R12 Splash Screen

Well it’s that time of year again. The new release of Cinema4D has been announced. What an amazing release it is too. I have been fortunate enough to be part of the beta team and have been testing the new features for a while now. It is difficult to know where to start, but the most important update for me has to be the new dynamics module.

Restructured GUI - Dynamics Menu

Dynamics is incredible! The old dynamics module was slow, unreliable and quite honestly an unpleasant experience to work with. The new dynamics is an absolute joy to work with. In fact work can quite easily become play!

Those of you familiar with MoDynamics, introduced with r11, will be pleased to hear that the new dynamics is a huge extension beyond this. Maxon have taken Dynamics to a whole new level. Instead of being restricted to rigid bodies that only will work with MoGraph objects, we now have have the addition of Soft Bodies, Springs, Joints (hinges, etc) and Motors. They all work together, and even better they all work with or without the MoGraph module. If you want a stand alone dynamics simulation you can easily create this, but if you want to then duplicate it 500 times, drop it in a Cloner and away you go.

Rigid and Soft Bodies working together - click for movie

Dynamics will function as a fantastic feature in it’s own right, it will also work with MoGraph if you desire. For instance you can create a Soft Body, but you can also create a Soft Body of clones. Imagine virtual springs between all your cloned objects. You can link Soft and Rigid bodies together with the huge number of connector objects, these allow you to create hinges, cardon joints, ragdoll, sliders, the list goes on. Springs can be linear, radial or both, expect to see a lot of bouncing around in your scenes when you get hold of this.

Rigid Bodies, Soft Bodies and Hinges in action - click for movie

All you Xpresso heads will be pleased to hear that Dynamics comes with some new Xpresso nodes, so you can link Dynamics to other elements in your scene, such as Thinking Particles, allowing you to create particles upon collision and plenty more besides.

All in all Dynamics has finally received the upgrade we have all been waiting for. To be honest, I’ve just touched upon the features, you should really check out the Maxon webpage for full details of the new featureset.

Alongside Dynamics there are plenty of other improvements to be in awe of. We have now got a bundle of new deformers and a new morphing system. The new Pose Morph is a hybrid of Pose to Pose and Morph. So you can mix and match between position, scale, rotation and point level morphing. On top of the obvious morph parameters, Pose Morph supports UVs, Maps, Hierarchy, Parameters and User Data. Yes! I did say UVs, now you can morph your UV maps as well as geometry.  How awesome is that?

New Deformers

The Camera Deformer allows you to deform objects from the Camera viewpoint, some crazy stuff is going to come from this deformer alone. You set the grid resolution and then you can drag and keyframe points on the grid looking straight out onto your scene (and it has falloff built in too). If you link Pose Morph up to Camera Deformer with some Displacement and Cloth in between, then you can start to understand the power that can be harnessed.

Mesh Deformer is another new deformer. Take a low poly cage and use it control a high poly version. Something I know a lot of users have been asking for. You can even set your low poly mesh deformer work as a Dynamic Soft Body and as the low poly cage deforms, it then passes that deformation on to the high poly mesh.

I cannot finish this without mentioning Linear Workflow. Cinema4D now has the option to include Linear Workflow in your projects. Those of you who have been using DeGamma will be glad to see LWF as part of the core application. The new openGL (which is a fantastic improvement) supports Linear Workflow, so you see an accurate preview of your lighting and materials in the editor. We can use Colour Profiles for input and output now. This means we finally have the ability to work in Linear, and use Colour Management.

An alternative use for the new MoSpline L-System - click for movie

Well I really have only touched on the new features. I haven’t mentioned the new Render Queue, Smoothing Deformer, Correction Deformer, Surface Deformer, GUI enhancements, Freeze Transformations, IES lighting, Weight Manager, L-System (OMG!), Python…

I love this release, it is huge and I am sure you will all love it too. Check out the Maxon website for the full details and visit Cineversity for all the video highlights.

As for learning those new features. Watch this space, helloluxx will soon be updating our tutorials, to offer you an intensive and comprehensive collection of training that will cover many of the new features in depth. Something you definitely won’t want to miss out on.

How to replace all instances of either missing textures, or simply swap an existing texture in your materials.

How to change the material that is referenced in multiple tags.

Enjoy…

The Modify Clone parameter

If you have several objects under a cloner and the cloner is set to something other than cluster, then the modify clone parameter will determine which clones are displayed in the editor and rendered.

Manually importing large sequences can be a slow process, especially if you are working with many different passes rendered from your 3D application. Firstly the OS tends to come to a grinding halt when presented with 10,000 files in one directory, so you have to battle with that.

Then you have to sift through the directory and find each individual sequence, select it and import it. Finally after you have laboriously imported all the sequences, you should really organise your project window. Next thing you know, the project changes and there has been a re-render. You need to bring all the new sequences in and not only that, you need to swap them out for the originals in all your comps. If you have only one shot to deal with this is bad enough, but if you are dealing with 10, 20, even hundreds of shots, this can become such a workflow killer. You literally spend hours importing and swapping out files over the course of a project.

