Make a Water Shader in Cinema 4D

Joey Korenman : Hey there, Joey here for school of motion. And in this lesson, we're going to take a look at how you can make something look like it's floating on an ocean without needing anything more than the built in tools that Cinema 4D has to offer. This lesson is about being clever with the existing tools. We'll take a look at how to build a custom ocean texture and then get some texts to float on the surface. Like it's riding the waves while this may sound a bit complex. If you hang in there by the end of this lesson, you'll learn a bunch of new skills about texturing rigging and animating that you might not have known before. Don't forget to sign up for a free student account. So you can grab the project files from this lesson as well as assets from any other lesson on the site.
Joey Korenman : And now let's jump into Cinema 4D. All right. So here we are in cinema and a, the first thing I'm going to do is show you guys what happens normally when you add, uh, the scenery plugin. So, um, if you're not familiar with it, it comes with a bunch of presets and setups for you. So I'm just going to add a sunlight setup and I'm going to add the, um, let's just go with the blue sky, ocean preset. All right. And, uh, so by default, um, when you add those two, those two objects, um, this is the result you get. All right. Um, and anti-aliasing has turned to low. There's no GI there's no, uh, ambient occlusion, but you can see you've got a pretty decent, uh, ocean here, you know, and you've got some nice reflections, um, and the lighting's nice and with a little tweaking, this could be a very usable, seamless ocean environment.
Joey Korenman : All right. Um, now here's the problem. And, and a reason I've been getting a lot of emails, uh, let's say you want something to actually be floating in the water. So let's just take this type and move it down into the water and do a render. Uh, now you'll see the reflections and everything is still a great, the problem is you are getting a perfectly straight, seamless line all the way across the object where it's intersecting the water. You're not getting any of the waviness or the ripples or anything like that. Um, and on top of that, there's no way, um, currently with scenery to, uh, to have this water actually be 3d water, what, the way, the way it's doing this is with a bump map. Um, and I'm going to show you guys the difference between a bump map and a true displacement and a little bit.
Joey Korenman : Um, so, uh, how can we, um, how can we actually get this ocean to have waves and rolling waves and ripples and things like that that will interact with the geometry? All right. Currently scenery, isn't set up for that, maybe in a later version. Um, I'll add that as, as a different type of preset, but what I'm going to show you guys is how you can use, uh, you can kind of make your own ocean, um, and you can still use scenery with it. You can still use, uh, these built-in 16 K skies that we provide. These are all seamless, by the way, you can rotate all the way around them. Um, and, uh, and you can use those to get great reflections out of your kinda, you know, home-brewed ocean. Um, so here's what we're going to do. I'm going to open a new Cinema 4D project, and I'm gonna add a floor to it.
Joey Korenman : Okay. Um, because I want to show you something now in, uh, in scenery, all of the floors and scenery are actually floor objects because floor objects and cinema are infinite. So if I add a material to this and render it, you'll see, it actually extends way past where it looks like it's going in my, uh, in my viewport here. It looks like it ends here. When I hit render, it goes all the way to the horizon. All right. Which is great when you want a seamless floor. Um, one of the problems with that is that, uh, cinema will not let you put displacement on an infinite floor. Um, and let me show you what displacement is now. All right. So I'm gonna get rid of the floor and I'm gonna replace it with a plane. Let's make it a little bit bigger here. Um, and if you guys are following along, uh, what I'm doing is holding the five key and just clicking and dragging.