I was asked about the Modify Clone parameter that is available on many of the effectors.  I made a real simple file that shows the parameter in use and thought I’d share it here.

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.

Hi everyone and welcome to helloluxx, the new home of my blog.

As a thank you for all the continued support, I’ve created a Light Dome scene that you can download for use in your own Cinema4D scenes. You will need MoGraph to use the setup and I created it using Cinema4D r11.5, but it should work fine in r11, and maybe even 10.5.

Light Dome - Basic Render Result

The Light Dome is fairly straight forward to use. Here’s a screenshot of the available parameters.

Light Dome Parameters

I’ve also created a short tutorial that gives you a quick overview of the controls. You can check this out on Vimeo.

Light Dome Introduction from Tim Clapham on Vimeo.

Download the Cinema4D Light Dome scene as a zip file here.

When using MoGraph in Cinema4D, the effectors can be used for several things other than affecting the position, rotation or scale.  Another option is to control the visibility of clones. If you switch to the Parameter tab of an appropriate effector, scroll down and you will see an innocent little check box labeled Visibility.  Now you won’t find this on all the effectors as it just wouldn’t make sense on some of them.  On the effectors where you can use it however, this check box  . . .  believe it or not  . . . makes clones visible or invisible!

Visibility Checkbox

You can use this to simply control which clones are visible and which are not.  Of course you can use the Falloff to control this too.  I’m made a small example scene that demonstrates this using the Random, Shader and Step Effectors.  Although the Step Effector is only really using Falloff as it’s control.

Here’s a preview of the result.

You can download this example scene 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.

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.