A couple of quick tips when working with materials and textures in Cinema4D.

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…

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.

Did you know that it is possible to loop noise in Cinema4D?

This can open up many possibilities for you, not just with the use of materials, but also when working with objects such as the shader effector. You may want random motion, but need it to loop. So instead of using the random effector, you could use the shader effector with loopable noise.

The loop option works for nearly all types of noise with the exception of Electric, Gaseous, Random and Wavy Turbulence.  The different noise types will give you quite varied results. So experiment with noise type, size, octaves and also try adjusting the brightness and contrast.

Here’s how it works..

Firstly, you need to set an animation speed for the noise.

Then you set the loop period.  The loop period value refers to the number of seconds for the loop, so if you set this to 3, then the noise will loop after 3 seconds.

Noise Settings

To make sure the noise does loop, the animation speed may be adjust slightly internally. The reason for this is that the speed will need to be a specific value for the loop to be possible. So if you use a value that is not loopable within the loop period (i.e. the speed is too fast or too slow), Cinema4D will internally adjust the animation speed so it becomes possible.

So the obvious use for this with MoGraph is with the Shader Effector.

Here’s a few examples using a Cloner set to Grid Array with varying noise types.

This uses regular noise

This uses cell noise

This uses dents

You can also use this method on non-MoGraph objects.  Using the sample effector node, you can sample the Shader Effector and then use the Range Mapper to apply the values to other objects parameters.

Using Xpresso to link the Shader Effector to normal objects

Here is an example where I have used it to control the colour and heading of a spotlight, and also the Z movement of an ExtrudeNURBS.

So there you have it . . . loopable noise.  Lot’s more you could do besides.  I hope you found this useful.

You can grab the files here.

We all know that HDR Images produce superior reflections when used as environment maps.

However a lot of HDRIs are supplied in formats that are not specifically shaped to be optimal for spherical mapping.

They often are created using the popular probe method, or alternatively, you might have some that have been generated using the cross method.

You can see an example of such formats below.

HDRI Cross Format

HDRI Probe Format

Well luckily for us, Cinema4D comes with some tools to take these formats and convert them into the more usable spherical map.

If you go to the Render Menu and scroll down, you’ll see two entries.

Convert HDR Cross…
Convert HDR Probe…

Cinema4D Render Menu

Well it is really as simple as selecting the command, then choosing the appropriate HDRI.

Cinema will then perform the conversion and resave the HDRI in the same directory.  The Filename will have the addition of _con to show you that this is the converted file.

The Converted HDRI

Happy HDRI-ing!

I was asked a question on www.fxphd.com how to alternate between two colours on a set of stairs that someone had built.

Stairs alternating colour

I came up with three simple solutions that use the shader effector, the color shader and the multi shader.

I thought I’d share the file here.

Download the C4D file

I hope that some of you find it useful.

I’m sure that a lot of you are already aware that you can drag a material straight from the Material Manager onto an object and that material will be assigned to that object. Did you know, you can use a similar technique to actually restrict to Selection Sets.

In Polygon Mode, first create the polygon selection.

Create a polygon selection

Next either drag the material from the Material Manager onto the selected polygons, or select the material and choose Apply from the Function menu.

Drag the material onto the polygon selection or choose Apply from the Function menu

Cinema4d will automatically create a Polygon Selection Tag and restrict the material to that selection.

Selection Set and Tag created automatically

Much quicker than creating the selection, choosing Set Selection, dragging your material onto the object, then dragging the tag into the texture tag . . .   Now, all you need to do, is rename the selection set tag to something more meaningful. (That’s if you want to?)