Cinema 4D Gel Material Tutorial

Inspired by Marbles and Gel, the filaments , bubbles suspended in the space, shards random shapes, specular light bouncing internal refections and caustics.

Challenge was to reproduce this as a material, that could easily be adapted to be used on ANY shape with minimum steps…

Cinema 4D being my tool of preference, I set about recreating what you see attached. It had to be something easy to set up, yet have enough variation, flexibility and depth for further exploration.

Their are no volumetric materials, only volumetric lights. These cannot create anything near what I need. Other options to try Sub Surface scattering… but alas no. Finally I turned to my old friend the hair and spline module, this had solved a few of my dynamics issues before, maybe it could create me a whole new material….

So first I created my pearl, next I gave it a second interior skin using the Cloth Nurbs. This gave it a thickness. Then I placed a few inward facing hairs (filaments) on the inside faces. These weren’t the default hairs… Hair has the option of using customised hair geometry in the “Generate instance” option, so I used a random shaped strand with various bubbles and geometry (you can see some scattered around in the background). I jiggled them about a little using forces, and because my inner skin had a hair collider tag the filaments stayed within the confines of the designed face.

Finally all I had to do was create a groovy material that was Gel, marble like. So I used the built in Cheen, with scale ramped up, Transparency switched on. Job done :) and the great news is its a flexible set up, robust enough to work with any shape. 

So bet you never expected the hair module to be used like that! Nope neither did I !