and I can offset this 3.25. That's a little bit too much. Let's do 3.1. There we go. That's pretty close. Now I can increase the counts of this. What this cloner selected and what I'm gonna do is create an additional cloner. So hold down option on the keyboard and the press this corner. Now that's going to start cloning these. Again. The way that these started cloning is in the grid default configuration. I'm going to go into this mode and I'll change this to linear. All I want is them to duplicate up and down. So I can just take this y parameter and bring these things closer. Maybe offset a little bit more, 5.75, maybe six. There we go. That's looking pretty good. All right, At this point I can create a new camera, or I could duplicate an old camera. Let's just duplicate this camera one command C command V will look through that, delete that protection tag. I can take this camera, turn it on so I could see it in the viewport. And bring that back a little bit. Bring it up. And now all I'm gonna do is rotate this camera view. Some rotating by holding down one of these one of these bands. And then I move it. Maybe I'll make it a little bit closer. Something like this. There we go. Now we have another composition. Now I wanted to show you how to create this type of blur on the sides. In this image. I'll duplicate this background layer Command C, command V. And now I'm just going to go up to Filter blur, motion blur. And now what I could do is I can kind of line up this angle with the angle of these cans. I could take this distance and really pump this up. Something like this. There we go. I'm going to hit Okay, create another layer mask. And I'll paint with black till I reveal some of these. We go now we've got the streaky looking type of blur going on. That's the basic technique for that. 16. Bonus Lesson 03: Water Droplets: This last bonus lesson, I want to show you how to create these water droplets on your soda can. Cinema 4D. What we can do. Let's turn this off. Let's go ahead and duplicate our original soda can command C, command V. We can go into one of these camera views. There we go. Alright. Actually we don't have to be in a camera view. It doesn't really matter. Now we're going to create the water droplets. How are we going to do that? I'm going to start with a simple sphere. So now this sphere is enormous. I'll hit T on the keyboard and scale this down. Something real small. Kind of like this. There's our first droplet and what we want to do is we want to create a few other droplets that are different sizes and different shapes. So let's duplicate this Command C, command V. I'll hit C to make this editable. And I'll just grab one of these, one of these axes and just kind of shape that a little bit differently. Now hit Command C, Command V again, for this one, bring that in shape that this way. Now we have three different water droplets. What we can do with those is create an additional cloner. Take all three of these droplets, drop them inside the cloner. Let's start to duplicate these. You could see these little dots down here. But what we want to do is we want to clone those to the soda can. Alright, so there's this mode inside this cloner called an object mode. Okay? Now that object mode is going to ask us for to drop an object in this field. And the object we want to drop in here is this original soda can model. All right, we'll take this, drop it inside of here. And now you'll notice that these little water droplets are actually on soda can. And the way that we increase this number is down here you'll see a count. We can increase that, let's say to 1000. And now we have a lot of water droplets on here. We can even increase it to 2 thousand. Let's see how that looks. There we go. Now to make this look like water. I'm just going to go back. And we don't have a water texture in here. So I'll go into my asset browser. I can search for water. There's a bunch of textures down here that we can use. So I'll double-click one of these. It'll import into my material manager. And now I'll drop this material on this cloner. We have a bunch of water droplets. Then you can render that out to give it that wet look.