Cinema4D Plugins

all in one packages

Extended Starfield

This is a shader plugin to render star field backgrounds for space scenes. It is similar to the buildin starfield shader but with a lot of options.

starfield_demo.c4d

Basic usage: The maximum diameter of the stars is set as pixels in screen space. The distance between the stars is set by the UV-Spacing parameter. That means the distance is measured in UV space. You will need to adjust this spacing when you change your mapping parameters. Furthermore the shader cannot handle arbitrarily large stars. Their diameter may not exceed the spacing in between them. Keep in mind though that the respective parameters are measured in different spaces.

There are channels for auxiliary shaders to determine the spatial density distribution of stars (Density Map), and their brightness distribution (Intensity Map). In addition the brightness can be controlled by probability distribution functions (Intensity PDF/Dark Intensity PDF) which determine the probability that a star has a certain brightness. The Dark Intensity PDF is used when an spatial intensity map is set. The final brightness is interpolated between the values picked from the Intensity/Dark Intensity PDFs. Analogously you can set a probability distribution for the star size. Link Size to Intensity means that bright stars are also large and vice versa.

Atmosphere Shader

This is a plugin material to simulate light scattering in the atmosphere. It is primarily intended for views from space. It can also handle views close to the ground and will produce acceptable sky colors and aerial perspective. But it does this quite inefficiently.

atmosphere ascent test.avi (1MB DivX 6)
Demo Scenes	Manual

Developement will probably continue on this plugin. For example, it computes single scattering only. Might add multiple scattering in the Future.

Credits: Textures are from http://www.shadedrelief.com/natural3/index.html (modified)

Implementation Reference: Bruneton, E., Neyret, F., Precomputed Atmospheric Scattering, Comput. Graph. Forum, 27, 1079, (2008)

Simple Colormap

This is a videopost plugin for color mapping. It works analogous to Cinema 4Ds native color mapping effect but with different parameters. The reason for its developement was that the native version is quite unintuitive use imo.

If Boot Low Intensities is off, the mapping is defined as 1-exp(-Exposure*L), where L is the original pixel intensity. If Boost Low Intensities is on, a piece of a gamma correction curve (with gamma=2.2) is used for low intensities. If Use HSV is on, the pixel color is first converted to HSV and the mapping applied to the V component, otherwise the mapping is applied to individual RGB channels. The 0.->, 1.0 -> etc. fields are there to show the result for specific intensity values.

Noise Deformer

Smooth

This was a little mesh smoothing plugin. There is now a deformer version avaiable in addition to the dialog. Just put the deformer under a polygon object to make it smooth. It supports restriction and weighting by vertex maps and it also supports the falloffs that were introduced with Mograph. It can be quite usefull for CA to reduce unwanted deformation artifacts from bones.

The dialog version is still there. This one supports now smoothing of vertex maps. If one is selected it should be smoothed instead of the polygon mesh.

Most options have changed in constrast to 1.0. There is an amount parameter which controls the total strength of smoothing. The algorithms uses implicit time(=smoothing strength) integration. The number of timesteps can be adjusted. 1 is most often good enough, but if you need extremly strong smoothing you might need more iterations. The Squared Operator option makes smooth transitions to non-smoothened areas (can sometimes produced odd results though). The different operator types select various approcimations to the continuous laplace operator. Pick one that works best.

As before the algorithm is based on Desbrun, M., "ImplicitFairing of Irregular Meshes using Diffusion and Curvature Flow", Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 99.

Furthermore there is new custom cone-shaped falloff type which is quite versatile but also a bit inconvenient to use.

CopyPastePolys

Dublicate Object

This is a mimimalistic "dublicate" generator. It moves cloned objects along a fixed vector, and/or rotates them around it's own y-axis. That's all :)

ThingsOnSurface Shader

• Brush:
  Here you put a shader or bitmap which is the "brush" that is distributed over the texture. Alpha channels are also handled, if the brush has one.
• Mask:
  Serves as alpha channel if the brush doesn't have one.
• Brush Format:
  The Shader needs to know the width/height ratio of the brush. It doesn't detect it automatically ( wich would also be impossible for a shader as brush ), so you have to enter the size manually )
• BlendMode and Strength:
  Determine how brush instances are blended over each other.
• Brush Size and Variation:
  Control mean brush size and deviation in uv texture space
• Size Map:
  Controls brush size by a shader or bitmap.
• Density:
  Density of the brushes on the textures. The Shader divides Texturspace by a uniform rectangular grid. The Densityparameter actually determines the mean number of brush instanzes, which come up within each grid cell. Can also be controlled by a shader or bitmap.

SplineConnector

• Input: SplineObjects
  SplineConnector generates a new spline from the base points of the input splines according to the type setting ( and the rest of the parameters )
• Input: LineObjects
  SplineConnector combines the LineObject approximations of the input splines to a single LineObject.

SplineNoiseDeformer

• Strength: deformation amplitude
• Helix Frequency: rotary frequency of the helix
• Strength Spline: modulates the deformation along the spline additionally to the noise function

ShearRotateScale

• Shear Tool
• Scale Tool
• Rotate Tool ( also rotates whole objects )
• EdgeRotate Tool:
  Rotates polys,point or edges around a given edge. Just hold down the mouse to select the nearest edge to rotate around, then drag to rotate.

Cellular Shader

Point Collapse Tool

UVtoObject