California Career and Technical Education Standards

• AME.A.A2.2 Know the component steps and skills required to design, edit, and produce a prod...

• Introduction - Hooks / Set

  Using the powerpoint, introduce five of the basic material properties and show how they appear on an object. Tell students to take notes as you go over each.

  Material Properties

  Color: This channel applies color, textured patterns, or images to the surface.

  Bump: This channel provides surface deviations as most objects are not perfectly smooth. Bump requires a texture map or procedural shader of some sort.

  Alpha: An alpha channel works similar to a mask in photoshop; black will block the image (making it invisible) and white will reveal the image. Using black and white images on an alpha channel allows you to create holes in objects.

  Specular: This channel creates the highlights that appear on surfaces from reflected light. Some highlights are small and bright, like shiny metal, others are larger and duller like paper.

  Reflection: This will cause your object to show reflections of other objects on its surface. Adjust the amount of reflection using the Brightness slider.

   

  • Material Properties [ Download ]
• Setup - Demo / Modeling

  Have students create a series of basic geometric primitives to which the materials will be applied. If this is early in the class, you may want to guide them in the shape, size, and placement, reinforcing previous lessons on positioning objects.

  The sample below uses the following:

  1. a plane with a grass material
  2. a cylinder with green glass material
  3. a cylinder with marble material
  4. a cylinder with a rebar material
  5. a cube with a wire mesh material

   

  • Setup Objects [ View Flash ] [ Download ] This tutorial describes the setup of the objects to which the materials will be applied and the application of the grass to the plane.
  • Sample Objects [ View Image ] [ Download Original ] These objects are used in the sample.
  • grass [ View Image ] [ Download Original ]
  • marble_08 [ View Image ] [ Download Original ]
  • grid [ View Image ] [ Download Original ]
  • metal grille [ View Image ] [ Download Original ]
  • bricks [ View Image ] [ Download Original ]
  • Black and White Bricks [ View Image ] [ Download Original ]
• Materials - Demo / Modeling

  Create and apply each of the materials to the objects. Discuss the settings as they are adjusted and emphasize the process of mapping each material to each object.

  Materials must be “mapped” onto a surface of an object. Think of it as dressing the object with the material. How do you make it best fit the object? Where do the seams go? How many “tiles” of the image do you want repeat on the object?

  Once a material has been applied to an object, it needs to be properly mapped to the object. To do this you often need to define the projection, orientation, and the number of tiles of the material. 

  Projection: Normally based on shape, typical options are cubic, spherical, cylindrical, flat, and UVW mapping.

  Orientation:  This is rotated, scaled, and moved as you would an object.  

  Tiles:  This relates to how the material is repeated on the object.

  • Materials [ View Flash ] [ Download ] This is a tutorial showing how the materials are applied in MAXON Cinema 4D.
• Mapping - Guided Practice

  Mapping Exercise

  
  Objective: Map a brick material onto a cube object to create a brick wall.
   

  1. Create 3D object
  2. Create brick material
  3. Apply the material to the object
  4. Map the material to the object

  
  Images:
      bricks.jpg          bwbricks.jpg

  Step 1: Create a 3D primitive cube and resize it into the shape of a brick wall. This can be further adjusted later if necessary.
  
  Step 2: Create a brick material and apply it to the wall object.
  
  Step 3: Set the Projection to Cubic.

  Step 4: Adjust the cubic map by position, scale and rotation.
  
  Step 5: Adjust the cubic map using tiles. The brick thickness should be about one third of the length.
  
  Step 6: Adjust the wall object thickness if necessary to create a wall thickness of one brick.

   

  Mapping Materials Requires:

  • Manipulating object
  • Setting projection
  • Adjusting the tiles
  • Adjusting the map
    • Position
    • Scale
    • Rotation
  • Mapping Exercise [ Download ]
  • Mapping Tutorial [ View Flash ] [ Download ]