Here we go with another Thinking Particles example…

This scene also makes use of the Proximal shader. As you may have guessed from the name, the Proximal shader works based on the proximity of objects. In other words you can use it to control a material when it is near another object, edge, vertex, etc.

Thinking Particles and Proximal

Take for instance a hot iron branding some skin. You could use proximal in the skin luminance channel, place it in a layer shader as a layer mask to reveal a glowing red colour. Point Proximal at the Branding Iron object and set the Start / End Distance and the Intensity. As the branding iron object moves towards the skin object, the proximal shader will get whiter. As it is used as a mask, it will reveal red coloured shader.

The Proximal Shader

As for the TP side of things, I’ve created a simple Surface Emitter and then dropped all the particles down using PGravity. The particles bounce off the surface using the PDeflector node. The surface that they bounce off has the proximal shader. I’ve used it in the displacement channel and also in a layer shader in the colour channel. So as the particles get close to the surface, they make dents and they also change the colour.

TP Xpresso Setup

Of course there are a lot more creative uses for this technique, but hopefully this simple example will whet your appetite and you will put it to a more suitable usage! How about emitting particles from the rear of a boat to stir up some wake. I remember JeremyW had a superb example of just that a few years back.

For those of you who don’t have Thinking Particles or just like to experiment. This type of technique is certainly possible using MoGraph too. You can use TP particles as the source for falloff on the Shader Effector and the Displace Deformer. If you don’t have TP then why not use MoDynamics to drop the clones down onto the surface?

I hope you find this useful and you are inspired to use the Proximal shader in your own projects.

You can download the Cinema4D scene file here.

A question was raised on fxphd about the different ways to generate geometry for Thinking Particles if you have created them using the MoGraph Matrix object.

You can do it several ways. You can create a Particle Geometry Object then create the particle geometry using Xpresso and the PShape node.

Alternatively you can use the Cloner Object and clone onto the Matrix Object.

I’ve created a couple of simple scenes that illustrate this. I’ve used two particle groups and then a simple Xpresso setup for each. The first scales one group of particles down and and the other aligns the second group to a null object.

The final scene is an example of doing this using only MoGraph, so no Thinking Particles or Xpresso is used.

Here’s a link to the files.

I hope you find them useful.