• Maxon Cinema 4D

  Is it possible to use Materials within Shaders?

  Posted by Michael Lansdell on August 28, 2015 at 1:43 pm

  Hi,

  I’m (still!) trying to get my head around the terrain shader in Cinema 4D R14. I’ve had great success getting nice results using jpeg textures I’ve made to separate grass and stone on terrains, but what I would really like to be able to do is use some of the graet materials I have access too within the shader. It seems like it should be possible, but I can’t work it out!

  I thought a way around it might be to use a stone material (which has some displacement) as my base texture, and then apply the grass on top with the terrain shader, but I don’t seem to be able to get transparencies with the terrain shader so it doesn’t stack nicely.

  I’ve attached some stills to show my workings.

  My Terrain Shader:

  

  Stone Material (from Video Copilot btw) with displacement:

  

  Attempt to overlay grass with from Terrain Shader over Stone Material:

  

  Any solutions or work-arounds would be much appreciated! Ideally I think I’d like to be able to do everything within one Material/Shader so I could save it away for future use easily, but I apprecite that might not be possible. Especially in my outdated version of C4D.

  I’ve had great advice and help on these forums previously, fingers crossed for more!

  Michael Lansdell replied 10 years, 8 months ago 2 Members · 4 Replies
• 4 Replies

• 

  Michael Lansdell

  August 28, 2015 at 2:24 pm

  So just to keep this up to date, I realised I could get 75% of the look by copying attributes from the material in to the Shader. It doesn’t look as good to me though. Definite disadvantages in that there will only be one texture controlling the specular, bump, etc…

  Anyway, this is what that looks like:

  

  If this is the way to do it, is there a way of linking attributes from the Terrain Mask in say the Colour channel to the other instances of Terrain Mask you would need for the Displacement, Bump, Specular channels?

  Also, whilst I REALLY like how the displacement alters the way the grass lies on the object, I wonder if there is a way so make it a little less rigid to every bump. It would be good to be able to fill in the gaps slightly, like this very (VERY) crude photoshop sort of shows:

  

  Thanks again! I’ll be sure to share the final result/material with the community here at Creative Cow (I’ll swap out any Video Copilot stuff for copyright free stuff) once I’m done.

  M
• 

  Michael Lansdell

  August 28, 2015 at 2:59 pm

  Actually, what would be REALLY powerful for something like this would be to use the Terrain Shader with something like the Hair simulation in C4D so there could be actual blades of grass…

  In the meanwhile turning down the number of repetitions of the shader has helped:

  

  Michael Lansdell

  Online/Offline Editor, Motion Graphics and VFX

  http://www.michael-lansdell.co.uk
• 

  Adam Trachtenberg

  August 28, 2015 at 9:18 pm

  Not sure why you’re having a problem using the terrain shader in the alpha channel. Should work fine.

  Example: 9184_terrainshaderstackedmats.c4d.zip
• 

  Michael Lansdell

  August 28, 2015 at 9:22 pm

  Thanks Adam! I won’t be able to check this until Tuesday but hopefully will solve the problem. Will be great to have a Terrain shader I can use to top other materials. I think I can imagine how this would help with creating coastlines (the next thing to work out!).

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