It was recently brought to my attention that a superb set of procedural shader presets has been made available to purchase. Eric Smit, the man behind this set creates some of the most stunning Cinema4D landscapes, so you can be sure of good quality with this product.

The LANDSCAPE SHADING KIT is a collection of 3D procedural Cinema 4D materials. 170 materials patiently designed to offer a high level of realism and flexibility. The whole kit is the most powerful solution for landscape texturing within Cinema 4D. It offers almost the same level of realism as photo based maps, without the limitations and frustrations of 2D mapping.

Landscape Shader Kit Example 01

Created by Eric Smit, this looks to be an awesome collection and anyone who is working with Cinema4D to create landscapes should take a serious look at this collection.

Created with ease of use in mind, and for a very affordable price too.  Head on over to Eric’s website to read more about this stunning collection.

Landscape Shader Kit Example 02

In this short tutorial, I show you some more of the features available in the Cinema4D MoGraph module.

By using the Sort option in the Cloner, you can use Effectors to determine which clone from the hierarchy is displayed.

The Sorted option in the Random Effector allows you to use each child of the cloner the same number of times, or in combination with the multishader you can ensure the shaders are distributed evenly across your clones. Great for things like playing cards where you don’t want duplicate clones.

To find out more visit Vimeo and watch the tutorial.

Sorted! from Tim Clapham on Vimeo.

You can download the project file associated with this tutorial by clicking here.

There was a question over at The Motion Exchange about how to create a falloff type effect with reflections in Cinema4D.

Well there are a few methods to achieve this, some are more accurate than others, but because of this, they are a little more costly with render times.

Reflection Blur

The first and perhaps the most obvious way is to use the reflection channel blurriness parameter. This will however increase your render times somewhat if you are after a smooth grain free result. Also it isn’t necessarily the result you may be after.

Reflection with Ambient Occlusion Shader

Another option is to use Ambient Occlusion in the reflection channel as Harry Frank from Graymachine shows here on The Motion Exchange. This is quite a cool trick, but again it can be a little slow to render.

Reflection using Distance Falloff shader

There is also a shader available online that will allow you to achieve this called Distance Falloff. Possibly the least accurate way, but also the quickest. I think a lot of you will find this to be the answer when you want a quick result and have no problem with a little inaccuracy. Lucky for us the shader is written in c.o.f.f.e.e. so it still works fine with r11.5.

The guy who wrote this plugin all those years ago is Matt Savard. You can download the plugin with a simple example scene from here.

Thanks Matt for a really useful shader.