Reflection Falloff?
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.
Works well, but plugin: Very, Very Sloooooow! I guess it’s a single thread. What about using proximal?
Thanx for this.
I compared render time between 3Dfalloff plugin & AO solution (after some adjustments to have almost the same graphic result with Matt demo scene).
It took 4 seconds with the plugin and 14-15 sec with AO (iMac core 2 duo 2.8 Ghz, 4 Go RAM). I can’t manage to have the “exact” same look (but almost), but notice I prefer the softness of the plugin result.
So yes, it’s a quicker way to achieve a good and pretty adjustable reflexion falloff (tweaking start & end color).
Thanx again Tim !
Tim very cool, thanks for sharing! I saw Matt’s plugin awhile back but always seem to forget to use it.
This is a good attempt at solving the C4D falloff issue.
However, a warning to those using this shader.
When this plugin is installed, cinema no longer can achieve anti-aliased reflections. Even if you are not using the shader. I had to remove it from the plugins folder to get everything back to normal.
Did anyone else notice this?
Hi Ryan
Not sure why you’re having that problem, but Best AA works fine for me with Distance Falloff.
cheers
Tim
Hi Tim,
I have used the falloff distance shader with great efffect loved it till I got to cinema 11.5 and it gives a weid grainy result. Can you off any help as to where to get a fix or an upgrade.
Hi Kevin
This appears to be a bug that has crept in
I noticed it too..
hey, i have the same problem on 11.5, any solution???
Wow, I can’t believe this shader is still being used. It was written for v6.x of Cinema 4D as that is what I had at the time. I can try and look at it in the newer version demo to see if I can get it working. I would imagine it’s just changes in the rendering engine and COFFEE SDK. Does anybody have any images that use this plugin? I would love to see them.
Matt Savard