In this tutorial, I show you how to make the video below using Animated Lathe Nurbs, Blurry Reflections, and specular highlights. You also may also want to watch my Radio Wave Tutorial to learn another way to pull this effect off with After Effects.
How to build a Sci-Fi Sphere Scene in Cinema 4D from Nick Campbell on Vimeo.
A couple of quick tips when working with materials and textures in Cinema4D.
LINK to post and video tutorial.
VRAYforC4D Version 1.25
Enhancement
* Speed up Vray Materials previews
* Improved Displacement calculation
* Updated GI presets
* Improved Light Mesh code with better precisions and support for instancing and mograph cloning
* Improved Sun light control in Physical sky, you can now use only the physical sky illumination without a physical sun. Good for overcast skies or for separating sky and sun to have independent control over both
* Area light now can have bitmap and shader textures now (also rectangular area lights, good to built natural studio lights, light boxes etc)
* Lights now can use shaders instead of light color. You need texture scalings rather big (ca 100-500x)
* Normal export rewritten, also added extra support for objects with negative flipped axis by vray core.(Mirrored objects with setting axis to -1 will not result on artefacts anymore, no need to use the axis reset tool anymore)
* Shadow color now can be changed in physical Sun light (please note that only black is physical correct though)
* Shadows now can be textured by use of procedual shaders. You need texture scalings rather big (ca 100-500x)
* All C4D Lights can have now physical emitter values, they use a approximations as if they would be very small area emitters (watt, lumen, etc), for 100% precise Photometric Lights use only Area light though, as in reality are only Area light.
* Material Weight maps now can be used to limit or multilayer Displacement
New Features
* Added newest Vray core 1.90.03
* Added true dispersion in Refraction Layer
* Added option to set exit colors on reflection channels
* Added option to set exit colors on refraction channel
* Added option to show AA samples, this is good to canalize and improve an AA solutions
* Added GI option to limit ray distance, can give speedups (speed up strongly depends on scene)
* Added material option to limit reflection by a certain depth (in real world units), with fading control
* Added option in overwrite material to set a per object based reflection environment (similar to the global reflection environment)
* Added material option to force materials/objects to be calculated by brute force, even though irradiance map is used in vray gi options. Enables use of brute force per material or objects that use that material (good for detailed interesting for animations too)
* Added translucency texture in BDRF SSS under Refraction channel of the Vray Materials (and much better and faster Volume Fog and SSS effects) as per user request.
* Added Compensate exposure option in Luminosity Layer, it will make an auto exposure of the luminance color/texture, a multiplier of 1 will then be always for any physical camera exposure if this option is checked. Useful for easy and fast use of luminance textures/effects.
* Added option to set custom multipliers for diffuse light emissision (default = 1x)
* Added option to set custom multiplier for specular light contributions (independent to light intensity, default =1x)
* Added new LC option to set ray depth og light cache calculation. (default =100)
* Added option to use environment fog for BRDF SSS calculation
* Added vray dirt material into diffuse and luminance channel, good for dirt effects and for fast AO.
* Added option to mix inverted vray dirt material to achieve multilayer effect of surface dirt
* Added ability to set c4d lights color, even if a vray tag was added (color will be transferred to the vray tag in that case)
* Added emit on Back Side parameter in Luminance layer of the Vray Materials
* Added new emitter parameter in Volume refraction
* Added option to auto connect AA threshold to DMC threshold (recommended to use in most situations)
* Added option to enable/disable shadow casting of the atmosphere in physical sky
* Added show calculation phase for caustics
* Added Vray Fur Tag, with procedual fur/grass/short hair/carpets solution, it generates special dynamic geometry on the fly during rendering for anything where you need fast and simple hairs or fibers. Detailed controls by textures or shaders
* Added vray Volume environment fog, in Vray environment settings. Can be used with any object as „gizmo“, density, color scattering, falloff can be controlled with native c4d 3d shaders (noises). very detailed control by textures and shaders, optimized for GI use. Good to make fog, ground fog, clouds, mist, smoke and other volumetric effects. Note that GI is also volumetric in this release, light truly scatters through the atmosphere volume (no fake scattering)
Cinema 4D R10.1: Windows 32/64-bit and MacOSX 32-bit
Cinema 4D R11.0: Windows 32/64-bit and MacOSX 32/64-bit
Cinema 4D R11.5: Windows 32/64-bit and MacOSX 32/64-bit
v1.2.0 (2010.08.23)
- Added TIFF image versions of efeu0_alpha, efeu1_alpha, and efeu_branch_big.
- Added Status Spinner to show loading of images during Ivy Grower tool initialization.
- Added “Soft” and “Image Alpha” options for Alpha channel settings of Adult Leaf, Young Leaf, and Branch Texture Maps.
- Updated Texture Maps to retain thumbnail bitmaps and load only from file as needed to speed up tool reuse.
- Rearranged Birth options.
- Added “Sweep NURBS” creation option with “End Scale” setting and cross-section Spline linkbox for both the Branch Spline and IGSpline creation during birth. This creates a SweepNURBS with Phong and Texture tag and a Branch Material if needed for either spline. The Branch spline or IGSpline as well as a clone of the Cross-Section Spline (if it exists) are childed to the SweepNURBS.
- Fixed undo behavior with rebirth causing last non-related action to be undone.
- Added “Render Instances for Leaves” under Birth tab. Only available in Cinema 4D R11.5 and later. Separate Branch object mesh is implicit with this setting enabled.
Pro: Faster Renders, less memory usage.
Con: Undo will take a long time.
- Added Texture preview for Adult Leaf, Young Leaf, and Branch Texture Maps.
- Updated IGSpline growth to be Linearly Interpolated for smooth growth of the spline instead of point-to-point of the spline.
- Updated Birth to realize a new growth at a new seed and not undo a previous different one in the process.
- Added Status Spinner to show that growth is ongoing.
- Updated HTML documentation
LINK to Kuroyume’s C4D Plugins page.
Smart image based lighting (sIBL) overview from rob redman on Vimeo.
In this video I take a look at sIBL, a great system for lighting your scene very efficiently, using a plugin which is freely available from: hdrlabs.com/sibl/index.html
Watch the video to see how it works and how easily you can set up very impressive lighting. Especially good for exterior shots but pretty useful for indoor renders too.
More tutorials from Rob Redman at PariahStudios.co.uk
How to Animate the Inception Totem Part 2 – After Effects from Nick Campbell on Vimeo.
“In part two of this tutorial, we head into After Effects where we composite and finish the scene using Frischluft Depth Of Field, Curves and blurs. I also show you how to use the object buffer from cinema 4D to color correct different parts of your scene separately. Enjoy.” -Greyscale Gorilla
LINK to original GSG post.
How to Animate the Inception Totem with Cinema 4D and Dynamics from Nick Campbell on Vimeo.
“In this tutorial, I show you how to animate, light and texture the totem top scene from Inception. I show you how to use the Lathe Nurbs, Dynamics and noise in your textures to build and texture the scene. Then I show you how to light the scene with the HDRI Light Kit Pro. Stay tuned for part 2 of this tutorial where we head into After Effects and do the texturing and compositing.” – Greyscale Gorilla
LINK to post and more info…
