EASILY ADD DECALS AND GRAFFITI TO OBJECTS

Bring extra life to your scenes as Editor Rob Redman shows you how to create realistic visuals for objects in Cinema 4D

- Rob Redman

There are many times when a simple material on an object in your scene will suffice, but equally as many when you need detail. This could be some graffiti on a wall, branding for a product shot or anything in between. There are a number of ways to do this inside Cinema 4D, but here we’ll take a look at the simplest: stacked materials.

The idea here is to take a base material, in our case a sheet of cut brass, and then to add the stickers/decals on top using an alpha to let the brass show through. While there are other methods for accomplishing this, they all tend to be a little more complex. That said, they are better for mixing the materials themselves, like adding dust into recesses or scratches and burns to surfaces, often procedurally.

For this project you’ll need your geometry, a base material (in this case brass), and a sticker. You can make this anything you’d like, but for me, I’m choosing to do a floral pattern in black to suit the designs of the synthesiser modules I’m creating. Mine will be a single colour, where the pattern allows the brass to show through, but the technique works for solid stickers in full colour too.

I’d also suggest setting up Redshift as your render engine from the start and enabling the IPR, so you can see results as you make changes. Let’s dive in!

01 START WITH A LITTLE FORWARD THINKING