• Note: Beside polygon objects of course, it really can only scale primitives like Cube, Sphere, Cylinder, etc. In some cases the object cannot be fit to the cage. For example when using a rotated object or a object with only one degree of freedom like a sphere. It will still try to do something reasonable.
• Shearing only works with polygon objects.
• Spline tangents are not touched. I will fix this some day.
• You can switch between move, scale, rotate, shear with ALT+1-4. This is hardcoded at the moment.
• Hold Shift for quantization.

This is a shader plugin to change the time value for the evaluation of another shader. The main purpose of this plugin is to be able to use the same animated texture several times, at different times without having to create a lot of copies of virtually the same material.

The evaluation time is determined by an offset from the current time and this offset is determined by a user data entry in the respective texture tag. The timeshift shader has the parameter "Data Name" to determine from which user data the offset is taken.

This is a shader plugin to render star field backgrounds for space scenes. It is similar to the build-in star field 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.

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

Development 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)

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 development was that the native version is quite unintuitive use in my opinion.

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.

This is a generator object actually. It can map objects from an area which represents uv space to the surface of the respective object.

Example Scenes

The object used to define the mapping must a UVW Map. There are no other restrictions. It works with primitives, uv mapped polygon objects, subdivision surfaces, deformed objects, animated objects or any generator objects which generates geometry with UVW Tags attached. To use a object it can either be put as first child under the UV Deformer or referred to by a link.

The mapping of the input objects can be done point by point or by translation/rotation/scaling of the whole object. The output consists of polygonized objects or clones respectively. Splines also work, in which case line objects are generated.

There are various options to control the details of the mapping procedure. There is no description of these. Example scenes are available though.

Known issues: C4d R11 seems to have broken the handling of generator objects as map. Often they won't be recognized and the UV Deformer will do nothing. Turning the generator check mark off/on makes it work temporarily.

This was a little mesh smoothing plugin. There is now a deformer version available 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 useful 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 contrast 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 time steps can be adjusted. 1 is most often good enough, but if you need extremely 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 approximations to the continuous Laplace operator. Pick one that works best.

As before the algorithm is based on Desbrun, M., "Implicit Fairing 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.

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

• Brush:
  Here you put a shader or bitmap which is the "brush" that is distributed over the texture. Alpha channels are passed through.
• Mask:
  Serves as alpha channel if the brush has none.
• Brush Format:
  You must set the width/height ratio of the brush manually in this field.
• BlendMode and Strength:
  Determine how brush instances are blended over each other.
• Brush Size and Variation:
  Control mean brushes average 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 the texture space into a uniform rectangular grid and the density parameter actually determines the mean number of brush instances generated per grid cell. It can also be controlled by a shader or bitmap.

• 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.

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

• 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.