Cerbera

It really does my friend, it really does...

Hey Cafe Last night @VECTOR told me what he had been up to these last few weeks, and that him and @everfresh been secretly organizing a donation fund for me and my mum while we're getting through some difficult bits. What can I say - I am absolutely blown away by the kindness and support of people here in this amazing community. There are simply no words that could convey how grateful we are to everyone that helped or left a message. Thank you so much. We will be making a donation to the Phyllis Tuckwell Hospice Foundation who are desperately starved of resources but still do incredible work and make a massive difference to the lives of people dealing with terminal illness and their families. Love and light, J

If you have no knowledge about code you cannot build a plugin ! You need to go to code school ! CBR

Oh OK -that's not GSG HDRI studio is it ?! Dammit, sorry - got my wires crossed there. Yes, in this setup, just disable seen by camera in compositing tags on both sky objects, which as you have discovered already, will do the same. CBR

This is possible within the HDRI Studio controls. Under the main tab click off 'seen by camera', and in the seamless floor tab turn off Background to see some of your background object. To see all of it you will need to kill the floor as well. CBR

Indeed ! Looking good so far. Are you going to glow the luminant bits or do you think the scale is a bit big for that ? Talking of scale - that is pretty much the biggest challenge you face if using the native renderers - making this look truly huge... One technique to try and mitigate that would be to use loads of small lights on the surface. Another is to have lots of scale-reference objects in the scene like transport ships and whatnot... Btw - are you modelling this at real world scale ? CBR

Don't have it myself, but I have heard mixed things about RF for C4D - some people really like it, others complain it is not as good as the standalone version, and feel it is rather limited in Cinema. having said that there has been another version since then where things may have improved. I 'd have a go on the demo and see how it's looking for you... Edit: just seen you are running C4D Demo, in which case you can't install any plugins... CBR

He-hey ! :) Thanks for the share... wonder what will happen to the free version, if it hasn't been pulled already :) CBR

Me too :) CBR

The Lounge (non-C4D discussions) is not the place for this, so I have moved it where it should be for you... There is nothing in Cinema that can do liquid sims past what you can achieve with a metaball, which isn't much. Give up on TP - it just isn't up to liquids sims, so no tutorial will help you there... Until recently there was nothing free that could either (maybe Blender excepted) but that isn't the case any more. Since the end of development of Navie FX, the developer did share a free version of that, and it can do liquid sims. There is already a thread or 2 about that plugin on the cafe so have a search about and you should find the download links and slightly complicated install instructions. Here's what the liquid setup looks like in that... CBR

Moved to the correct section (Xpresso / Python Scripting)... CBR

Here we go - I made a quick JS map, made a new Beckmann reflectance layer with these settings - basically turning reflection off, and just using the specular (use other layers to do reflectance if needed), then the JS map went in the specular map slot. In the test shot below I have a normal omni light on the left, and an ambient illumination light on the right (not that it matters where that is) crucially with its specular component turned off. Were I to add another JS map (this time in lights mode) to the luminance channel I'd be well on the way to a decent space station... The ONLY reason you can still see a bit of the panels in the dark bit is because I also used the map in the bump channel (albeit with only 6% depth) but I think you should do that anyway for better realism. In fact now I think about it, displacement is way overkill for objects this large so probably avoid that... CBR

I'll do some experiments later to find where best to put it, but I can tell you straight away where to go to get your cool hi-res panel maps. JSPlacement from Windmill Arts is extremely helpful in this regard when used with displacement, but works equally well (albeit more subtly) used in bump... you want the 'classic' mode here I think... CBR

What do you mean 'a different manner' ? CBR

And again in the wrong section !! If it's about user data, it goes in the Xpresso bit !! I will move it there now for you ! CBR

You're welcome :) I moved it because it wasn't in the right section for the question. As I remember you also double posted, so I would have deleted the duplicate as well. CBR

Nicely done :) I also came from Max, and was glad I did. Though I still miss 'the stack' sometimes. And Set Flow ;) CBR

Nice to have you both back (I'm including the cat) :) CBR

You might get a faster answer on the XP forum. Not everyone here has it... CBR

Moved to correct section... CBR

Moved to correct section. I don't know the answer to your exact question, but I do know that if you copy an object or objects that have Xpresso controls set on them by just ctrl-dragging in the Object Manager it doesn't work and breaks the Xpresso, but if you copy and paste the original objects, that is technically a different type of copy that does preserve the Xpresso, and if this theory is correct, will automatically create a copy of the user data auto-assigned to the new object so you don't have to do anything. I saw that in an Ask GSG a while back but have never tested it myself. Let us know how you get on ! CBR

The thing that struck me most when I first looked at these was 'why are they so noisy' ? I don't know if that is intentional, but even if it is, there is a big risk that people will look at your work and think 'oh he doesn't know how to render !' :/ It just looks like your quality settings were way too low. Also, seeing as most of the visual interest is coming from reflection, i think there could be more interesting things in the scene to be reflected - what you have now is kind of 'OK' but doesn't really pop as being amazing like it could be... Also it would be nice to see some depth of field and perhaps something more subtly interesting in the environment than just pure black. There are some decent creative ideas in there, and if this was 'wicked clean and ultra-glossy' I'd like the style as well... big fan of gold on black myself :) CBR

No, I don't think there is. You've noticed that in the preferences / layouts folder you can only access your custom ones and not the standard layouts. If we were meant to be able to delete the defaults I guess they would be there also... interestingly, I think in way older versions they were all there, so maybe it causes some problem to remove them, hence the change... CBR

Just beautiful. Especially the underwater stuff. And soundtrack equally brilliant... Gold stars all round basically :) CBR

I'd have to agree with Bob. If you are doing motion graphics I'd say you absolutely need the full mograph set, including Voronoi Fracture. Likewise the dynamics and softbody tags, which I find myself relying on quite a lot for all sorts of setups. I think it might also be a mistake to be assuming that XP cloth will be totally fine for every cloth-related need. For character cloth, you really do need something like Marvelous Designer, but for other cloth work you might find it useful to have some cloth functionality built in. The other things you have mentioned I would say are less of an omission / problem in day-to-day work, and as long as you have RS and XP you do have your rendering and particle bases covered. Sculpting-wise, Zbrush is a good idea if you do it all the time, and know that software well. However sculpting in Cinema is rather quicker and more intuitive if you are not already a ZB expert ! CBR