Here’s a screen grab for one sequence I’m currently working on for fxphd… (this is just the ambient pass)

A typical image sequence in the MacOS Finder

This is where Immigration comes in. It has got to be one of the most important scripts in my C4D to AE workflow and an absolute bargain at only $20!

If you use the C4D to AE export option to bring renders and cameras etc into After Effects from Cinema4D, you can create an AEC file and it automates the importing of all of those sequences by basically doing it for us. This is great for the first round of renders. The fun stops there, after this you have to import them manually and swap them out for the renders you’ve already included in your comps. Immigration not only makes the importing of sequences simple, it also facilitates swapping out any existing sequences. It handles huge numbers of files with ease, using intelligent recognition to find and replace existing renders in your projects, even when the filenames may have changed, which of course they will, at least, the version numbers.

Here's the same directory when viewed with Immigration…

If you’ve ever used Shake or Nuke, then you will be familiar with seeing your sequences as single entries when you browse the project directory. So instead of seeing hundreds and thousands of files, you see a single entry for each sequence. This is how Immigration presents your files in After Effects. I’ve never understood why the AE team hasn’t written this type of custom importer into the application, but until they do, we can use Immigration.

Here's the Immigration replace dialogue.

If you like the sound of this and want to take a look for yourself, then there is a free trial period that you can take advantage of. Test the script out for yourself. If at the end of it you are not convinced then you’ve lost nothing. Your projects will not be missing a plugin, you can return to the long winded way of importing sequences. I don’t think you’ll want to go back however, but don’t take my word for it, give it a try.

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.

Basic Flocking Xpresso

]]> http://www.helloluxx.com/cinema4d-thinking-particles/thinking-particles-basic-flocking/feed/ 10 http://www.helloluxx.com/cinema4d-misc/envy-c4d-interiors-for-vray-advanced-render-2/ http://www.helloluxx.com/cinema4d-misc/envy-c4d-interiors-for-vray-advanced-render-2/#comments Mon, 19 Jul 2010 11:03:50 +0000 Tim http://www.helloluxx.com/?p=522 I was recently contacted by Envy Studio who asked if I’d make a blog post regarding a new product they’d released for Cinema4D. Being the charitable type and always looking to support independent entrepreneurs, I agreed.   Plus it looks like a pretty good deal to me.  So here it is…

ENVY: C4D INTERIORS FOR ADVANCED RENDER 3 AND VRAY – volume 1.

These products are available as a downloadable version on the ENVY website.

- 10 professional interior scenes
- various light setups
- incorporates Linear Workflow for gamma correct results
- high quality lighting and render settings for optimum results
- 10 scenes for only 40 euros

ENVY: C4D INTERIORS FOR ADVANCED RENDER 3 AND VRAY – volume 1.

These products are available as a downloadable version on the ENVY website.

- 10 professional interior scenes
- various light setups
- incorporates Linear Workflow for gamma correct results
- high quality lighting and render settings for optimum results
- 10 scenes for only 40 euros

Vortex.A

Take a look at this cool little app that has been developed by Peder Norby from Trapcode.  As well as the incredible plugins that Trapcode produce for After Effects, Peder has also written a few apps for the iPhone / iPad that are definitely worth checking out.

Vortex.A

In Peders words “Vortex.A – touch-interactive generative art. I am experimenting with fluid dynamics: how liquids and gases behave – a classically difficult problem in physics/maths. Most agree that fluid dynamics is described by the Navier-Stokes differential equations. There is no known all-case solution for the equations, but there are solutions for specific cases and approximative methods to find numerical solutions.” – For more info, you should check out the Trapcode -Blog.

You can buy the Vortex.A app here

Did you know these templates can be exported and transferred to other copies of After Effects?  It is pretty simple to do and will save you loads of time recreating them from scratch.

Open up the version of After Effects that contains the templates that you’d like to export. From the Edit Menu, choose Templates > Render Settings.

Choose Edit / Templates / .....

In the dialogue that opens, there is an option to Save All in the lower left corner. Click here and choose a suitable save location on your hard drive.

Choose Save All

Now follow the same procedure for your Output Modules. The files you’ve saved will use the suffix .aom for output modules and .ars for Render Settings.  Once you have saved both of these files, you can close this version of After Effects and open the version you wish to import them into. Again choose Edit > Templates > Render Settings. This time click the Load button and then locate your saved files. Repeat for Output Modules and you are ready to go.

Loading your saved templates

Nice and simple and definitely one to remember. If any names are the same then those templates won’t be imported, this stops you loading in duplicate templates.

You can also use this method to send your render settings and output module templates to other users. Particularly handy if you need to ensure that staff working off-site, or even overseas, all use the same settings for their projects.