MAXWELL TUTORIAL

Hi all,

Here is a little tutorial based on the render you see above. I shall discuss the material setup (using the maxwell v1.1 c4d plugin) and then the lighting.

1. First prepare your scene by making sure everything is modelled to real scale, ie. if its 10mm in the real world its 10mm in cinema 4d. I placed the model of the fire truck in a large chamfered cube and then I cut top off, I then reversed the normals. (see piccy below)

2. Now time for the materials. I shall discuss in detail how I created the most important texture of the scene, the fire truck's bodywork. I used a custom MXM tag and created 3 BSDF layers. The first one was for the paint work, the second was for the paint works gloss and the third was for the metal work underneath the paint work. I used an alpha map on the layer settings, this allowed me to paint where the metal would show through. you can see this on the picture below. notice how I inverted the alpha map on the 3rd layer so that the metal only showed on those white parts. This was also the case on the rear of the truck.

Basic run down on the other materials used. The background cube used a plastic tag, with a reflectance colour of 214,214,214. The spec colour was 41,41,41 and the toughness of 86. For all the metal work I used a Maxwell metal tag. This was set as Aluminium with a roughness of 24.52. On the metal floor I added a check plate (slightly blurred) bump map to the maxwell tag. This was done by mapping the floor with a c4d material that contained the check plate bump which was then set to 39%. I then dragged that to the maxwell tag that was on the floor. For the rest of the black plastic I used a custom MXM with two BSDF layers, one set to 80% and the second to 20%. The first was for the colour, ie. black. The second one was for the glossyness of the material and that was set to reflectance(0o) 135,135,135. the (90o) was set to white. The transmittance to black. The Nd was set to 20 and the roughness to 15. Thats basically all the textures sorted.

3. Lighting. I decided to go for a studio light setup that I have seen many times. This is used a lot on cars in real life. So if its good enough for them its good enough for me :). If you scroll up to the setup piccy you can see I have created a large box above the truck, this is the emitter. Being big it creates nice soft shadows and also nice reflections on the body work. It has a maxwell emitter tag set to, colour+luminance. Emitter intesity set to 2000 and Emitter efficiency to 12.7. Power [w] and colour was set to white. Once I set the render off I adjusted the shutter to either make the image lighter or darker (very handy being able to do this while rendering ).

4, The camera was set to 0.017 shutterspeed, 100 iso, and fstop of 4. like I said you can adjust it in the render while rendering.

5, For the render settings dialog I just made sure it was set to low priority by adding the p:low to the command line. I then made sure it was using 2 cpu threads and had enough time to render.

Well thats about it. I will write another small tutorial on how I lit the flashlight version this truck. I hope it will help someone.