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.