My work from the past three weeks

I have accumulated a large quantity of work during the past three weeks and I'll be posting all of it in this one post. I was working on widening my set of skills using C4D (cinema 4D).

Making realistic water:

Some images of renders I made of the realistic water:

How I made the water:

First I created a simple cube and hollowed out the centre with an extrusion to create a container for the water I wanted to create.

Next I added a simple plane inside the tube, this plane will be what I add certain modifiers to to make it look as close to realistic water as possible.

After the basic shapes were made, I started working on the texturing for the water. first came the colour which I adjusted the hue, saturation and value to create a very faint blue to exaggerate the colour of water. This was because the colour exaggeration makes the water seem more like water even though real water is almost completely transparent.

Next I worked on the transparency of the texture. I lowered the brightness to 64% and changed the refraction pre-set to the premade 'water' feature c4d has built in. I didn't need to adjust the HSV nor any other setting as it already looked quite realistic.

As the final part I worked on the reflectance of the texture as real water is quite reflective. First I changed the type to ward and the attenuation to additive. This mirror like reflectance which wasn't exactly what I wanted so I adjusted some of the reflection strength and specular strength and put the roughness to 0%. As a final touch I added a water texture in the colour layer.

This is what the texture looked like once added to the panel from earlier. I also added a randomise modifier which created a ripple effect in the plane.

This is what the final piece looked like before rendering. I decided to add a floor to make it seem more realistic and a HDRI map which I'll be talking about later on.

As an extra piece I animated the water to ripple and rendered a short MP4 file of the animation.

HDRI maps:

As a first step, I created some basic shapes to show off how the difference between how they looked with and without the HDRI maps.

To create a semi reflective texture to show off the HDRI map better I made this texture. the most important information was the type which is ward, the attenuation which was additive, roughness to 0% and the other three to 100%. Finally in the colour layer I changed the texture to Fresnel.

This is how I actually made the HDRI map. I took some HDR images from online, I then turned off all other settings beside colour and in the texture drop down I added the HDR image. Then to use this texture I made a single sky object in c4d and added this material to it to create the HDRI map.

In the render settings I added a global illumination modifier, this makes the final rendered product a lot higher definition as it traces light and how it interacts with the objects with a much higher precision.

in the anti-aliasing setting I changed it to best from geometric, min to 2x2 and max 8x8.

This is what all of the HDRI map work looks when used on the simple objects from the start:

As I did for the realistic water I rendered a short video of how what the HDRI map looks like in motion.

Working on single physics relating to FMP of jewellery:

After talking to my teacher, he advised me to start narrowing and focusing my skills research down into relevant and usable skills to do with my FMP (final major project). Taking this advise I decided to try work on my skills using rigid bodies and realistic physics in C4D. This video was the result:

What I was testing by doing this is how I could manipulate realistic physics built into C4D in regards to my final major project as I would like to make a jewellery set based around mental health.

After showing my teacher this video, he asked me if I could record a tutorial style video on how I made the necklace. As I really enjoy sharing my knowledge, I agreed to the offer and this is the process of making for the necklace:

Because of this tutorial, decided to ask my teacher if it would be ok with him if I translated one of his C4D tutorials to Blender which I know how to use to the same level or higher. The reason I asked this is because blender is a completely free application and it would save people in the class that want to do 3D work some money and still give them access to 3d software.

This was the tutorial video I made:

This has been the majority of the work I have done, anything that I haven't included is either outside college paid pieces or not relevant to the course.