The latest Maxon Cinema 4D was just announced with a number of new features and updates to existing features , a new Take System shows promise to deliver an unlike before Render Layer system within C4D , along side an excellent integration with Side Effects’ Houdini the leading simulation and animation software used by many , learn more about the latest release on Maxon.net.
be sure to also watch this new piece of art by Aixsponza Titled “Seed” , made using Cinema 4D R17.
Another great year and yet another fantastic teaser for the well known 99 Frames The social animation project which gathers talents and users of Cinema 4D to create a 3 second or 99 frames of animation for the competition .
@Richnosworthy worked on this year’s fantastic teaser for the project and provided us an insight on the process with this great breakdown .
learn more about 99 Frames on 99frames.tumblr.com
Welcome , we will continue our series on getting started with VRayforC4D . In this session we will talk more about some of the other material types that VRay offers and then we will get started with the Physical Camera , its been some time since our last tutorial and VRayforC4D has advanced so we will also include some of the new things that you might have seen in other tutorials outside of the Basix series , lets get started !
To start off keep in mind that some the “theories” that we talked about in the last tutorial regarding materials still remain valid , we are only going to talk about the most recent changes and how these changes will effect our new workflow .
The advanced material specular layer has now been changed to a new UI and adds a few things to help users to create more realistic materials , and the new core ( v2.55) brings a number of new features including interpolation for the specular layer and a flakes layer, the flakes layer is also part of the new VRay Car Paint material which we will cover in more detail later on in a future part .
In real life , metal flakes are a tiny bits of of type of a reflective metal , these flakes are often added to paints and blended in to create that shiny effect on paint jobs , as these are mostly random and reflective on their own , at the same time its often difficult to add them our materials ( in 3d ) without them looking fake . Thankfully now there is a new feature to simulate the flakes , and in order for VRay to do that , currently its going to generate a bitmap based on a mixture of textures that represent the flakes , and as mentioned , flakes are also a part of the Car Paint material so there is going to be more that in a future tutorial .
The new workflow around this layer is now much simpler , fresnel is on by default and there is no longer ( when fresnal is used ) a large transparency box to get on the way of making changes .
The fresnel options as they are important have been moved up and now you can link both highlight and reflection glossiness with a checkbox which is very helpful , you can uncheck this box for a custom value for either of them . you will also notice new interpolation options for each specular layer .
interpolation was originally meant to be a fast way to render glossy reflections , however it can cause a lot blotches to appear on your surface and it flickers a lot when used with animations , so i wouldn’t recommend using interpolation in most cases and only use for experimental stills , simply rely on the use LC for glossy rays as its the best way so far to render blurry surfaces fast with VRay .
This is as far as it goes for changes at the moment , now we can look at the other material types and what they do.
A new sercice update is now available for VRayforC4D 1.9 , this update adds some new shaders and fixes the bugs reported from the last update , more infromation at www.forum.vrayforc4d.com .
