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There's an off-beat panel show on UK TV called QI, chaired by Stephen Fry (of Jeeves and Wooster, Wilde fame) that often features quirky physics demo's. This usually inspires yours truly to have a go at recreating said demo in C4D. Recently, Mr Fry announced 'did you know I could knock The Shard over using a feather ?' (The Shard is a 300m tower in London). He then produced a set of blocks of wood of geometrically increasing size, lined them up like dominoes and hit the smallest with a feather. The 1st block hit the 2nd which hit the 3rd etc until the last (very large) block went down. The block increment was 150%, and SF claimed you'd only need 24 to knock down The Shard. Here's my first attempt - uses a pendulum to simulate the feather QI_scene.c4d

Hey guys, I don't know if you've encountered this problem when seeking to share your C4D renders on Facebook: Facebook's image publishing algorithm features a rather harsh compression standard. (I guess they have to use it, given the bazillions of images they are forced to store on their servers everyday.) In most images you publish, Facebook is going to make them come out with nasty artifacting, especially all sorts of ugliness around your sharp edges. It also tends to make your fields of solid color full of bad artifacting, and will make your color gradients come out with ugly banding. The more "toon-y" and less photorealistic is your image, the worse will be the artifacting. I've had a couple of my image posts almost completely ruined by Facebook's compression, which bummed me out plenty. Even if your render is already compressed and low-filesize--- as with a JPG--- Facebook will even compress it further. Well, I think I've discovered a bit of a workaround to making your image posts to Facebook look better, a bit closer to how they originally looked when you first rendered them in C4D. Export your C4D render as a 16-bit PNG. Import your C4D render into Photoshop, then choose the ADD NOISE filter. Make sure the filter is set to Gaussian and Monochrome. Then you want to dial in a Noise setting that is extremely subtle, like 0.5% or 0.6% The resulting noise should be extremely subtle, and not change your C4D picture unduly. You can always FADE the effect under EDIT after application, until the noise is almost imperceptible. I don't know why--- someone clever here will perhaps know--- but the slight noise added to the image completely "short-circuits" Facebook's compression algorithm, and your image will be posted with very little... almost no... banding and artifacting (which were far worse, visually, than the slight Noise you're adding) I also notice that Facebook tends to post your image slightly cooler and slightly less saturated than it appeared when first rendered. You can prep for this by making your image 2-3 degrees warmer in Photoshop under HUE/SATURATION, and you can use 2-3 degrees of Vibrance added, before you post to Facebook. With these steps-- admittedly, they are a workaround, not a cure--- your image in Facebook should look closer to your original artistic vision. ras