GrungeFX (FREE)

The tool provides an easy way to setup unique grunge, weathering, and distress effects to your object without any need to UV map or use BodyPaint to paint masks.

LINK

Cinema 4D Live at NAB

Check out C4DLive.com for a live broadcast of the demos at the Maxon booth during NAB.

Here’s what’s up for Monday, April 7th… NOTICE THE KRAKATOA DEMO!!!!!

9:30am Learn To Animate The Easy Way with Nick Campbell – Greyscalegorilla
10:30am Creating Complex Animations with X-particles with Casey Hupke
11:30am Breakdown of Emmy-award winning World War 2 from Space with Hazel Baird
12:30pm Camera Mapping for Game of Thrones with Josiah Taylor
1:30pm Breakdowns and Pipelines for South Park and God of War with Jeremy Cox
2:30pm X-Particle Playground: Basics to Advanced Techniques with Rob Garrott
3:30pm Nontraditional 3D Aquisitions and Workflow for Groundbreaking Music Vids with Ghost Town Media
4:29pm Particle Effects with MoGraph / Creating Flexible Textures for Packaging with Athanasios Pozantzis
5:30pm Intro to Krakatoa for CINEMA 4D with Borislav “Bobo” Petrov – Thinkbox

http://www.c4dlive.com/

UVWLaser (19 euro+VAT)

UVWLaser is a Cinema 4D plugin that creates a black white mask image sequence based on a raytracing operation over a polygon

The plugin’s working principle is very simple:

1) Place a UVWLaser object in the scene
This object is a ray caster that emits a ray between two points and draw it with a spline

2) Configure its properties and set which object is the ray collider

3) Animate your scene

4) Press Bake Map button and set the bake options

The plugin will generate a black white image sequence based on the ray tracing over polygon UVW Map

You can set a lot of parameters like the brush size, brush pressure and opacity, the size of the images, the time interval to bake etc. etc.
With the black white image sequence you can enjoy yourself doing a lot of interesting animation
For example animating a pen that writes on paper will be a breeze, you won’t need to use any complicated 2D video editor to generate the map and waste a lot of time to sincronize the movement of the pencil with the map.
For more information watch the video demo, it contains some examples of rig and use.

The plugin works with all editions of Cinema 4D R13/14/15 (Prime, Broadcast, Visualize, Studio) and with all cinema 4D compatible engine renderers (V-Ray etc).

LINK

Pixel Lab 500+ Materials Pack ($50)

The textures are organized into the following categories: Alpha Overlays, Everyday Color, Fabric/Leather, Glass/Transparent/Ice, Luminance, Metal, Misc., Paper/Cardboard, Patterns/Tiles, Rubber/Plastic, Stone/Concrete/Dirt and Wood. It’s a .lib4d file so you can load these textures into your Cinema 4D Content Browser and easily access them at any time.

Here’s a sample of the luminance textures.

Luminance

LINK

Fold It Plugin [19 euro]

foldit

The plugin’s working principle is very simple:

1) Imagine you want to fold a paper sheet
2) Take a polygonal sheet and place it on the plane XZ
3) With the knife tool or other modeling tools engrave the sheet in such a way as to obtain the polygon’s edges in correspondence of the folds of the paper
4) select the edges to fold and the polygonal area that you have to fold
5) call the Add Fold tool, an arrow indicating the direction of the fold will be created
6) set the proper size of the arrow and arrange it according to the desired orientation for folding sheet
7) repeat this process for all the folds you want to obtain
8) according to the priority of folding adjust the fold object hierarchy
9) select the polygonal sheet and call the make joint command, the arrows will be made invisible for any future changes and in their place a joint skeleton will be generated already rigged and weighed ready to be animated using the appropriate controller created by default

LINK

M4D Mental Ray / Iray update 1.3.0

new iray features:
-Speedups due to 3.11 support
Team Render single frame support
Team Render animation support
-new caustic sampler for fast caustic effects
-new architectural sampler
-“Use all GPUs” setting to simplify settings
-Tile mapping improvements
-Overwrite Material
-Gamma/LWF fixes
-new Preset system (extendable by user)
-can use std material, iray material and mia material to define sky map
LPE support (Beauty, Reflection, Indirect Illumination… even Custom Light Paths)
-Better Progress Bar support
-Presets for Rendersettings
-Presets for Photographic exposure
-Environment rotation fixed
-Update Preview on Rendersettings changes
-GPU settings can be set in m4d Preferences of each TR or NET clientnew mental ray features:
Team Render single frame support
-Team Render animation support

-new NET support for R14
-Light Tag improvements
-Overwrite Material
-Presets for MiaMaterial

Refractive Animation with Caustics in Cinema4D

caustic

 

This tutorial is from a technique that I used many years ago. I’m sure some of you will remember this as I used to have a written tutorial on the Hypa website many moons ago! The results from this are quite unique and you can create some really beautiful effects by rendering a few passes and comping them together.

LINK

Cinema 4D Scene Speed

IntroSplit

“In this article I will explain several methods I use to reduce heavy calculations in Cinema 4D in order to retain Viewport speed while working with large scenes. I recommend reading through each section but have provided an index below to access information quickly.”

LINK